Normalization of Men’s Violence Against Women

In today’s culture, the number of men getting away with rape and other forms of assault is ridiculous. The most ridiculous theme in our culture that normalizes men’s violence against women is the belief that women asked to be abused. This belief is deemed justifiable in order to punish women into aligning with the patriarchal expectations of femininity. If a woman is not dressed “modestly” then men justify their actions by saying “she was asking for it”. We live in a “blame the victim” society where women are blamed for a man’s unwillingness to control his actions and be respectful towards women. This belief depicts men as unable to control their anger or sexual desires and that women should submit to changing their behavior in order to please men. I can tell you right now that it will not happen. There are too many strong, capable women in this world to allow such myths to continue. Women should be able to dress and act as they please without being judged, ridiculed, or held responsible for the acts of violence perpetrated against them. 

Another myth that is extremely popular in our culture is that violence ignites sexual arousal. I have personally witnessed the use of this myth on social media with the twitter trend exclaiming that women want to be choked during sex because they find it pleasurable. Men’s violence toward women is sometimes justified with a misinterpretation of sexual behavior rather than criminal behavior. 

Women deal with sexual intrusion on a daily basis and it causes us to fear to go anyplace alone. For example, I refuse to get gas after the sun goes down out of fear. I nervously watch my surroundings at all times when I take a trip to the grocery store. Sexual intrusions dehumanize women and portray them as simply objects to be used and thrown away. It is degrading and fear-inducing. 

Hate Speech

I thought this would be a good topic to talk about considering the situation that took place here at UNT this semester. Let me start by saying that free speech does not give a person permission to be disrespectful and hateful towards a person or a group of people. In today’s culture, we have a strong belief in the use of ethical language when it comes to referring to a person or group of persons. The number of US hate groups has doubled in the past 20 years and because of the rise of technology, it allows these hate groups to access social media and acquire more followers and supporters. What saddens me the most is seeing how many “Christian” hate groups there are. True Christianity is in NO way a form of hate and should not be represented that way. According to the book, around a quarter of all hate crimes deal with sexual orientation and I came across a website for a CHURCH that was a hate website against LGBTQ. I just do not understand the need to hate a person or group of people just because you don’t agree with their opinions and decisions. This section of the book made me angry because as a Christian I know that it is not okay to project hate and judgment on others because at the end of the day God sees us all the same despite what sins we may commit. We have no right to judge each other based on the fact that other people sin differently than us. Hating a man for kissing another man doesn’t make up for the fact that you cheated on your wife last night. 

Sports and Native American Mascots

The conversation over whether a sports team should be able to use Native American mascots is something that has just recently become popular in the eyes of the media. However, this fight to address stereotypes of Native people in media and sports started in 1968 when the National Congress of American Indians started their campaign. These mascots display a negative representation of Native American people and their culture. I mean we’re talking about America’s first people here whom we kicked out and then transformed into a symbol for a sports team. It's harmful and has caused hate crimes to rise against Native American people. According to NCAI, when it comes to professional sports teams, no new mascots that use racial stereotypes have been established since 1963. Also, in the past 35 years over 2,000 of these stereotypical references have been eliminated. All the negative images displayed by sports teams affect Native American’s reputation and self-image as well as fosters ongoing discrimination and stereotypes. There are fewer than 1,000 stereotypical references and images still left today and hopefully, soon we’ll be able to eliminate this form of hatred and discrimination. If this type of discrimination was used against any other cultural group in America it would be a huge problem, therefore, why are we not recognizing the importance of the problem when it comes to Native Americans? It’s a pure lack of respect if a team chooses to continue using these discriminatory images. 

Seventh Day of Class 10/8/19

The conversation surrounding poverty, disability, and aging persons is a conversation that we don’t always have, but I was glad that it was gone over in today’s class. As far as homeless people go, most media outlets strictly identify homeless people as “street people” when that is not always the case. Sometimes it’s someone who is crashing on a friend's couch or in their car. Around 50% of homeless individuals are women with children. In fact, some have jobs they just can’t afford a place to live. 

