Welcome to the first week of Sociology of the Family 130. Please familiarize yourself with the syllabus listed above (make sure to select your appropriate class). We will be viewing several documentaries in class and at home. You can view additional documentaries about media representations at the Media Education Foundation. We will be watching Cover Girl Culture, Tough Guise, and Consuming Kids. We will read the article by Linn: 2: A Consumer in the Family, p. 31-41 (Blackboard).
We will then switch to a more historical representation of the American family. We will watch at home the lecture by Stephanie Coontz. We will read Riseman: “The Evolution of American Families” (on Blackboard) and Riseman: “American Childhood as a Social Cultural Construct” (on Blackboard).
For blog posting number #1, please post a response to the prompt for whichever group you belong (see Blackboard for groups). Be ready to share your response with the class on the due date. Be sure to include links to relevant information and to read the syllabus guidelines for blog posting grading criteria.
Group 1: please select any additional movie from the Media Education Foundation and write a detailed critique of the documentary. Relate this to one other movie or article assigned for this week. Be prepared to share clips of the movies you watch and write discussion questions for the class.
Group 2: Your group members will write a critique of the documentary Consuming Kids, along with the article by Linn “A Consumer in the Family” (see Blackboard). Compare this documentary against the article “American Childhood as a Social Cultural Construct.” In class, your group will discuss the Consuming Kids movie with your classmates, be sure to show clips from the movie and come up with discussion questions for the class.
Group 3: Your group will write a critique of the documentary Cover Girl Culture and include links to resource websites and YouTube videos. Compare this movie to the article “The Evolution of the American Family,” for a discussion on evolving understandings of gender roles. In class, please be prepared to come up with discussion questions for the class about the documentary.
Group 4: Your group will write a critique of the documentary Tough Guise. Compare this documentary to the article “The Evolution of the American Family,” for a discussion on evolving understandings of gender roles. Be ready to present the class with discussion questions and clips about the movie.
Group 5: Your group will write a critique of the video lecture and article by Stephanie Coontz, “The Evolution of the American Family” (on Blackboard). Be prepared to present the class with discussion questions about the article and video, and be sure to show clips from the video.
Group 6: Your group will compare and contrast the article “American Childhood as a Social Cultural Construct” against the documentary Consuming Kids. For class, be ready to present and discuss the article with the class.
Gabrielle Mazzucco
Sociology of the family
Group 1
Week 1
The two documentaries that I viewed were “Bro Code” and “Breaking Our Silence.” Each of these documentaries focused on the image of the ‘manly man’ and how men in our society treat women. Each takes a different perspective on this important matter.
The documentary “Bro Code” focused a lot on how men put women in a category separate from humans. Men look at women in this society as objects that they can toy around with. Films, music videos, magazines, and many other forms of media give men the sense that women are not of an equal status. The thing that I noticed most about this documentary was that men thought that it was okay to verbally abuse women whether it is directly towards them or behind their back.
The dehumanizing of women as sex objects was a big part of this film. There was a part of the film that talked about the porn industry. The thing that was most surprising to me was that the porn industry makes most of its money off of rape/hate porn or ‘Gonzo porn.’ It is horrible to think that men are actually turned on by beating women and it is something that is being promoted in our everyday society.
Abusing women is something that should not be tolerated, yet, every day the media abuses women. MTV’s “Jersey Shore” was an example that was used in the documentary that showed the prime example of how men are expected to act in this society. Men are expected to go out find as many girls as they can, bring them home, and brag about it. The women are seen as whores while the men are seen as heroes.
The second documentary that I watched, “Breaking Our Silence,” is about how men need to become more aware of abuse towards women. Men need to take a stand against the media and realize that it is not ‘cool’ to abuse a woman physically or mentally. This was a short, 11 minute, documentary that took place in Boston, Massachusetts. During a parade with an attendance of 25,000 people, a group of men made a float for the parade that promoted putting a stop to the abuse of women. The film showed a few women with smiles on their faces when they saw the float. Many people looked surprised in a good way. It is fantastic that these men are leaving behind their manly man attitude and taking a stand for something that is important and looked over.
The media needs to stop influencing men from a young age by showing them that it is okay to look down upon women and treat them as if they are not human. The only way to stop the abuse of women is to stop this ‘macho man’ society.
