Thinking About Culture

Final Conclusion:
http://webct.lakeheadu.ca/SCRIPT/57264/scripts/serve_home


Throughout our search for gendered sites and different ideas of gender on the web, we have managed to find insight as to why there are marketed toward one gender or another, and why. We have also found how they perpetuate the cycle of masculinity, femininity, and gendering.

The website gendered towards women include everything down to specific colours, advertisements within websites (feminine hygiene products, etc.), styles of design, and wording which targets the caretaker or homemaker of the family. These more feminine ideals are then placed upon the generalization of all women. These websites also portray the heterosexual norms in which place heterosexual relationships as the ideal. The one blog ‘Google Search’ touched on a website http://www.gurl.com/ that projected resistance towards the ideas of feminine but in the end it was also pulled back into the vortex of the heterosexual ideals.

Social networking sites such as Facebook, www.facebook.com are gendered as feminine because women are seen as linking into relational stereotypes, whereas men are much more autonomous. A woman’s liking to gossip and social chit-chat makes networking sites a tool which allows women to do this more frequently. Whereas, there are notions that men do not constantly update statuses, however they partake in the viewing pleasure of creeping other people’s pages. This directly links these men to the male gaze that is placed upon other, which may entail people to curtail their pages to meet that masculinised gaze. The creeping created a successful union, allowing the reader to be fulfilled with their viewing, and then the feminized relationships are fulfilled as well. Facebook allows people to follow the lives of others, similar to soap operas. The three aesthetic essentials that make up a soap opera are very similar to Facebook and social networking site features. For example, light entertainment is related to the applications on Facebook like “Farmville” or “Bejewelled” or the constant questionnaires people partake in. Facebook is an emotional engagement with friends or acquaintances, or even strangers. It also allows a realism that reveals their true or made up self. (Roth, 2010). Facebook allows people to show their truthful reality and allows them to makeup, avoid or disallow people from seeing through to all their information which could potentially portray them as someone completely different than themselves. Like Soap Operas, Facebook allows people to create a more glamorous lifestyle than what is true.

The LCBO Food and Drink Magazine directly links the woman being the home entertainer and caretaker with the phrase, “the art of entertaining”. This directly links to women in that stereotypical lifestyle of homemaker and cultural broader social norm of women’s place in the home. Therefore, perpetuating the cycle of women’s place in the home which would could been seen in centuries before.

Home Depot http://www.homedepot.ca has developed a masculinised title because they offer a linear lay out of their store which links to the patriarchal set up. Home Depot presents sections their products in aisles where everything is easy-to-find, straight-forward and presents a Linear set up. This links back to French theorist Cixous, who brought forth the proposal of linear being masculine and the circular formation to be feminized(Roth, 2010).For example, products and household things targeted towards women, are organized in a more circular way and scattered throughout the middle of the stores, rather than organized in a linear fashion. Making the majority of the store set up speak to the masculinised masses which obviously, are their target audience.

While these websites are gender specific, they also typically speak to upper middle class people who are from financially stable economic backgrounds. These website make the lower classes strive to reach those impossible societal ideals that are deemed necessary. These products make it necessary for the intended audience to have access to internet which does not include everyone in society. Furthermore, these intended viewers require the means to consume these name brand products. In reality, consuming these products is not a necessity but rather a luxury that is pushed upon people to consume in order to conform to the societal ideal.

There are few cultural jams that resist the perpetuating cycle of product gendering and gendered websites. Therefore, completely resisting the process of societal norms is virtually impossible. So with the realization of these gendered texts and product marketing, it brings forth some deeply rooted fundamental questions.

We believe that basically, it all boils down to purchasing and consuming whatever makes you happy as an individual – no matter what gender, race, class, cultural belief, religion, or sexual orientation. However, the ongoing questions will still remain: Why is it that we like what we like? Where do these ideals come from, and where does the cycle end? Does the cycle ever end? Will we ever TRULY think ‘for ourselves’?

