I've lived in Washington State for the majority of my life, and yes, it is rainy and as beautiful as the setting in the Twilight series. But I never really got into either of the movie series that Berlatsky talks about. Twilight is just boring as hell (I think I've seen scenes of the first one) and the Hunger Games is violent, but doesn't have modern day guns or vivid goriness (I haven't seen the second one). My interpretation of Twilight, which is more than likely wrong, is that the girl can't choose between two men, creating a love triangle and making life hell for both of these guys. I believe Bella shouldn't be a slave to her emotions, which is viewed as a feminine trait especially seen in teenage girls. Katniss is cool, but she could stand to put on a little makeup with all that downtime she spends in caves with Peeta hiding from the fight. I mean, come on, the world is watching her.
A recurring idea from Ross' long essay is that media is controlled by the stereotypical white male and conservative ideals influence the movies, TV shows and advertisements that we all see. Her essay focused on the effect of these ideals in Disney movies that young girls see. Ross says that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland starts with a positive message about girl's fantasies, until she is lost in a mad world, can't handle herself, and is brought to tears waiting for someone to rescue her. This shows that Disney is trying to teach girls that they need order and direction. This is a contrast to The Hunger Game's Katniss who uses inner and outer strength to correct a shitty world and create order and direction. I like this idea, because I believe that people shape their own destiny, regardless of masculinity and femininity.
In the spirit of gender roles, I just started watching the series Mad Men. It has given me a deeper insight of why gender roles are they way they are today. The show is set in the 60s in an advertisement firm. Everyone in this building is white, all of the people in positions of power are men, while there isn't a man to be found amongst the secretaries, assistants, and telephone operators. Sexual harassment didn't technically exist back then, since there was no word for it, but it happens every five seconds they are in the office. Women are expected to be faithful to their men with no question, yet a man can arrive home late or even the next day with a simple work related excuse.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxZ3A9giyIo
After watching this show, it makes me wonder what values we have now will be viewed as ridiculous and sexist, and what values we should have kept: because wearing suits all the time and smoking inside... That's just glorious.
I'm going to disagree with Berlats interpretation of the films or at least the way he goes about analyzing Bella and Katniss as if either of them had anything in common other than the fact that they are both women. Berlat says that we don't like Bella because she's a mopey girl that can't do anything for herself and that we like Katniss because she has control of herself. But the real thing that separates these two characters is that Bella has all the freedom in the world to be moly and find vampire love and such and Katniss has no freedom and there for has something to fight for and has a reason to remain in control.In twilight we find that when Bella's freedom is challenged she does rise to the occasion and attempts to protect the ones she loves. Katniss has to fight her whole life and is granted freedom when she has been beaten down by the fight. So these feminine and masculine traits aren't really separate the are something that both these characters hold.
ReplyDeleteThat paragraph probably doesn't make a lot of sense.
I do agree with Deborah Ross's more organized and on point essay. Movie such as Alice in Wonderland and The Little mermaids story line do little to influence children to have and imagination but I do think that most children remember the vibrant under water kingdom more than they do Ariels wedding and the dancing flowers in Alice in wonderland.
Now if you've watched Parks and Recreation you'll know that Leslie Knope isn't your average women. Like all people Leslie Knope is her own person. She is all about working hard to accomplish great things for her town of Pawnee. Leslie does sit outside the gender norm for a woman.
“The hunger games verses twilight” puts the two main characters together and makes it sound like they are about to fight. However she ends up comparing the two and their strengths, or lack of strength. She starts off by talking about how powerful Katniss is with her athletic ability and being able to fend for herself, whereas Bella is viewed as the girl that needs to rely on a man and can’t do anything for herself. I think that Feminists would like Katniss because she is a symbol that woman don’t need to rely on a man, whereas Bella makes it look like a woman is just emotionally distressed and has to have a man in order to be happy.
ReplyDeleteIn “Escape from wonderland” the author talks a lot about gender roles and how it effects society. I think that the media has a large effect on gender roles. Because of Disney movies lots of girls my age are looking for the perfect guy to pick them off the feet, when in reality that doesn’t really happen. It also makes girls have an unrealistic idea of what they should be (princesses) and just makes the expect things that wont really happen. I think that the media also makes women think that they have to be perfect looking in order to find a boyfriend or they will die alone which isn’t what happens at all.
I think that most of these interpretations of these books and movies are ridiculous. These movies are not trying to subconsciously put gender roles in the back of our heads, they’re just telling stories. But firstly, I’d have to agree that when it does come to romance, Bella is the definition of needy. The article by Noah Berlatsky talks about her as being “passive”, “emotional” and desperate. But possibly that could be because she moved across the country, selflessly for her mom, to an unfamiliar place, and just feels lonely. Bella could have behaved that way because she just didn’t want to feel alone and not because this was Stephanie Myers’ idea of what women should be. After all, Bella did say in the book that she had never really interacted with boys before. That doesn’t really make her sound all that boy crazy to me. On the other hand, Katniss is strong because she has to be. It’s true that she is less emotional than Bella, but in fact she hardly lets herself feel emotion at all. Susan Collins wasn’t being a feminist when she wrote the Hunger Games; she just chose a female character. People forget that Susan Collins wrote another book series before the Hunger Games called Gregor the Overlander, featuring a strong, male main character. I think the way people act comes from their experiences and what situation they are in. Bella and Katniss are not representative of anything but simply come from two completely different circumstances.
