For my final project i decided to look at the way african american teenage boys are depicted in the media. I noticed that when watching television, and looking at magazines, and the news african american boys are mainly depicted as drug dealers and gangtsters. My project reminds me of the movie we watched in class Tough Guise. The movie made a very valid point, if men are constsanly shown to be tough thats what they are going to grow up and believe thats how they have to be. If African American teenage boys are constantly shown depictions of their peers as drug dealers and gangsters thats what they are going to believe they have to grow up to be. Not all African American teenage boys deal drugs or are in gangs. This stereotype of african american men has been around for many decades and still today is seen in mainstream video. I took some clips that i thought showed this stereotype of teenage African American boys. Ialso found a really good article that talked about these stereotypes and the need for young black men to have positive role models. Here is a link to this article. Hopefully one day people will not be judged by their race or stereotypes of their race.

                                                                                     P.S.
                                                                         Please excuse the quality of the movie it's my first time making one. I had fun doing it but needless to say i'm not great at it. LOL :)

Tolman and Higgins: Argument

Tolman and Higgins argue that females should learn to say yes. In their article How being  good Girl can be Bad for Girls they talk about how girls are always taught to say no to a guy which can lead them to be confused about when to say no. Most girls say no to something that they really want a guy to keep doing to them so when it gets to a point where they really mean no the guy doesnt take them seriously which can lead to rape. Tolman and Higgins argue that females need to learn that it is okay to say yes to the things that you do like or do want to happen. By saying yes to a man when you do say no he will know you are serious and not playing the whole no means yes game with him.
Our Society creates such a contradiction for women. All the media really teaches girls is that they have to be sexy and desirable but when a women does this in real life she is labeled a bad girl, slut, whore etc. Like in the movie Easy A  (heres a link to their main page) the main character is in her class and they are talking about the scarlett letter and its telling how women shouldntcommitt adultery and if they do they need to be put to shame. Hello?? What about men? why isn't it that people shouldn't not be adulterers whether they are male or female. Easy A showed the basic contradictions that women face in society. Before she lost her virginity no one cared who she was. Once everyone thought she had lost her virginity everyone had something to say to her. To the other females she was  bad girl to the guys she was "Easy". Why is it a good thing when a boy looses his virginity but a bad thing when a girl does?

Krassas: Hyperlink

While reading this article i noticed how krassas talked about the positioning of men and women in magazine articles. I went through the magazines i had in my own house and noticed that this was true for most of the articles that showed both men and women. The men were always positioned at a higher angle than the woman as if the woman was inferior to the man. Krassas also talked about the way magazine articles depict men and women. Women are always shown with little to no clothes on while men usually are fully clothed. They may show some skin but not nearly as much as women. I googled some maxim magazine covers and all of them had a women posed very sexy and wearing very little clothes. Here is the link to these maxim images .
    I also found an interesting article that related to this article and some other things we discussed in class such as christiansen, about the way women are depicted in the media compared to how men are depicted. this article titled Females as Sex Symbols in the Media talks about how women are always portrayed as weak and can't do anything except be beautiful and sexy. Although it was a little confusing to understand the exact methods in Krassas study i did get the main point which was that women are mostly shown as subordinate to men in magazines especially in Maxim magazine! Below is a video of a maxim magazine photo shoot. The women are barely wearing any clothes and every pose is a sexy pose. never are they posed as strong or smart.

Talking point # 4

So for this aasignment i found an interesting video called why teens lose it...a video produced by teens for parents. i found it intersting because it showed one of the discourses we talked about from Raby. it shows the storm. in this video the girl is upset over orange juice. but when you get to the end she really was upset about something else. i think the teens who produced this video were trying to show adults that teenagers just like everyone else get frustrated too only when they do their labeled as acting out and being bad instead of having someone care enough to try and get to the bottom of whats really bothering them.

Quotes: Raby

In Raby’s Tangle of Discourses: Girls Negotiating Adolescence. She discusses 5 dominant discourses that make up the perceptions of teenagers. The five discourses are the storm, becoming, at-risk, social problem and pleasurable consumption. Raby discusses how everything that teenagers do every behavior they show has to fit into one of these discourses. I found a blog by a man named Evan who wrote about the five discourses on his blog. He describes them relating it to getting children to eat vegetables a little different but i found it interesting heres a link to Evan's blog Normal is Weird.

 One of the quotes I chose to look at was “The metaphor of the storm, wild wind or turbulent water as ways to understand adolescence can be found in early and current academic works on adolescence. I found this interesting that teenagers are related to a storm. Storms are usually negative. They can destroy things and are very unpredictable. You never know how bad a storm can be till it happens. Why relate a teenager to this metaphor. They are human beings and anyone at any age can be unpredictable. Or not know what they are doing in life. The second quote I looked at was “the social milieu was fundamentally different in the past so there teenagehoods cannot be compared…( Raby pg. 435) Raby looked at young girls and their grandmothers. This quote shows how adults today cannot look at what teenagers do and think it’s so crazy because times have changed. What these parents and grandparents did when they were teenagers is not what their children and grandchildren are going to do. As the years go on times change and so do the social skills and thinking’s of teenagers and adults. The third quote I looked at was “ Today youth not only advise their families on how to spend money, but are identified as a group with both free time and disposable income” (Raby pg.437) I found this quote to be ironic. On the one hand Raby is talking about how adults view teenagers as irresponsible and not really knowing much but then she shows how teenagers are giving advice on finances in the household. If they are so irresponsible why would anyone listen to them about important matters such as money?

Point to share: Why do we think adults feel it is okay to label teenagers within these five discourses? Shouldn’t it be the same for everyone no matter what their age?

Reflection: Christensen

Linda Christensen’s Unpacking the Myths that Bind us was a story I could relate too. As soon as I started reading it and she was describing herself as having big hips and not being a perfect size two I felt like I was reading a description about myself. I have always been a curvy woman and when I was younger it made me feel a little bad about myself. Especially when I looked at the women on the television and in the cartoons. Christensen talks about cartoons and Disney movies and how every woman portrayed is basically light skin, long hair, and very petite. I always wondered why I never saw a woman who looked like me in the television shows and especially as a Disney princess.

                Christensen talks about “the messages or secret education, linked with the security of their homes, underscore the power of these texts deliver”. When I read this quote I could understand what Christensen was talking about because cartoons and movies send subliminal messages to children about how they are supposed to be when they grow up. Disney movies and many cartoons make young girls feel like they have to be petite, and can only can be somebody important if they have a man standing in front of them. And it teaches young boys that they have to be strong, have muscles, great hair, and be a hero. The way cartoons get into young children’s minds and make them believe they have to grow up to be this “perfect adult” that does not exist is just harming children’s self-esteem. It creates self-hatred at a very young age. I fortunately grew up to appreciate my curves and darker skin tone but not every child can be that strong and may succumb to the vicious circle of self-hatred.

this is me :)

chavon yay!!!!