Does American Popular Culture Discriminate Against Men?

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DOES POPULAR CULTUE DISCRIMINATE AGAISNT MEN?

Does Popular Culture Discriminate Against Men?

        Although women have always played central roles in the consumption of America’s popular culture, their most significant role has been the largely passive one of providing popular culture with its major images. That is, the images of women, far more than those of men, pervade the various forms of popular culture. In short, women as a group - a class, a sex- have been used to represent most of the social mythology that is expressed in popular culture (Fishburn, p. 3, 1980). In this Essay, two authors argue whether popular culture discriminates against men. Warren Farrell points out that men are discriminated against in today’s culture. He shows some absurd examples such as Shoe Box greeting cards that bash men and a button that states, “Not all men are annoying, some are dead.” Farrell’s point of view, the public favors stories about the oppression of women and companies are afraid of negative publicity. On the other hand, James P. Sterba argues that women are who really discriminated against in culture not men. Sterba gives an appropriate example. He points out that pornography increases discriminatory attitudes and behavior in men toward women that take both violent and nonviolent forms. I advocate Sterba’s argument because he demonstrates more proper reasons why popular culture does not discriminate against men with his neutral voice.

        In pornography, sexualized domination is enacted via explicit scenes of rape, bondage, abuse, and torture. In everyday porn, these same behaviors are suggested with varying degree of subtlety. Sharon Marcus (1992) argues that a “rape script” is coded into the ways that our culture habitually represents men’s bodies as penetrating, powerful forces and women’s bodies as inner spaces that can be invaded and owned, without will or capacity for violence, including defensive violence. In the February 2009 issue of Details, a photograph illustrating a story about dating during the economic recession showed a white woman turned upside down and dumped in a garbage can. All we can see is her high-heeled feet and legs, jutting up in the air. Similarly abusive images are just as common in women’s popular publications. An extreme form of violent pornography is the snuff film or photograph, which documents someone actually being murdered. A virtual snuff sensibility informs countless fashionable images that have appeared in advertising and fashion tableaux since 1970s. So normalized has the image of a murdered woman become that “America’s Next Top Model,” in an 2008 show, asked contestant to pose as victim of violent death. Repeated, negative mass representation of women is a public form of psychological abuse. Paralleling the abused images of women in our popular culture is countless (Caputi, J. 2011).  Helen Longino claims that pornography shows men and women taking pleasure in activities that objectify women and treat women as less than human. By depicting female subjects as dehumanized objects, pornography encourages the idea that women can be treated without moral regard — i.e., raped and tortured. Longino writes, “What's wrong with pornography, then, is its degrading and dehumanizing portrayal of women (and not its sexual content). Pornography, by its very nature, requires that women be subordinate to men and mere instruments for the fulfillment of male fantasies” (Longino 1980, 45). In daily basis, I see many photos’ of women who are abused. These make my face frown. These are not something I can enjoy while are looking at them. Compared to these, male-bashing cards, which Ferrell believes these discriminate against men, served a minor and now almost nonexistent role in the success of Hallmark’s Shoebox Division. Moreover, Sterba points out that No Good Men, the book that Farrell was so offended by, has no great assault on the power of men. Men can read this book and enjoy it (almost) as much women can. Its impact is nothing like the impact of (male) pornography on women.

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        Farrell claims that the New York Times is unequivocally profeminist. The New York Times sought him out to write articles teaching men about feminism. Farrell states that they published everything he wrote but when he began to question the feminist perspective that he was writing from, the New York Times did not publish the things he wrote. From Farrell’s point of view, the public wants to hear about the oppression of women. His evidence is not enough.

In 1980, the Journal of American Culture ran an issue on magazines, edited by Dorey Schmidt. Among the essays included are three ...

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