Culture Questions Essay Examples

Naomi Wolf raises critical issues surrounding the notion of "beauty" in relation to female identity. Indeed, accomplished women who have thriving careers feel physically and emotionally tortured by the societal expectation for them to look like celebrities. The “ludicrous” and unattainable ideals and standards of beauty condition, govern, and dictate women’s agency, thereby imprisoning them within their own corporeal existence (DuBois and Dumenil 636). As such, perfume advertisements appeal to female consumers by exploiting this tacit societal expectations that they purchase the right goods and don the correct clothing in order to be viewed as beautiful and socially and culturally acceptable. Perfumes indeed help to contribute to the prevailing notions about female beauty. A perfume advertisement featuring a well-known female celebrity cultivates a sense of style and accomplishment to regular woman. Each woman aspires to be more than normal and to be desired by many. In the advertisements, the women are portrayed to demonstrate this conscious sense of self-confidence. Beyond beauty, however, advertisements underscore female sexuality because sex sells in modern society.
In the popular television show “Malcolm in the Middle”, Lois is the mother of Francis, Reese, Malcolm, Dewey and Jamie. She is quite overbearing and obsessive regarding her control over her own life and her family. Her neighbours convey their aversion towards her, which manifests itself when they time and again do not invite her to any neighbourhood social gatherings. Although she is disliked, she nonetheless has a nurturing side under her tough outward countenance. Her marriage is strained due to her troubled past, which explains why Lois’ personality deviates from that of a traditional and ideal mother. In the show “Reba,” the protagonist is a divorced single mother who grapples with taking care of her family and home as a single parent. Reba’s character also eschews traditional renderings of ideal motherhood. Although sarcastic and bombastic, Reba nonetheless conveys her nurturing and caring nature towards her progeny. As such, these television mothers depict the need for women to be nurturing, king, and caring, especially towards their children Such alternatives to motherhood unequivocally shunt cultural gender
African-American characters in criminal justice television dramas have burgeoned gradually in the past few decades. Often, they occupy stereotypical roles that are ubiquitous in American culture and in public discourses. Police television shows feature more than one detective or police officers who retain actual clout. Law and Order: SVU Unit features a black officer who primarily deals with narcotics due to the fact that he grew up in drug subculture on the streets and in which he constantly had run—ins with the law. While not overt, such images of African-American characters directly link a predisposition to poverty and criminality—especially regarding the consumption or selling of illicit drugs—in the public imagination. Moreover, Ice T, who plays Finn or the only black police officer, fathered children at a very young age and out of wedlock. As such, this characterization covertly stresses that black men are libidinous. Finn is the only non-white cast member and is thus cast in a different light that underscores and reproduces certain notions about race in modern popular culture.
The daytime soap operas and dramas primarily showcase the lives and customs of the modal subject, which is the white middle class in the context of the United States. Depending what audience the soap opera caters to, each television drama portrays various practices related to specific culture, which further illuminates idiosyncratic cultural and social practices. The most critical role that daytime dramas have is the creation of particular images and rituals for particular groups of people. Nonetheless, despite many of the dramas have people from different races, they nonetheless reify the hegemonic heteronormative paradigm that propagates a Christian mainstream governed by the possessive investment in whiteness.
Radways study unequivocally reinforces traditional gender mores rooted in patriarchal strictures and female subordination in heterosexual relationships. Romance novels thus were viewed by feminists and inherently misogynistic and thus rendered anti-feminist because of the passivity of the female characters in the narratives whose lives were focused on pleasing the men in their society. Some observers decry romance novels as pornographic through the exploitation of female sexuality. As such, women in this genre exist to please men and are constantly in a sexualized state.
Allen Jones used the medium of sculpture rather than painting for this work because he sought to objectify women in a fetishistic fashion. Mulvey assesses the work from a psychoanalytical perspective by employing Freudian theory about the male fear of castration, which she stresses by immediately quoting Freud's view of decapitation as a trope for castration, invoking the figure of Medusa as a prime example. Mulvey explains how the statues display the fetishism (and its paradoxes) that undergirds Freudian theory about male fears about castration. Popular images of women are often fetishistic in nature, and the absence of female genitals juxtaposed against their absence from the male unconscious emphasizes that. While feminists most likely would decry Jones' work for portraying women as bound to male desires, it could be seen as a feminist work because although women are exhibited as objects of display, the medium of the work itself is phallic in nature. Thus, it could be interpreted as women recreated as masculine figures. Also, the absence of genitals strips away the traditional association between women and their reproductive organs as a defining feature that differentiates men and women. Thus, they become more than just progenitors of the next generation rather than becoming puppets whose lack of a phallus symbolizes men's fear of castration. Mulvey's psychoanalytical analysis makes sense within the context of modernity and how men fear being perceived as feminine. If viewed through a Freudian lens, the statues are imbued with pornographic qualities. Indeed, the positioning of some of the statues are sexual in nature. While some people view pornography as demeaning to women, I believe that it empowers women to be sexual creatures in a patriarchal culture that stigmatizes women who engage in meaningless sex. Such art should not be censored in the modern day because it has cultural significance that critiques as well as exposes the flaws in modern-day societies that must be addressed.
This argument centers on how Brunsdon does not resolve the problem of spectators and so-called social audiences being different/diverse. Brunsdon attempts to explain how the spectating audience understand context when watching films or television shows. Thus, he conveys to the audience how both of them cannot justify or resolve the dyad of the context. The "way around the problem" refers to the fact that people want to flesh out both terms within certain contexts but have struggled to solve this quandary .

Works Cited

DuBois, Ellen C. and Lynn Dumenil. Through Women’s Eyes: an American History. Boston: Library of Congress: 2005. Print.
Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. New York: W. Morrow, 1991. Print.