Women's magazines in the 1960's

             The author in the textbook, chapter 19 Women’s Magazines explained the development of women's magazines in the 1960’s and 1970’s in the United States. The author pointed out that in the 1960's women’s magazines focused on the women’s roles in their families rather than their social statues. In addition, he/she accounted that the development of women’s magazines related with the movement of feminism in the late 1960's and 1970's and women’s magazines tried to change their contents. In order to support this, the author introduced some articles of writers and editors of women’s magazines.

             The explanations about the characteristics of women’s magazines in the 1960’s were interesting for me. However, the most interesting thing of this article is about promotions. The author cited the article of Nora Magid, which is “promotion is then the primary business of the woman’s magazines, and like the networks they are first of all self-congratulatory.(p.209)" I understand and agree with this statement. I think that this situation about promotions never changed. I am subscribing to some women’s fashion magazines such as Marie Claire, Elle, and Harper’s Bazaar. This month, I have been surprised because those magazines were too thick. I expected them to be more useful articles in there, but most pages were promotions and commercials. Most promotions were designer label’s clothes, which I could not imagine how the are expensive. Of course, I am not going to blame those promotion pages because the concept of those magazines is a kind of high-fashion topic. It was interesting that the same concerns of the 1960's still exist these days.

             In addition, I found one more interesting statement in this article. The author pointed out that “and two days after the sit-in, 50 young women marched down Fifth Avenue to protest the passing of the miniskirt” (p.212). In this statement, “two days after the sit-in” indicates March 1970. The reason that this statement was interesting for me is that I read the article about the same situation in South Korea. I want to show a picture.

 

http://news.khan.co.kr/kh_news/khan_art_view.html?artid=201006061815035&code=990000

This picture indicates that the policeman are measuring the length of skirt a woman is wearing in 1973 in South Korea. In that time, the wearing of ‘miniskirts’ was banned by law in South Korea. Even though it looks like nonsense these days, some women actually went to jail for several days. As the author mentioned, women’s magazines have developed with the movement of feminism in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

In conclusion, women’s magazines have changed in many aspects such as their contents and target audiences. The magazines not only represented the interests of women in the 1960’s but also guided them to the new trend.

Isn’t she lovely?

People say that men should have "manliness." Do you think the characteristics of men should be masculine? On the other hand, feminine beauty is known as the virtue of women. Of course, I believe that the physical difference between male and female obviously exist. I admit that in the Olympic games, males and females should compete separately because they have the different physical levels. However, even though we need to admit the difference of physical level, I think that we should not encourage our children to be macho and feminine. I think that some people firmly argue that masculinity and femininity are standard for men and women.

 I would like to introduce a TV comedy show in South Korea.

 As you watched, the heroine, who was beautiful and sexy, appeared in this show. She is a main character, who is a very skillful spy in an imaginary spy TV series in this show. However, she theatrically says “NO” when the director requires action scenes. Her excuses are that it’s too heavy or high for her. She just wants to look sexy and beautiful on the screen. Next to her, the director and the male actor complain about her selfish behaviors. Eventually, the body double appears next to her, and she looks like a man. She performs exaggerated stunt actions. Audiences laugh with her exaggerated masculinity. I know this is just the comedy show. However, sometimes I am uncomfortable of the message of this show because this show tries to satirize the heroines who want to be ‘the Barbie Spy’ at first, but it becomes that the body double is ugly to the audience.

I think that people consider masculinity and femininity as attraction of men and women in many cases. Sometimes, I feel the body double, who performs extreme actions, is more attractive than the sexy heroine. As an action role, actress should do their jobs.

The Correlation between Heroes and Heroines in Superhero Movies

In commercials of Super Bowl 46, the trailer clip of the new movie, The Avengers, has been opened to the public. The commercial showed that the team of superheroes from Marvle comics such as the Hulk, the Iron Man, and Captain America will rescue the world this coming May. Even though most superheroes in the movie are male characters that have muscular builds and supernatural powers, there is a female character, Black Widow, who has a sexy body and foxiness. Why are superheroes male characters and do heroines support them in most of the hero movies? The following article is dealing with this topic.