Discussion questions:
1. Guys, did you feel like when you were growing up if you didn’t playoff the macho man attitude that you would get made fun of for it?
2. Do you think that if society was different that you would still act the same? (not saying that all men are the same)
Blog 1: Stephanie Coontz Video Lecture and Article Critique
The video lecture and article by Stephanie Coontz, “The Evolution of the American Family” provided historical information for viewers/readers to understand the family systems of early America. Both pieces focused primarily on Coontz belief that families are fluctuating at rapid speeds and because of this, it is vital to recreate the family values and forms of the past not try to restore the “traditional” ones (Coontz, 46). Coontz eludes in both the video lecture and article that the focus on restoring American families should arise from a desire to minimize the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of family forms by not pointing fingers and by lending a helping hand (Coontz, 47).
In her video lecture, Coontz states that everyone faces challenges, but that the clock cannot be turned back. She recognizes that marriage is similar to the Industrial Revolution in that it is irreversible. She states that marriage brings as many problems as it does benefits. In stating that marriage has changed in the last thirty years more than it has in the last three thousand five hundred years, she enables readers to understand one of the reasons that marriage is an irreversible revolution—women joining the workforce.
The family of the past consisted of a husband, wife and children. The fathers were known as the breadwinners while the mothers embodied the role of “doing housework, sewing and childrearing” (Coontz, 37). The article states that wives and mothers entered the labor force in the 1950s and 1960s in response to new opportunities (Coontz, 45). The new opportunities women were given brought with them many difficulties as well. Women found themselves having trouble leaving the home to work when they could not find childcare. The stress that is accumulated by having two workers in the family is increasing while it does not have to be. The additional stressor of finding childcare makes women more vulnerable, affecting the family structure for many families (especially the young ones). In recognizing that the family is affected by women in the workplace, Coontz attempts to persuade that the problems that families and marriages face should inspire people to create “new” family values rather than reconstruct the “traditional” family of the past (Coontz, 47).
I agree with Stephanie Coontz in that it is vital to focus on the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of families in order to improve the family structure. I agree that providing a helping hand in order to see the change happen should be practiced rather than it returning to what used to be.
The link attached above provides viewers with a historical timeline of the successes of women in the workplace during the 1950s. One of the events on the timeline that is of particular interest to me was the sitcom “I Love Lucy” that alludes to Lucille Ball. I found this event the most shocking and appealing because it contradicts the article and video lecture. Instead of facing difficulties, women, like Lucille, who joined the workplace became very successful. The best part of all is that in the creation of the well-known sitcom “I Love Lucy,” Lucille Ball gave birth to her first child, Lucie Desiree Arnaz, while being a working woman. I believe this contradicts the notion that mothers had a difficult time while being workers. Lucille Ball was a mother, wife and working female who in many people’s eyes succeeded.
Discussion Questions:
1. Is your family structured the way families of early America were? Provide examples to how your family is different or similar to the early “traditional” families (1950s).
2. Do you think marriages today, in comparison to marriages of early America, are more about love and happiness or wealth and power? Why?