ReplyDeleteAs for the Disney movies, they are not manipulating young girls that they need to be submissive and have to be saved by some prince charming. There are several other female Disney characters that are strong willed, ambitious, and independent. For example, Mulan saves the entire dynasty of China and proves she can lead just as well as any man could. Just because Alice in Wonderland ends with her crying and desperate doesn’t mean that’s how Disney thinks young girls should feel this way, but because Alice was only a child. The movie would have ended the same way if the character had been named “Allen” instead.
Berlatsky had a lot of very interesting points when interpreting the characters of Bella from Twilight and Katniss for The Hunger Game, all of which were fairly accurate in my opinion. Although the characters are said to be put up against each other in a fight, what the author is really saying is who, in todays society, is considered the dominant and more likeable female. Berlatsky’s point of the essay is that Katniss is looked at as superior to Bella and is more liked than Bella simply because Katniss is “butch”. Katniss is a strong, independent, badass who can fend for herself. Bella is hopeless, girly romantic, who needs saving. In today’s society, because of all the feminism and gender competitions, the butch girl, wins over the girly girl every time. But why? In the end, regardless of what the characters were like at the beginning, both succumb to the gender norms of females, getting married and having children, that’s the “norm”.
ReplyDeleteIn Escaping from Wonderland, Ross interprets Disney characters as being so feminine that it teaches young girls that “weak and defenseless” is the way to be, once again, introducing gender norms that seem to be unavoidable. She does provide great examples of these, such as Alice being on the road and suddenly stopping in hopelessness and waiting to be saved. However, I feel that Ross fails to examine the whole picture, where Alice eventually does find her own way, with just a minute amount of help. Although Alice, and the other characters do have moments of weakness, I don’t feel as though Disney is trying to portray a sense of female inferiority. They are simply showing that anyone, women or not, may have moments of weakness, but can overcomes those in the end, which I believe turns out to be a great moral for young girls, and young children for that matter. The media is full of advertisements that show and appeal to gender norms, but it doesn’t always have to be about analyzing and tearing apart to find the gender inequality of something, sometimes, there is a bigger, more important picture to look at. For example, in almost any type of house cleaning commercial, it is a women doing the cleaning, such as in Swiffer commercials. They portray this because the majority of women do the cleaning in the house, but this doesn’t mean that a man can’t watch the commercial and decide to go out and buy a Swiffer. It’s the bigger picture that needs to be looked at, whether it’s telling a story about a girl on an adventure, or trying to get someone to buy a Swiffer.
To be honest, I have read the entire Twilight series and the entire Hunger games series and there are parts of both series where the heroines show conviction, courage, and strength such as when Bella goes to the ballet studio alone to save her mom to confront a vampiric kidnapper despite her fear and incredibly fragile existence or when Katniss pretty much does anything in the Hunger games. There are also parts where Bella's not as strong, such as...the entire second book. However, I do not contribute their characters to society. Who they are is determined by the experiences they have had throughout their lives. Katniss is a "badass" because she's had a difficult life in which she had to risk her life every week so that her family didn't starve not to mention the constant fear of being forced into a competition in which children are forced to brutally murder each other. Bella seems "weak" in comparison, however how many guys could be as strong as Katniss? Bella is admittedly needy, although I know several people, male and female, that become incredibly attached once in a relationship. The notion of comparing the two characters is ridiculous even under the pretense that society dictates who someone is; Katniss lives in a society that most people couldn't even begin to fathom. A more appropriate comparison would be Bella and Effie Trinket.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the movie series “Twilight” sucks, but I did kind of enjoy the series “Hunger Games”, I also think that Bella is wimpy and Katniss is both headstrong and strong at heart. I don’t think it really matters if Katniss should put makeup on or not. Either way I would marry her and have fourteen kids with her. I also agree on the fact that media is very stereotypical on men and women. You always see men playing roles like Chief Executive Officers (CEO’s), and other high-powered jobs, and you always see women as men’s secretaries, telephone operators, or their assistants. In a way it is a pretty accurate statement, but there are some women in high-power out there. I did watch the link that Josiah put up for the television series “Mad Men” and I caught myself laughing the whole entire time! It is funny how America and even the world interpret women in the workplace. It is mostly true, but the media likes to blow things out of proportion. I thought the end of the video was particularly funny because it said “If Peggy follows these simple rules, with a bit of luck, she wouldn’t have to go to work at all.” What the video was implying was that if she does all the right things a man in high-power might marry her and she can become the typical, but stereotypical, house wife. That part just really made me laugh. Not only because it was funny, but because of the fact that that is what media and our society always portrays women as.
ReplyDeleteI both agree, and disagree. I love both the Twilight and Hunger Games series, only because I read them both before they were adapted into movie. In the movie, and even in the books, they do portray Bella as this girl who can't do anything on her own and insists on devoting her life to a boy and is willing to even give up her mortality for him, and this is a message I think that is very controversial in the feminist community. A lot of feminists don't want to be known as the girl who needs a man to be happy, or has even the desire to spend their entire life with a member of the male species. But I think this all depends on kind of feminist you talk to. There should be a distinction between desire (which is okay to have) and the overwhelming feeling that you cannot live without someone. I think that is why people like Katniss more than Bella, because she doesn't portray herself as needing Peeta or Gale, aside from in Catching Fire when she tells Peeta she needs him. But, honestly, that was purely a romantic gesture. As the author of the article said, "But I think they might understand each other's desires and each other's strength." They both have qualities of a woman that, at least I believe to be, are acceptable. As for Ross' essay, I think she had a great point. It is important to remember when watching movies, ads, etc that with gender roles in mind it is important that you understand that there or more than likely more than one didactic approaches being made, and like he said "...we must watch carefully the interplay of elements within the films and notice how many stories are going on at one time."
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