Poor people are mostly portrayed by entertainment media as “uneducated trailer trash” and often appear in three different roles: the victim, the criminal, or the exception. In the role of “the victim”, the person is only poor due to force or policy or some other unfortunate circumstance that made them poor. “The criminal” is portrayed as someone you should fear. “The exception” is someone who overcame their situation ( the situation being them being poor). 

Disabilities are something that is often not mentioned in the media. They’re often only portrayed as recipients of charity or as the butt of a joke. 

Aging in today’s culture is often seen as negative due to the fact that our culture reveres youth. There are so many things being sold today that are supposed to be “anti-aging” and plastic surgery is popular among celebrities. Because of this, all everyone worries about is their appearance. According to society wrinkles are gross and un-wanted but to me, I think it shows a lifetime of experience and wisdom. 

Sixth Day of Class 10/1/19

Today in class we talked about Islamaphobia and how Muslims are portrayed and stereotyped by media. Saad Yousuf gave a presentation over the topic and it was very intriguing to hear about a different culture. I believe that we should all make an effort to learn about different cultures in order to be more media literate and be able to distinguish stereotypes of different groups of people from the truth. I witnessed Islamaphobia in my own life a few years ago after recent terrorist attacks. My dad is a very conservative man and would always tell me to watch out for “those types of people” and I don’t mean to throw him under the bus because I know he has good intentions but I recognized it then and i especially recognize it now. The statistics given in Mr. Yousuf’s presentation goes to show that stereotyping an entire race or culture based on the actions of a handful of people is not ethical or respectful in any way. For example, people also have a good amount of hate toward Christianity because of the handful of people who have tainted what Christianity really stands for. Just because one person displays hate and judgment on others doesn’t mean that the entire group of people also do. This class has helped me recognize stereotypes and all in all, made me more respectful of other's opinions and beliefs. 

Fifth Day of Class 9/24/19

In this class, we talked a lot about body image and how media portrays women when it comes to how they “should look”. This is a very important conversation to me because, as a woman, I recognize these issues with body image every single day. The picture I attached to this post, is an advertisement from the 70′s and the reason I decided to attach this ad is that it shows just how long the issue of body image has been going on. In fact, it has been happening since long before this ad was made as well. I think that in today’s media, we are trying to convince viewers that body image is no longer an issue (just like they are doing with feminism and equal rights). However, with the up and coming as well as current social influencers, it is obvious that that is not the case. I see more negativity towards women and their bodies online than I do anything else. The idea that a skinny, tall, blonde hair, blue-eyed girl is the “ideal woman” is just ridiculous. However, recently we have gone back to the idea that women with a big butt and tiny waist are the “ideal body type”. Social media is the reason more and more women now days tend to look down on themselves for how they look. In fact, more adolescent girls are worried about their bodies and how they look rather than their character, and their education. The use of photoshop or “facetune” teaches young girls that if they aren’t happy with their bodies or the way that they look, they can just change it. Most people today are so self-absorbed that the constant struggle to be the “ideal woman” causes unhappiness and depression.  Media should stop telling women how they should look and instead encourage a healthy lifestyle. It is more important to be healthy, happy and confident than to be at constant war with yourself about how you look. 

Fourth Day of Class 9/17/19

The thing that stuck out most to me in this class was the conversation about “colorblindness”. This is today’s form of racism. One can’t simply ignore or overlook ethnic differences. The color of someone's skin and their background makes them who they are and it should not be ignored. 

Specifically, when it comes to education, most teachers in the United States are white whereas there is a large number of children of color in our classrooms. Teaching Tolerance magazine points out how little curriculum calls for the history of African Americans and other cultures who are not predominately white.  This is a form of colorblindness due to the fact that in order to avoid “accidental racism” teachers should avoid the subject altogether when we all should realize that that is simply not the solution. We should be educating everyone about ALL cultures, not just the ones significant to white people. Everyone’s background is important and it should be taught in early years that we should not be judgemental towards someone with different colored skin but instead recognize their culture and their background and how it makes them who they are. 

Often people believe that being “color-blind” is a good thing because they believe that they are following Martin Luther King Jr’s belief that people should be “judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” However, in today’s world, that idea has been flipped on its head. Acknowledging differences between people such as culture and other attributes is not racist but simply the opposite. We should recognize the uniqueness of every person despite their background or the way that they look. By avoiding the conversation and claiming to be “color-blind” you are stripping non-white races of their uniqueness and teaching them that they are still inferior to whites. 