3. Males of the class: Would you feel inferior or incompetent if your wife was the breadwinner of the household?
Erin Curran
Group 3
The movie Cover Girl Culture showed all the different views to the controversial topic of advertising towards the younger generations. The movies main focus was showing the damaging effects these advertisements have on a younger generation. These advertisements mold the younger kid’s brains to want certain products or look certain ways. The video showed how these girls feel they need to look a certain way to be happy in their lives. The video did not just portray the girl’s views but the people behind these magazine article advertisements. These were an important view to show to the viewers. It reinforces the point that most of the people behind the magazines truly believe they are doing the right thing. In one scene from the video and executive at teen vogue said that the magazine uses average girls to show that all types of girls are portrayed, while the person was speaking clips from the magazine showed off the typical model type. (Cover Girls Culture) These executives don’t understand how the influential these ads are to young girls. Although many of the magazines out are geared towards an older generation, young girls are the predominant readers, and they are the ones whose minds are still in a big stage of development. Most of the times these ads and peers who also see these ads can trump the lessons that are being taught at home. This video did a great job of getting across how this is effecting the youth. I always knew that these ads had negative impacts on people, but it really brought the point home hearing girls as young as 11 say they would change stuff about themselves already. (Cover Girl Culture) These young girls aren’t even fully grown their bodies are still in a transitional period, but yet they have things they wish were different already. The video also did a good job of showing how these girls want these bodies and looks, but there not real. These advertisements are fantasies to sell the magazines. The photos are all photo shopped to make the celebrities and models look better. The airbrushing and photo shopping that is going on can be seen in these youtube videos. These videos show the real picture and then how it was changed to make the model or the celebrity look better, as said in Cover Girl Culture these ads are making young people strive for something the models and celebrities don’t even have. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbBmX2Qnv3Y&feature=related (Youtube.com). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqZ0bJhRUVs&feature=related )Youtube.com) These are the people that are being looked at as role models these days. In the movie it was said that these are the people young kids want to be like, there are no more Gandhi’s in our world. (Cover Girl Culture). In my opinion most of the celebrities looked better before the retouching. The video also mentioned that what was once beautiful curves, and natural looking, has now turned into no curves and being as skinny as one can be. (Cover Girl Culture). The photo in this link is an example of the point the video was trying to make about the past and today. http://cdn.blisstree.com/files/2012/01/when-did-this-become-hotter-than-this.jpg
The video really brings to life all the issues these girls are dealing with and at such young ages because of the advertisements. It shows what the media is doing by making their target age so young. In relation to the cover girl culture video I came across some videos that bring up the same points as the movie. In an article about a French company trying to start a lingerie company for young girls, a main concern was that these girls are too young to be in the mind set of deciding how they should look. (cnn.com) Marketing is only getting younger with each day. Another article I came across talks about how in 2011 the U.K pulled some advertisements because the photos were so retouched. According to the article the photos were giving girls a false sense of image. (dailystrength.org) “Clearly these images serve to distort the self image of teenagers, particularly young girls, as they strive to achieve the weight or skin tone of these altered celebrities.” (dailystrength.org)
“The Evolution of Families” by Stephanie Coontz speaks of how what people perceive as a family has changed over time. Throughout time the dynamic of what a family is has changed many times. It also has different meanings for different cultures. In certain ways this article can be brought back to the Cover Girl Culture video. Both talk about the said norm is and both show how people follow that said norm. The said norm for families in America for a long time, and it is still around today, is said to have one mother and one father. That father works while the mother stays at home with the children and does the housework. In Cover Girl the said norm is to look like a supermodel. Both the video and article explore how the said norm can change on a daily basis. The said norm of a family has changed many times throughout history and is still changing today. Cover Girl makes mention to how a fuller woman with curves is what used to be the norm and attractive, that is what girls strive to be like. Now girl are striving to be as skinny as they can, because that is what they are seeing in the ads. That is also what they are being told is pretty and how they should look. I believe both show how what a society or community says is a norm slowly becomes that norm. People are highly influenced by peers, ads, television and celebrities. Many people want to fit into what is said to be norm at a certain time and will do whatever for it. Marketers feed off that, especially with the younger generation since they are the ones still developing and figuring out who they are.
I personally like the video and message it brought with it, It showed viewers how the executives target these younger kids because they know those are the ones whose minds are still developing. It showed how these ads have a more meaningful message to many, not just a message of the clothes or makeup. When bringing the article and video together I think it shows how fast a norm can change and how people will try to keep up with what others say is normal.
Discussion Questions
Girls of the class: When you were around the ages of the girls in cover girl what did you think of these ads you would be seeing daily?
Do you agree with what was said in cover girl about how our generation and the ones below us role models have changes drastically? When you were younger did you look up to these models and celebrities are your role models?
In your experience do the norms at Siena change and if you so do you yourself or have you experienced other trying to keep up with these norms or other peers?
Sarnof-Ross, Cyndi “Banned Advertisements Could Lead To Higher Self-Esteem for Young Girls” 2011. http://www.dailystrength.org/health_blogs/cyndi/article/banned-advertisements-could-lead-to-higher-self-esteem-for-young-girls
Strickland, Ashley “Adult-inspired lingerie marketed for young girls” 2011. http://articles.cnn.com/2011-08-18/living/young.girls.lingerie_1_lingerie-ad-bras-young-girls?_s=PM:LIVING http://www.youtube.com
Cover Girl Culture
Coontz, Stephanie. “The Evolution of Family” 2010.