In the article “Sweetheart, This Ain’t Gender Studies”: Sexism and Superheroes, Carol A. Stabile (2009) wrote that hero movies and television series focus on male heroes who protect children and females. In addition, female characters of these shows are sub-characters and their sexuality is overemphasized. To be more specific, the author pointed out that heroes in recent movies and television shows, unlike the past, are getting the bigger diversity of characteristics while heroines show us “the constant recycling of sexist stereotypes” (p.88). Moreover, through the television show Heroes, whose main characters are “international, multiracial, multilingual casts,” the author argued that female characters of the show just support male characters or are helped by them. On the other hand, men characters represent stereotypes which prevent invasions like 9.11 and protect the fears of females and children.  

As many researchers explained, gender socialization in childhood is affected by family members, friends, and schools as well as mass media. Although family members, especially parents, might influence gender socialization of their children when they are infants and in childhood, teenagers are becoming more influenced by mass media. For example, we can easily watch media content which highlights sexism of women or masculinity of men, including television shows, movies, and commercials every day and everywhere. On the basis of other research in gender studies, the author identified gender stereotypes of mass media by using the specific example, Heroes.

On top of that, I think this article was dealing with a very interesting topic and I agree with the author’s opinion that female characters lack in hero movies and television series. From classical literature such as Greek and Roman mythologies to recent television shows, stereotypes of gods/goddesses or heroes/heroines have been fixed in our minds. In the article, the author mentioned that the cultural change might command new stereotypes of heroes and heroines in mass media content. I not only hope that but also think that maybe new media contents can lead to new cultural change as well as they reflect social situations.

Boys in Blue and Girls in Pink

When babies are born, boys should wear blue baby-suits and girls should wear pink shoes. When babies become two or three years old, boys play with tank and airplane toys, while girls play with Barbie and princess dolls.

I have been to a baby shower of a girl in the United States. The whole room was decorated in pink and presents from other people were almost always pink. For another example, my friend has a boy, three years old, and his room is decorated with blue and green. I thought the blue and pink for kids are a kind of formula for American parents.

Well, is it different in Korea? No. Absolutely, No. If a pregnant woman goes to a doctor to ask which sex her baby will have, the doctor probably tells a mom the baby would like a pink color as a metaphor. And then, parents should prepare pink stuff for their new baby-girl. If you would present a blue baby-suit, maybe you could get some reputation you have a poor sense. It looks like there is a strict rule where baby-girls should like pink and baby-boys should like blue in the whole world.

In my memory, I played with Barbie dolls when I was a kid. My younger brother played with mini cars. Surprisingly, these days, kids also play like my brother and me. I do not remember any lesson from my parents or teachers to play with dolls not cars or airplanes. My parents gave me dolls and doll houses and they gave cars to my brother. That was it. Of course, my girl friends did not play with cars but dolls and some cute stuff. I think I learned invisible rules about the difference between boys and girls. 

I watched a video on YouTube two months ago. Let’s watch this video.

The cute girl is raising a question about pink and superhero marketing. How smart! She recognized that girls do not have to like pink stuff and boys have more options. According to Susan D. Witt (1997) in "Parental influence on children’s socialization to gender roles," children are influenced by family members, friends, school and media to learn gender stereotyped behavior. In other words, boys and girls grow up as "immovable gender stereotype." I think that our kids should allow to get various chances in their taste regardless their gender. 

Activity – Like a man

I want to introduce my experiences of how I could learn men's manner in the United States and try them for myself.

I think that there are the different etiquettes in Korea and America when people use public transportation. In Korea, men give their seats to not women but elderly people and pregnant women. Even though a young lady, wearing a short skirt and high-heels, stands next to a young man, he does not usually give his seat to the lady. It is not a required manner for a man. However, I realized that male students in America naturally give their seats to female students on shuttle buses to campus. The first time a strange student gave his seat to me, I said, “Oh, really? Thank you so much, but I am fine” because it was not a familiar situation for me. The problem was the student was obviously flustered. After that, whenever other male students yielded up their seats, I accepted it thankfully. As a foreigner, it seemed like very necessary manner of men and women in the United States.

The other thing is holding a door. I thought it is natural that a person who is close to the door holds it for other people who come in or out. Therefore, I usually hold doors for other people regardless whether they are my friends or not. But sometimes some men wait for me to come into the door first because I am a woman. In some cases, I tried to hold doors for men waiting for them to come in first, but in most cases, I failed. As expected, whenever I tried, I could see they felt curious about my action.

In these experiences, I think what men do and women to seem fixed. The interesting thing is that those fixed man jobs and woman jobs in America and Korea might be different slightly.