Works Cited:
Roth, J (2010). "Popular Culture and Counter Culture Lectures". January 5, 2010 to March 4, 2010. Lakehead University.

gURLs- Final Conclusion Blog

Cultural texts surround us in many different forms everyday. By critically analyzing what it is that we are seeing and being shown, one is able to recognize the subtle and more prominent ways in which gender is injected into the different types of media. Gender, in our Western culture, is mostly limited to male and female. This binary is and exclusive and inaccurate. It has been constructed, as many other things in our society have, as a hierarchy in which those things associated with being male and masculine are much more valued and respected, in comparison with things that are associated with feminine and female. However, both have to exist for the other one to contain meaning. Our blog outlines a broad range of examples that illustrate this point.

Websites act as a medium of culture by portraying the dominant cultural values of the time. As a result what we see is the perpetuation of the gender binary in websites such as gossip sites, cleaning product advertisements, sports sites and “reality” television. Also, what was prevalent while deconstructing these websites, was the presence of other forms of oppression and stereotypes. For example, many of the household cleaning product advertisements that we see portray an upper-middle class, white, heterosexual family. There is very little variation in the type of family that we most often see. This is a demonstration of the layers of oppression and exclusion that can exist in many types of situations.

Our research of gendered websites has proved that in terms of the ideological construction of what is feminine and masculine, things that are coded as feminine are frequently devalued. As we discussed in class, this is a learned response. We internalize social hierarchies and constructions through the process of socialization. All of this feeds into the hierarchy of high culture as valuable and often masculinized versus low culture, which is often feminized and less valuable. Our blog posts attempted to uncover ideas about the social constructions of femininity and masculinity in relation to high and low culture. A major discussion on the blogs stemmed from the website Perezhilton.com and whether or not it was gendered as feminine. Written by a homosexual male (self-proclaimed ‘Queen of all Media’), the site features your daily fix of celebrity gossip - “Celebrity Juice, Not from Concentrate” (Perezhilton.com). As we discussed in class in relation to soap operas, women’s gossip is something that is seen as socially illegitimate and thus is consequently devalued. Many students responded to the blog expressing that they did not want to admit their enjoyment of celebrity gossip due to embarrassment and that it was a ‘guilty pleasure’. This demonstrates how society views gossip. Partaking in it is often deemed a ‘waste of time‘ and this is connected to systems of domination. Gossiping in a way lacks credibility according to the dominant discourse (Hollows, 106).

As we have discussed in class, current dominant ideologies rely on hierarchical divisions between human beings. Our research of gendered websites and texts has revealed how dominant ideologies rely on a system of binary thinking, which results in the naturalization, and normalizing of certain roles for men and women. This type of dichotomous thinking does not necessarily reflect the actually lived realities of people, and could perhaps be referred to as a distortion of reality. Our research has shown that these ideas have become embedded in cultural texts including the world wide web, with sites such as www.mrclean.com and www.toysrus.ca depicting specific norms or roles for men and women. The section of Mr. Clean’s website that features advertisements from the company through history is particularly interesting. As Looie pointed out in one post, an ad from 1957 depicts a comic male placed into a ‘woman’s role’ with a frilly heart apron. Although there are certainly websites out there that are not gendered or that disrupt gender norms and categorizations, the web is not a space that is free from gendering. This was discussed in class in regards to hegemony and cultural texts, as cultural texts are spaces where a combination of representations can exist. We must consider how websites can spaces of both oppression and resistance (Roth, 2010).

Lastly we would like to discuss representations of masculinity and femininity through websites. Some excellent points were brought up in the blogs that contrasted “men’s” websites to “women’s” sites. www.spike.com, www.tsn.ca, and www.muscleandfitness.com were three sites that we determined were gendered masculine while websites such as www.cleanandclear.com, www.victoriassecret.com, and http://twimamas.wordpress.com were gendered feminine. Our research has led us to believe that the masculine websites often portray opposite ends of the spectrum from feminine ones, depicting extreme representations for how men ‘should be’. By analyzing the websites, we can determine the types of qualities that society values for men including strength, athleticism, and a lack of interest in the private space (as depicted on www.spike.com). Feminine websites such as www.victoriassecret.com portray the ‘ideal’ women through the Male Gaze and urge women to purchase lingerie and products to achieve this ideal. Other ‘feminine’ websites are devalued for their content such as gossip or their purpose such as fan sites of typical ‘chick’ texts. Websites may also be gendered as female because of the roles they represent, such as cleaning and home related websites. In conclusion, our research has helped us to better understand the constructions of femininity and masculinity in popular culture texts. Websites are contested spaces, which both resist and support dominant ideologies. Our goal was to highlight and deconstruct some of the most recognizably gendered websites and discuss the how this relates to the system of social hierarchies.