I find it really interesting how the “Macho” man ideology has been supported through historical monuments in family development. In the documentary Tough Guise, Jackson Katz explores what young men perceive a “Real Man” to be, i.e. A Real man is someone who is powerful, demands respect, is tough, and is someone who is in control. We often as a culture talk about groups such as minorities, women, non heterosexual people, but we do not analyze the power of the dominant group in this culture; the white male heterosexual and why their use of suppression and violence is accepted as a cultural norm. It is known that men are more violent towards both men and women, then women are. They make up 85% of murder against their own gender, they are responsible for 90% of assaults, 95% of domestic violence, 95% of dating violence and yet this has not been addressed as a societal issue. Why is it that violence is accepted as part of the male culture? Men are not born with this preconceived notion of what it means to be a man, they become shaped through social and cultural pressures that make it acceptable to exhort your dominance over others by disrespecting and belittling them. Media portrays a man as being strong and invulnerable that should be able to be dependent on themselves, this suggests that men are emotionally unavailable and that they are incapable of being compassionate or caring which is clearly not the case. The history of the evolution of the american family also supports the notion that the man should be able to be the provider and the “Sole bread winner” of the family whereas women should be the homemaker and take on caring for the children and doing household duties. This conception made men the authoritative figure in their household and politicians created tax codes to support male breadwinner families over dual earner families, just contributes to the growth of disparity between men and women in the family (Coontz, 41).
By watching the documentary on tough guise the disparity between men and women are influenced through media representations of them. By creating movies and pornography that depicts violence as “Sexy” and allows men to be seen as fulfilling a sexual fantasy by maintaining dominance over women I believe helps contribute to the reasoning behind the statistic that 1 in every 4 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. This media portrayal also allows men to be emotionally withdrawn from the women and this is reinforced because these men are achieving their goals by being this controlling person.
Jackson Katz states that we first need to make this conception of what it means to be masculine visible that way people can learn to question it and eventually change the definition that society has shaped. Katz also hopes that men will learn that vulnerability, compassion and the ability to care for others are still part of what it means to be a man. By having role models such as Mark McGuire that emphasize how things like therapy ( which is often seen as mostly for women) has helped lead to his growth as an individual.
Stephanie Coontz’s article, “The Evolution of American Families”, and lecture, “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap”, are generally one in the same. They both discuss marriage and families throughout history and how both have changed, mainly because of changes in marriage. Most of the changes she talks about are good; however, there are some weaknesses that have arose from the progression of marriage.
In the video lecture, Coontz talks about the old days and discusses how different marriage was from what most people think it was like. It was interesting to hear that adultery was more common in the past and that in many cases, it was not discouraged. It must have been easy for a husband to cheat on a spouse knowing that divorce was not an option for the woman. This brings truth to the fact that marriages back then were often unhappy and shared no love between spouses. They were for financial, social, and other material reasons. Coontz talks about how in today’s world, we can marry the person we love. This is a huge benefit of the revolution of marriage. We now have the option of spending time with a person and deciding if that person is the right person to marry, another benefit that we have today. Her main point seemed to be that it is impossible to go back in time and go back to the way things used to be, and even if we could, that would be the wrong decision. We can only minimize the weaknesses of this revolution and enhance the strengths.
In Coontz’s article, she writes about many of the same things she talks about in her lecture. In the end of her article, she writes, “We should not assume that recent changes in family forms and practices are inevitably destructive.” (Coontz, 46) This is particularly true when she talks about children born out of wedlock. In the old days, these children had no rights and were looked at as accidents. Through the progressive movement of marriage, these children now have rights just as a child conceived to married parents. When Coontz brings up points like this, it makes the reader appreciate how far human rights have come.
Coontz’s article and lecture are virtually about the same exact topic and discuss the same facts. What Coontz wants the reader to realize is that when people refer to the “Good old days”, they are not what we imagine them to be like. In those days it was legal to beat your wife, it was fine to have an affair, it was normal to be in a miserable relationship with someone you did not love, and it was common for parents to have their children work in order to sustain their retirement. Like with any change there are certain things that need work; but, overall, the changes have been for the better and they have empowered both men and women with different abilities. Coontz is right on when she says we can only go forward and improve the weaknesses and enhance the strengths.
Personally, as you could have guessed, I agree with Stephanie Coontz. There have been so many benefits that have come from the changes in marriage and families. I completely agree with her when she says that we can now only minimize the weaknesses and build on the strengths.
