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The TV series Sex and The City is a romantic comedy created by Darren Starr, which is produced by HBO, broadcasted from 1998 until 2004. (Star et al., 2017). Set and filmed in New York altered from Candace Bushnell’s Chick lit novel also Named Sex and the city. The TV series is an example of post feminism, as the series follows the lives of four single women in there mid thirties providing discussion about contemporary relationships and traditional views of woman (Star et al., 2017). The episodes follows the protagonist Carrie Bradshaw as she looks to find true love however, providing a post feminist twist to this fairy tale. Sex and The City reinforces the Hegemony of pest feminism in the 21st Century. McRobbie displays this hegemony of …show more content…
According to Adriaens (2009), “Post feminism is defined as the backlash against 60’s and 70’s feminism, and recognises the diversity of woman and the empowerment and celebration of feminity”. With the emergence of post feminist popular culture allowed for the replacing of modern serotypes associated with ‘true love’ and ‘happily ever after’ to change with new standards emerging around the transformation of woman and the concentration of self, female empowerment and self realization. This text will analyse three episodes of the Sex and the city series, which confronts these ideals in relation to post feminism and the modern day woman. The first episode I will explore is Season 6, episode One “To Market, to market” and Season 4, episode ‘‘The Real Me’’, which looks at the consumer culture which is directly related to the post feminism tradition. The first episode I will explore is Season 6, episode One “To Market, to market” and Season 4, episode ‘‘The Real Me’’, which looks at the consumer culture which is directly related to the post feminism tradition. This text will also be analysing the ongoing portrayal of men throughout the series being presented as a “commodification” a consumption of goods for woman to buy, which is demonstrated in Season 1, ‘‘Bay of the Married Pigs’’. Sex and the City provides the audience with a tool to analyse modern feminity in the 21st century and how it is feminism is slowly rejected by society. McRobbie (2004) looks at this same idea and takes it into account within her article, “feminism is slowly recognised and is simultaneously understood and repudiated in the modern public sphere”. This text will use Hall’s encoding and decoding concept to analyse how the audience responds to SATC (Kellner, D&H Chap 1). According to Hall “the audience can have three positions concerning the
...lass and sexuality by including papers like Stead's which brought middle-class readers in touch with the events of working-class London and provided workers with middle-class representations of themselves. City of Dreadful Delight is an assortment of cross-cultural contact and negotiation between class and sexuality in Victorian era London. Walkowitz's analysis emphasizes distinct “classes,” and the impact of events on each group. Through close social and cultural analysis of the explosion of discourses proceeding and surrounding Jack the Ripper, Walkowitz has demonstrated the historical importance of narratives of sexual danger particularly in the lens of sexuality and class. She explicitly demonstrated the conflicted nature of these discourses, outright showing the women marginalized by male discursive dominance, whose struggles continue to even generations later.
The media is a powerful tool and has the ability to influence and change one’s overall perspective of the world and the position they play in it. Although Television shows such as Friday Night Lights are seen as entertainment by consumers, its storyline contributes to the social construction of reality about class in the United States.
The world is becoming more aware of the gender hierarchy occurring in our society. Men are consistently leaders and placed in positions of power while women are seen as inferior. Jean Kilbourne, author of “Two ways a Woman Can Get Hurt”, investigates this ideology as she looks throughout media and advertisements and highlights their sexually explicit commercials that degrade woman. In comparison, Allan G. Johnson, writer of Why Do We Make So Much of Gender?, discusses how the world’s view of gender has changed over time and how it has affected the world. Kilbourne and Johnson outline the presence of a gender hierarchy but do not accurately interpret why it happens. The underlying presence driving patriarchy is hidden deep in men’s resistance
In Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy attempts to reconcile her personal views of feminism with its portrayal in popular culture. In order to challenge what she sees as a co-opted version of feminism, Levy raises the question of authenticity of “sex-positive feminism” (Levy, 63) on two levels: by “selling out” in terms of the body and in terms of our patriarchal culture. In order to restore a binary relationship between feminism and non-feminism, Levy recasts this sex positive feminism as a new form of (fe)male chauvinism.
movies are about men’s lives, and the few movies about women’s lives, at their core, still
Gender Trouble published in 1990 by Judith Butler, argues that feminism was and still relaying on the presumption that ‘women’ a...
In L. Frank Baum’s second Oz novel, The Marvelous Land of Oz, he includes a prominent philosophical theme of feminism. During his novel, conflicts arise among powerful male figures, such as the Scarecrow King, and oppressed females, including those in General Jurjur’s Army, that demonstrate the inequality between the two genders. However, Baum’s incorporation of a strong sense of feminism is present to illustrate independent females longing for the establishment of an equal status quo in society. The overall solution to injustice treatment of women is present in Baum’s plot twist that ended with a highly liked, powerful female ruler over the Land of Oz.
In America women have gone through so many social norms that has affected them throughout a lifetime. Since then with the changes, mass media got involved in this type of movement. American culture shifted where women where becoming professionals in the work force, more independent and less likely to marry. As a result, television networks created a series of shows to expose and associate the female audience to the TV shows. From Charlies Angels to Sex in the City and for our present time Nashville show, incorporate feminism to be shown in the small screen, in every decade shows exhibited the 3 feminist movement waves. For instance, during the 90s the 3rd wave of feminism was represented through Television by revealing female sexuality
Eugene August wrote how ‘Death of a Salesman’ is a profoundly male tragedy, one in which its protagonist is destroyed by a debilitating concept of masculinity . Willy Loman embodies deluded values, hopes and aspirations that originate from the American dream and infiltrates them into every aspect of his life. His highly inflated dreams of success and prosperity contrast with his emotional instability, which tragically lead to mortality and mutability. ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ on the other hand shows how imperilled masculinity is defended. This essay will cover the masculine attitudes towards women, the values held by men and how this is reflected in their primitive behaviour.
