Geena Davis In Miss R

We’re still watching Miss Representation. In one of my earlier posts I was ranting about people mistrusting the interviewees in the documentary. Well, for this post I’m going to prove that one of them is at least reliable on some of the opinions they give.

I was watching the documentary and was surprised when the actress Geena Davis was interviewed to speak about women being represented poorly in the media. I was intrigued a couple times when she gave several statistics and seemed to be quite knowledgeable on the subject. I was surprised because I couldn’t help but think: But she’s an actress. Why does she know all these statistics about women in the media? Well, I did some research and found some pretty interesting things about her that I didn’t know.

            First off, she is the founder of the Geena Davis Institute on Media. With her program, she did some extensive research on children’s movies. She found that, “for every female character there are three male characters in G-rated.” With this knowledge, Geena and her program work to get movie creators to make movies with an equal ratio of girls to boys.

            Looking at her biography, website, and learning about an award for her work in this area I’m definitely more inclined to respect her opinions in this matter. If she’s managing this big institute, doing research on these things, and as an actress herself, surely she is reliable when it comes to how women are presented in the media.

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Snow Can Be Annoying

         It has snowed again today but it is an irritating snow. It’s not deep enough to do anything fun like sledding or building a snow man. It’s just a little powder sprinkled here and there. Just enough to freeze over night and make you fear for your life when you go out to your car. The snow came pretty fast. Yesterday it was near forty degrees and today it’s in the teens  Not matter how long I’ve lived here I don’t like the cold and just can’t get used to it. What’s even crazier than the temperatures is the people. There’s always someone out walking to school in shorts or a tee shirt. Heck  I’ve even seen someone in flip flops  That reminds me of what people do in, I think Switzerland? A few people with their friends sit in a sauna for a while and then run outside and jump into a freezing lake or something crazy. It’s really amazing what the human body can do. See, if I tried that I’d probably die of shock.
        Of course I don’t want a big snow to come and dump two or three feet on us. However, the weather just jumps around and sometimes it’s annoying. One week you wake up and breath in the fresh air and know that spring is on the way. The next, that red stuff in the thermometer is dropping like my chances of finding a date to homecoming. You never know what the weather’s going to do next week. Honestly, I don’t know how the weather men and women do it  (Yeah I know how they do it smartypants but you know what I mean)
       This winter has been weird. We had one big show storm in December but that was it. We are almost through January which is supposed to be the coldest and most snowy month of the year but we’ve got almost nothing  I walk home from school and I here birds chirping like it’s spring  That can’t be normal. Oh well, with my luck next winter we’ll just have a crazy snowy cold winter. Of course I said the same thing last year.....and the year before that....

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Miss Representation

Warning...Again: the following contains opinions that may not be shared by everyone. Educated arguments to these opinions as opposed to hurtful words are advised.

       
       Well, apparently my class still has to write something about gender and gender roles so here I go.
       The documentary, Miss Representation, that my class is still watching made the claim that most women shown in the media have no power like the men do. Or if women do have power their bad girls who can beat everyone up and wear tight clothing. The documentary said most women were shown as these bad girls, the cutsie damsel in distress, or women looking for love in a ‘chick flick’. The documentary does acknowledge Oprah and some other women but says that these women in the media are few. I kind of have to agree with that.
       What I don’t agree with is the political section in the documentary. At one point a woman says something like ‘if there were more women in politics, the government would actually get something done’. I think it was a different lady who said that women make better politicians. I have to say not necessarily. What makes someone a better politician is their ability to do the job not their gender.
       Another point, someone insinuated that girls vote for girls and guys vote for guys. They showed a clip of a girl running for a president position but losing. Then the documentary reported that most of the girls voted for a guy. The documentary seemed to say that if the girls voted for a girl then for once a girl would be in high power. I can’t agree with that. I would vote for her if I thought she had the skills and was right for the job not just because she’s a female like me.

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Miss Crazy

Warning: the following contains opinions that may not be shared by everyone. Educated arguments to these opinions as opposed to hurtful words are advised.

            Lately in my Language Arts class we have been watching a documentary called Miss Representation. It’s about how women are portrayed in the media. The claim is that women are seen in the media as *ahem* sluts and we all have to be beautiful and crazy thin. The documentary writers present some evidence such as personal stories, interviews with regular high school students, and grown-ups with degrees in journalism or psychology.

In my class, we watch a bit of the documentary and then pause it to point out rhetorical strategies. We point out the writers many claims, what sort of reasoning are they using (deductive or inductive), how the writers present the evidence, and how the presentation affects your opinion. Or at least we are supposed to be doing these things. We don’t because people get so hot over what the documentary is saying that class turns into a big debate. Of course everyone is entitled to their own opinion and I’m not saying they can’t talk about it but the class isn’t applying the terms. Well, some do but it’s only to try and connect a logical fallacy to what the documentary is trying to say so it seems false. Again, I know people want to give their opinions what seems like all the time but I’d rather get through the documentary. Get through it, look at all the claims, evidence, and the reasoning and then apply the terms to advance the skills I’m trying to learn. I want to get through all that, probably form my own opinion but keep it to myself, and do it all with minimal conflict. Well…that’s what I want but it’s absolutely not what will/did happen (we’re only fifteen minutes in ;-;).

What really irked me was when people started to question the people who got interviewed with degrees. The teacher showed a list of them and their reliability but people still questioned their authority. Sometimes it’s good to question an authority if you’re in search of the truth but these people clearly knew what they were talking about. I suppose what really upset me wasn’t how people kept returning to question the authority but the fact that people are so distrustful. It’s a sad world when people listen to something or someone but don’t believe them from the start. I guess it’s this distrust that makes people shut down to arguments that they don’t like. By shut down I mean people listen to an argument but they have no intention of considering the view of the other person as truthful in anyway. However, maybe they do consider some of it true but they don’t say so. I view arguing as a break down in clear communication. People just get upset or stressed and it just seems to lead to miscommunication. Now this is talking about the debating in my class not real debates.