Decade after decade the growth and development of children has been a main focus considered by many individuals. Throughout the article “American Childhood as a Social Cultural Construct” and the documentary “Consuming Kids,” I was able to find many similarities and differences discussing the ideas of childhood and change over time.
Both pieces of work put a strong emphasis on the important role that society plays on children’s well being. Whether it is media or our societal differences, children are influenced by many outside sources and these sources have changed drastically over time. We see in the documentary that children once were excited about going to the store to buy penny candy- and yet now, the focus of children is placed on computer games, cell phones and other technologically advanced devices. Children have become extremely focused on the ideas of consumerism. This is discussed in the article as the author, Steven Mintz, states that children suffer from “the violence of representation, where children and adolescents are exploited by advertisers, marketers, and purveyors of popular culture…” (Mintz 57). Through this comparison, we see how both pieces show how outside forces greatly influence what we consider as childhood. We see in the documentary how marketing largely influences children, and in the article how childhood is largely influenced by society, race, gender and family influences. Through these influences, we are able to connect both pieces to understand the changes that childhood is facing in today’s day and age. The documentary and the article also both discuss how the perception of a child has changed over time. We see how a child has become much more consumed in the world of technology, and how childhood is not all about going outside and playing anymore. Rather, childhood has become much more focused on technology. In comparison to the documentary, the article also discusses how the idea of playing has been lost in childhood, and how children have become much more likely to consider technological forms of play rather than the outdoors.
The documentary and article have many similarities, yet they also have differences. “Consuming Kids” is a documentary largely focused on the consumer side of childhood and the abilities that marketers have on gaining the attention of children. In contrast, the article “American Childhood as a Social Cultural Construct” puts much more attention on social class, race and gender. These pieces are different from each other in the ideas that one is more consumer oriented and based on the facts of the consumerism of children over time, and the second is more focused on family-oriented changes that affect the lives and changes of childhood.
I agree with both the documentary and the article, and it blows my mind to see how drastically childhood has changed over time and how it will continue to change. I feel that there are many factors that influence the change of childhood, just as Mintz says throughout his article. The link I have found is a quick youtube video that shows how great the influences of society have on a child. Through this video we realize how impressionable children are and how they are capable to pick up and act out every little thing they see within society. This can relate to marketing and to family oriented practices that the reader learns about in the article “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct” and the documentary “Consuming Kids.” I largely believe that outside influences such as parenting and marketing have taken a toll on the growth of children and the ideals of childhood. Children are losing their innocence much sooner due to things that they are seeing and soaking up. Throughout childhood, what many children see becomes how children think. They are like sponges and soak up everything that is happening around them, and in many instances, they will repeat what they see. Therefore, through the practices that society and marketers have created, children are losing their innocence much earlier than they used to.
Mintz, Steven. “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct.” Families as They Really Are. (2010): 48-58. Print.
Discussion Questions:
Do you believe that society is taking the innocence away from childhood? Why or why not do you feel this way? Do you believe that American society is child friendly?
Steven Mintz states “childhood was defined as a period during which young people should be insulated from the stresses and corrupting influences of the adult world and free from adult-like responsibilities” (Mintz 52). Do you still believe that this can be used as the definition of childhood? Is childhood still considered a purely innocent time in a person’s life? Why or why not?
Prior to the 18th century, children were forced to speak, read, and contribute to their family’s economic status as quickly as possible. Do you believe that our society would ever come back to this idea?
Steven Mintz discusses that “in no other advanced country do so many young people grow up in poverty or without health care..” (Mintz 27). What would you do to change this idea? How would you think of effectively getting children out of poverty and the services they need to stay alive?
Cover Girl Culture and Girls: Moving Beyond Myth are both documentaries that focus on the difficulties of being a girl in today’s society. Cover Girl Culture is focused on how the media affects young girls body image and how it can have a negative impact on them. The media is telling young girls that they have to be pretty and skinny in order to be perceived as “beautiful.” When asked what they would like to change about themselves, most young girls said either their face, height, or figure. Girls as young as 12 spend hours getting ready in the morning putting makeup on and worrying about what to wear in order to be “liked” by other kids at school. The documentary blames fashion magazine editors, such as Vogue and Elle magazine, for these problems among girls. However, the models in the magazine only represent such a small percentage of women, and most women do not look like models. What we see in magazines is not beautiful, but when exposed to it at such a young age, young girls grow up thinking that the girls in the magazines are beautiful and if they want to be beautiful too they have to look like them.