References:

Roth, J (2010). "Popular Culture and Counter Culture Lectures". January 5, 2010 to March 4, 2010. Lakehead University.

Aubrey B, Looie, Princess Consuela Banana Hammock

Pop & Counter Final Blog Post

After conducting our research and posting on the blog we have come to some interesting conclusions. Websites that are designed to appeal to men or women work in a way that perpetuates stereotypes of femininity and masculinity, as well as the “physical characteristics, traits, behaviours and occupations” that make up gender stereotypes (Begley 2002). These stereotypes affect our performance, and encourage us to act in a manner that corresponds to our gender (Begley 2002 http://www.ablongman.com/
partners_in_psych/PDFs/Brannon/Brannon_ch07.pdf).

Websites tend to be a distortion of reality and give agency to the social institutions that mould people and culture. Dichotomies are a crucial aspect of and are consistently perpetuated through websites. In particular dichotomies involving gender and ‘what it means to be a woman’ are prevalent in pop culture. Women remain to be portrayed as either a Saint or a Slut. In dating websites women are represented as man eating sex addicts, using men merely as their props. Whereas laundry detergent, cooking and diet websites deliver the message that women’s femininity is constructed by cooking, cleaning and being thin. Hollows writes that “the processes and practices of representation work to produce ideas about what it means to be a woman” (Hollows, 2000), it seems that women must follow unrealistic social standards where “judgments’ about value have often been gendered” (Hollows, 2000) The dichotomies found in websites do not reflect reality, and their meanings are negotiated to conform to the mainstream stereotypical social standards. Distinctions between the Saint and the Slut are becoming increasingly blurred and femininity continues to be re-negotiated.

Two types of websites that are both gendered “saintly” feminine are parenting and cooking websites (since historically these duties have been deemed “Women’s Work”). These websites maintain these ideals by trapping and containing women further into the realm of domesticity. These types of sites perpetuate stereotypes of femininity, while at the same time reinforcing these stereotypes. It’s a cycle that works to control women: telling them how they should look and act, and what their responsibilities/duties are as women (Begley 2002). Contrast these websites with websites about parenting and cooking that are designed for a male audience. These websites are all reinforcing stereotypes of masculinity: that men don’t know how to be a parent (whereas it comes naturally for women), and that men don’t have to take on any of the domestic responsibilities.

The results were very interesting when comparing porn sites that are gendered masculine, and sites that are gendered feminine. There were distinct aesthetic differences between the sites as a whole. The male sites had predominately masculine colouring, whereas the women sites had more traditional feminine colours such as pink or purple. Also, the female sites seemed a lot less cluttered: the male sites seemed to try to cram as many naked ladies and advertisements onto the page, whereas the female sites seemed almost relaxed in its presentation. Other interesting differences were the content. The male sites were predominately thumbnail clips with links to videos, and the female sites had many personal stories, something that the male sites did not have at all. These sites perpetuate the stereotype that men are interested in the sexual connection of a relationship, whereas women should focus on the emotional connection. If women do show interest in porn sites, then immediately they are placed in the Slut category within the "Saint" vs. "Slut" dichotomy because they are expressing and exploring their sexuality (something society frowns upon), and deviating from the "pure" and "virtuous" position women historically and stereotypically are expected to have within society.

In conclusion, there are such discrepancies between the types of websites that appeal to men, and the types of websites that appeal to women. However, all of these websites perpetuate stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, maintain dichotomies involving gender, and work to keep men and women safely trapped and contained within the realm of stereotypical “femininity” and “masculinity”.

Danger Powers, Keekers and The N3rd