*sigh* I really hate arguing and debating. It just upsets me when people get angry with each other and I know they’re not really angry but they seem angry. I guess everyone has their own way to release anger and stress. Like this post I just did which is really me ranting. Curses! It’s irony!

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Man, Wife, and Geisha

        Ok! This is part 2 of talking about traditional Japanese women. When I left off in the last blog, I said a perfect wife is beautiful and takes perfect care of the house finances. In an average traditional  middle class Japanese home, there is a male head, his wife, perhaps a geisha (or two), and some servants.
       A word about geishas. It’s a common miss conception that geishas are just a *ahem* sexually partner for multiple males. Well, some, usually low class geishas, are just for sexual pleasure. However, a good geisha is more than that. Her duty is to make a man happy in anyway and that sometimes that includes *ahem* sex. A good geisha will be beautiful,  skilled at sing, dancing, playing an instrument, an actress, flower arranging, doing the tea ceremony, good at jokes, and reading the moods of her clients to see what makes them happiest. Geishas usually will form a contract with one or several men and see to them when they request or always at a certain time. She gets paid for her duties and lives in what’s called a teahouse run by a female. The head of the teahouse takes care of the geishas’ finances and contracts.
      A geisha will flirt and show her skills while a wife remains modest and quiet. It isn’t rare for a husband to love a geisha more than his wife.  The geisha will openly visit her client and maybe is even friends with the wife. The husband employing a geisha is no big dirty secret. In fact, if a man is wealthy enough, it is expected that a man visits a teahouse one or two times.
        Today, geisha are just entertainers performing on a stage.  
         In my last post I may have seemed hard on the men of that time. I might have portrayed them as boaster and such. However, the men had worries of their own. They had to guard and protect their higher ups. The consequences for hurting their higher up (be it shamefully, physically or economically) were harsh. They could have their land taken away from them, their house, food, servants, or even their life.

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Traditional Women's Roles in Japan

Lately in some of my classes we’ve been talking about women, women’s roles in society, and our thoughts on it all. I’d rather not get into a discussion about women today since it seems to be a sticky subject, but I will talk about women in the past. I will specifically talk about Japanese women in the past. I read a wonderful book called Shogun and it was mainly about a European trapped in Japan after his ship crashed. As the main character struggled to understand Japanese society (which was very different from European society) the reader could see how the women were treated and what they were expected by society to do.

Unlike other places in the world, it was perfectly acceptable for a woman to carry a sword and know how to fight. The twist is that a woman with a sword could only be a woman of high standing.   However, usually upper class women actually preferred their duties of taking care of the house so most didn’t get involved with fighting and such. The most war-like (if you could call it that) possession that they might carry is a short dagger.

Traditional Japanese women took their duties of taking care of the house perhaps further than other societies. Traditionally it was the wife or sometimes the eldest female of the house who took care of the household expenses, in other words the money. The wife would, basically, give her husband an allowance to spend as he chooses and take care of the rest such as paying the bills or getting food for dinner.  Of course the husband was still in control. He would be the one to decide what dinner would be and it would be the wife’s problem to figure out how to pay for it if the couple were not well off. If the husband’s lord, or a superior, says he’s going to stay the night and demands all of these things that he wants, like some scented candles, the husband will tell the wife and she will once again have to find out how to pay for it. As you can imagine, women of that time were good at bargaining for lower prices from merchants and dealers. To me it seems like the gender roles of that time were defined like this. The men were like a mask, show to others that their house is respectable, honorable, and well off. The women would just quietly work behind the scenes to make things as good as the men pretended and a successful wife would do just that.

There’s much more to talk about and I will continue in my next blog post.

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Japanese women doing a flower arrangement

The Code of Fashion

          Fashion is a mystery to me. A certain style of clothing will become popular then unpopular then resurface five years later. I just don’t understand why people have the need to wear what their favorite actress wears. High school clothing seems to be the most confusing of all. What you wear can show your social status but sometimes it doesn’t. Not to mention it seems silly to wake up early just to agonize over what will make you look cool or cute. Don’t even think about getting me started on make-up. I think the Japanese have made things a whole lot easier by just having almost all students wear uniforms. For elementary school, it depends on the area if they have uniforms or not. However, in Middle and High School, all students generally wear uniforms.

            Each Japanese school has a different uniform so the students can tell just by looking who is from what school. As with any uniform there is a dress code. For girls, the skirt must be a certain length and no accessories whatsoever. There are all kinds of different rules when it comes to a girls’ hair. A school may decide that all girls’ hair must be down or up in a ponytail or bun. Some schools won’t allow a girl to perm her hair and others have a certain length it must be. For boys they usually wear ties, buttoned up shirts, and their pants must be at an appropriate spot on their waist. Disobedient boys and girls will unbutton a couple buttons on their shirts or girls will shorten their skirts a few centimeters (since that’s what they measure in and not inches). Usually, if any student found with a tattoo, piercing, dyed hair will, maybe, get a warning and then expulsion. Of course all of this depends on the school; they’re all different in one way or another.

            An interesting fact is that some schools have their emblems or signs on the buttons of the boys’ uniforms. If a boy perhaps wants to confess to a girl, he might give her his second button from the top. This certain button is closest to the heart and signifies romantic importance. When a boy gives his button it’s the last day of the term. Sometimes a boy will just give his button to a girl who asks for it and he’s somewhat interested in her, though that doesn’t generally happen. This practice was made popular by a certain intense moment in a Japanese novel.

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Types of boys' uniforms

Types of girls' uniforms