This video is an example of how messed up the fashion industry is. A Ralph Lauren model was fired for being “overweight” at 5’10 and 120 pounds. Fortunately, the model does not agree with her agency that she is overweight. However, any other girl who is told she is overweight could have a very negative impact on her body image.
These two links help reinforce that the media is having a negative impact on girls and putting a lot of pressure on girls to be “perfect.”
Girls: Moving Beyond Myth focuses on how girls are being pressured by media and boys to have sex. Girls’ bodies are maturing earlier, but that does not mean they are emotionally mature for all the complications of sex. Girls as young as nine years old are asking parents about sex and masturbation. The girls in the documentary talk about how a lot of girls are feeling pressure from friends and boys to go further than they are comfortable going. They are afraid that boys will not like them if they don’t have sex with them. When interviewed, a lot of the girls say that if a girl has sex with a boy she is called a “slut” or a “whore” but guys are “cool” for having sex with girls. One girl mentioned that since girls have such low self-esteem, if a guy calls a girl beautiful she will do whatever he wants. Girls are becoming sexually active at younger and younger ages due to pressure all around them.
Discussion questions:
Have you ever felt like someone judged you just based on the way you look?
Do you think stick thin is attractive?
Have you ever felt pressured by a boy/girl to do something you didn’t want to do?
I viewed the video lecture by Stephanie Coontz, “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap” and I also read the article written by her called “The Evolution of American Families”. The video lecture focused more on the marriage component of a family and the myths of what a traditional marriage actually was. In contrast, the article focused more on how the definition of a family was shaped over time according to various global events and cultural diversity that was encountered within each period.
Within this video lecture Coontz spoke mostly about marriage and what we as a society today think is “new” but is actually “traditional” and vice versa. One thing that struck me that was actually traditional within marriages was the single parent family or the stepfamily. Although today we think that the step/single parent family has become a sort of recent trend, it was actually quite common in the earlier centuries because a parent would die of disease or hard labor. In addition, adultery was also quite common and throughout history sex outside marriage was also common. What we think of as traditional was actually new, for example the man being the breadwinner. In past history the man as well as the woman were both bringing in the money and participating in manual labor (Coontz, online video).
Coontz did say that “marriage in the old days was invented to get in-laws” as opposed to todays world where marriage is about “love and choosing who you want to marry and if you even want to marry” (Coontz, online video). I found it to be quite important that Coontz mentioned these points because that is what ultimately dictated the reason that past time marriages were more stable because there was no choice as to whom you would marry and men held superior rights and women just followed the man’s rule. However, in today’s society marriage tends to be unstable due to the independence that women gained and the new idea of actually finding love.
After viewing the video I thought that today we tend to be stuck in the idea that we need to revert back to the traditional ways of how marriage was, however, we must realize that these changes have brought about much reform in terms of women’s rights and freedom to choose. Although the nuclear family seems to be separating due to both parents working and new technologies, we must not shun these new outcomes rather we need to make improvements to the new and forget about the old in order to strive as a society.
In regard to the article, Coontz stated that the term family was something that encompassed different traits by various cultures throughout American history. There seemed to be no universal definition of a family, however most societies referred to it as “the term to endow certain sexual relations and biological connections with special privileges and obligations” (Riseman, p. 33). I thought this was a sound definition that could be used in today’s society when categorizing what a family actually is because a lot of people in America tend to think of a family as having some sort of either true or artificial biological relation and having responsibilities and opportunity within that unit.
An interesting point that was brought up in the article was the idea that periods of change (i.e. industrial revolution, World War II, etc.) shaped the American family to a significant extent. In these times of irreversible change, the family unit needed to adapt to the changing environment and this is where we get our “modern” family (Riseman, p. 40). The Industrial Revolution lead to a rapid change to the nuclear family because of people needing to relocate to cities where there were smaller living spaces and less room for large extended families. In addition, World War II impacted the population through the baby boom as well as having women go back to domestic life and ultimately lead to the typical 1950s portrayal of family life in the suburbs. I thought that this whole idea of how global events, whether they were good or bad, have had an impact and continue to impact the idea of what a family really is. For example, in today’s society there is a need for dual income households with such a harsh economy, therefore babysitters have become somewhat part of American families as well as families in other nations. This shows how historical and economic events do indeed change the way we live and more specifically change the notion of what a family truly encompasses.