Sex and the City is a show centered around four beautiful, successful women in their mid-to-late thirties. Although the show focuses on the "love lives" of the four women, the title has been dubbed "Sex and the City," and not "Love and the City." The question is, why? Well, it could be simply that sex does sell. Perhaps Candace Bushnell christened her book Sex and the City because it would attract more readers. However, while this may be a small, superficial factor in the reasoning behind the title, the content of the show suggests a deeper purpose behind the focus on sex. For the most part, the relationship between love and sex is dichotomized throughout the show. Although the characters end up married or in a monogamous relationship at the end of the series, the majority of the show is concentrated on the women's brief sexual encounters and the glorification of their trysts. Only once in awhile do the topics of love and sex come up simultaneously in the characters' post-sex brunch conversations.
The sexualization of women in the 21st century has led many to wonder whether or not the feminist movement actually resulted in more harm than good. Although the progress and reform that came out of the feminist movement is indisputable, things such as equal rights under the law, equal status and equal pay, the reality is that the subjugation of female roles in society still exist, and the most surprising part about this is that now women are just as much as at fault for this as men are. Ariel Levy defines female chauvinist pigs as “women who make sex objects of other women and of ourselves” (Levy 11). This raunch culture is mistakenly assumed to be empowering and even liberating to women when it is in fact degrading and corrupting to the modern feminist movement and makes it more difficult for women to be taken seriously in society. The shift in the nature of the feminist movement is in Levy’s opinion attributed to by the massive industry now profiting off of the sexualization of women, the reverse mindset now adopted by post-feminists and women in power roles in our society, and ultimately the women who further their own objectification as sex objects and thus, so by association, deem themselves lesser than man.
Throughout the 21st century we have been immersed in a world in which is almost wholly dominated by the media. It is appropriate to say that many ideologies have been indeed challenged by the media, including the ideology of feminism, which I aim to focus on in this essay. Firstly, it is necessary to think about what the founding concepts of feminism actually are and how the ideologies of post feminism and antifeminism are using the contemporary media to question feminism. Texts such as Bridget Jones’ Diary and Desperate Housewives are fitting examples of how post feminism has penetrated through the media challenging feminism. Similarly elements of anti-feminism are evident when looking at films such as the new adaptation of Cinderella .
Feminism is a movement that supports women equality within society. In relation to film, feminism is what pushes the equal representation of females in mainstream films. Laura Mulvey is a feminist theorist that is famous for touching on this particular issue of how men and women are represented in movies. Through her studies, she discovered that many films were portraying men and women very differently from reality. She came up with a theory that best described why there is such as huge misrepresentation of the social status quos of male and female characters. She believed that mainstream film is used to maintain the status quo and prevent the realization of gender equality. This is why films are continuously following the old tradition that males are dominant and females are submissive. This is the ideology that is always present when we watch a movie. This is evident in the films from the past but also currently. It is as if the film industry is still catering to the male viewers of each generation in the same way. Laura Mulvey points out that women are constantly being seen as sexual objects, whether it is the outfits they wear or do not wear or the way they behave, or secondary characters with no symbolic cause. She states that, “in traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote it-be-looked-at-ness.”(Mulvey pg. 715). Thus, women are nevertheless displayed as nothing more than passive objects for the viewing pleasure of the audience. Mulvey also points out through her research that in every mainstream movie, there is ...
Feminist theory was derived from the social movement of feminism where political women fight for the right of females in general and argue in depth about the unequality we face today. In the aspect of cinema, feminists notice the fictitious representations of females and also, machismo. In 1974, a book written by Molly Haskell "From Reverence to Rape: The treatment of Women in Movies" argues about how women almost always play only passive roles while men are always awarded with active, heroic roles. Moreover, how women are portrayed in movies are very important as it plays a big role to the audience on how to look at a woman and how to treat her in real life due to the illusionism that cinema offers. These images of women created in the cinema shapes what an ideal woman is. This can be further explained through an article 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' written by a feminist named Laura Mulvey in 1975. She uses psychoanalysis theories by Sigmund Freud to analyze 'Scopophilia' which is the desire to see. This explains how the audience is hooked to the screen when a sexy woman is present. In a bigger picture, where Scopophilia derives from, 'Voyeurism' is also known as feeling visual pleasure when looking at another. Narcissism on the other hand means identifying one's self with the role played. It is not hard to notice that in classical cinema, men often play the active role while the women are always the object of desire for the male leads, displayed as a sexual object and frequently the damsels in distress. Therefore, the obvious imbalance of power in classical cinema shows how men are accountable to moving the narratives along. Subconsciously, narcissism occurs in the audience as they ...
In conclusion, David Lodge managed to embody the concrete term of feminism. Through the character of Robyn Penrose, he creates the breakup of the traditional Victorian image of woman.“ `There are lots of things I wouldn 't do. I wouldn 't work in a factory. I wouldn 't work in a bank. I wouldn 't be a housewife. When I think of most people 's lives, especially women 's lives, I don 't know how they bear it. ' `Someone has to do those jobs, ' said Vic. `That 's what 's so depressing. ' ”(Lodge