Third Day of Class 9/10/19

On September 10th, 2019 we focused a lot on how women were portrayed in media. There were three group presentations, all of which were about women in media. Specifically, the first one talked about how the media frames feminism. In my own life, I have recognized a certain stereotype when it comes to feminism. I was raised in a small town where a lot of social media posts portrayed feminism as women who hate men. A lot of media portrays feminists as women who are extremists and rather than them standing for equality (which is the actual definition of feminism) it portrays them to be hateful towards men. There is a trend on twitter and other socials where women join together behind the “men are trash” saying and just to point out, I am not one of those women. I consider myself a feminist and there is not a single percentage in my mind that makes me believe that men are trash. As much as we should recognize the inequality of the sexes, we must also admit that we have come a long way from where we were in the past. Despite what media portrays, I have met many feminists who, like me, still have traditional feminist views and beliefs. However, I have met some extremists and the media portrays those extremists to be the majority of feminism when in reality it's only a small percentage. On another note, the media does the same thing when it comes to the left and right extremists. People see the way the media portrays certain people who are democrats and certain people who are republican and assume that all of the people in that group are extremists. I think we should start to recognize this issue and that it isn’t just feminists and African Americans who are stereotyped but rather several different groups of people. Other groups of wrongly stereotyped people are Muslims, Christians, men, LGBTQ, and many others.

Second Day of Class 9/3/19

On September 3rd we talked about a couple different things in class. We talked about media literacy, intersectionality, social groups, and cultural/social identity. Two groups also gave presentations. The first group talked about the social psychology of stereotypes and the second group talked about incognizant racism. When you really start asking questions about things presented in the media, you can really start to notice the different uses of framing and symbolic annihilation.  

I did some research on Ervin Goffman’s exploration of how framing affects the ways we organize our own experiences and beliefs. According to Penn State Public Media, Ervin Goffman believed that we “experience life through frames.” In other words, it depends on how we receive, interpret and engage with the media that determines the way we see the world and organize our own beliefs. Since the media plays a huge role in how we perceive things in today's society, the way that the media frames different situations and different people affects the way we frame different situations and different people. We need to recognize the type of vocabulary used in the media to describe certain groups of people. The media is a big reason why we have certain stereotypes about certain groups of people. For example, the video displayed in class about Antoine Dodson and his sister who was almost raped. Like we discussed in class, the news report didn't seem to take the situation seriously which is concerning due to the importance of the situation. The family was used as a form of humorous entertainment. The media also portrayed their neighborhood as "the hood" where bad things always happen and that this sort of thing is "normal". This depiction of this family feeds into our own stereotypical beliefs and affects the way we organize our beliefs towards certain groups of people. We need to know how to examine media in order to recognize these issues of framing and symbolic annihilation.

First Day of Class 08/27/2019

I have heard a lot of wonderful things about this class and the first day definitely made me excited for the semester. One major thing we talked about in class was women in the workplace. I have heard a lot of statistics about women in the workplace before this class but every time I see the statistics it blows my mind. We talked about how a lot of times women are overlooked when people think about leaders such as senators or professors, and that women are rarely ever quoted as experts in news media. I would definitely consider this to be symbolic annihilation, which is another thing we went over in class. If only 25% of women are recognized sources on the front page of a newspaper and are rarely identified as experts, then marginalization towards women will never get better and younger girls will not recognize the success they could encounter in their future careers. However, I have a strong feeling that this upcoming generation of women is going to do something tremendous in “the real world”. 

Another important conversation in class is how minorities are represented in the media. It was interesting that Dr.  Everbach used the popular video of Antoine in class because I, as well as others, probably never realized the lack of empathy and respect the media had for the people in this situation. The video was popular because most people saw it as comical when it was actually a very serious situation that shouldn’t have been taken so lightly. My mom always said that the media will almost always find the most interesting and entertaining people to interview because, well, “it makes good television.” African American people have been portrayed by media as aggressive, uneducated, provocative, and unprofessional for a long time according to the book Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research.  I believe that due to social learning if the media continues to portray minorities the way that they do, it will continue to be difficult to eliminate or lessen the amount of racial stereotyping.