This article is about the evolution from the extended family to the nuclear family and how the Industrial Revolution, The Great Depression and WWII had profound effects on which type of family dominated.
Discussion Questions
After learning about the impact that the Industrial Revolution and World War II have had on shaping the American family, what are some other events that you think have shaped the American family or are currently shaping the American family today?
Do you think that people truly look for love today or do they marry for other reasons?
Kanika Cummings
Group 2
Blog 1
“Consuming Kids” and “A Consumer in the Family” are the two documentaries that focus on how marketers capture children in wanting their products. Both documentaries reveal that the marketers will are cleaver in thinking of ways to get children hooked on their product. From television, radio shows and every billboard and sign around them in our world today is proof that there is no getting away for the constant pressure of buying things. They showed that children are easy to get a child’s attention in commercials and other forms of advertisement. Both “Consuming Kid” and “A Consumer in the Family” talk about “The Nag Factor”. This is basically marketers promoting kids to nag and whine to get what they want in a store or any place else that sells their product. There are actual advertisements that say to nag to your parents and you will get what you want. “A Consumer in the Family” reads, “In, fact, the marketing industry purposely comes between children and parents in many instances, potentially wreaking all sorts of havoc in family life. One of the most egregious examples of evidence that they do this comes from a 1998 study on nagging. Conducted not to help parents prevent nagging but rather to help retailers exploit nagging to boost sales” (Linn 33). In the “Consuming Kids” documentary the video shows advertisements from way before 1998 promoting children to beg for that product that they need so much and the ad ensures that they will get that toy or burger that they wanted. “Consuming Kids” showed they would do just about everything to get the viewers attention while promoting their product. Marketers would put advertisements in schools and on the bus on the way to school. The amount of media that children are experiences seems very overwhelming. “A Consumer in the Family” focuses on the marketers ideals on how to influence the children while the parents try to not let their children fall into the trap of the advertisements. The article said, “The problem is while parents are trying to set limits, marketing executives are working day and night to undermine their authority” (Linn 38). Another article called ”American Childhood as a Social Cultural Construct” also seeing the marketing of these companies to be aggressive also. This article focuses more on how the child has been brought up in their family while the other focused on the advertisements and how they influence the child like a middle class and upper middle class family influence their children with educational toys early in their childhood to get them learning as soon as possible.
I just liked this picture because it shows how a child is brought into a world of advertisements and is the target of all marketers
Discussion questions:
Do you think that the marketers are going overboard with the suffocating advertisements or is it just part of the culture that we have?
Do you think that there will be a change in the advertising world because of the dangers showed at the end of the “Consuming Kids” documentary?
The article “The Evolution of American Families” by Stephanie Coontz speaks to the idea of the family dynamic and what the definition of a family is while the movie Cover Girl Culture was more about placing blame on the magazine companies for young girls’ negative body image. The article takes more of a research approach on historical ideals of family which makes the article seem more credible under a critical lens. The documentary had credibility because it used actual quotes from those involved in the production of magazines and campaigns. The documentary sought to use the words against the magazines; they took their words and put them in contrast with the photos actually being shown to the girls within the pages of their magazines. An example of this would be when the women working for Teen Vogue were discussing how they believed that they used healthy looking young girls to represent the population of teen girls while recent magazine images of young, almost emaciated girls were being flashed on the screen.
In American culture there has always been a standard set upon females to look and act a certain way which is what both the article and the documentary showcase. The article discusses how women have been expected throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries to be the “happy homemakers,” willing to cater to the needs of her family and be practically voiceless in the household decisions. In a quote by Coontz she states “there was a renewed emphasis on female domesticity in the postwar years…They were urged to forego the challenges of the work world and seek fulfillment in domestic chores…Psychiatrists—who had largely replaced ministers as the source of advice for families—claimed that any woman who desired anything other than marriage, motherhood, and domesticity were deeply neurotic” (Coontz, 43). This idea that women were almost insane for wanting to have a sense of independence made it hard for women to break the mold during this time period, and lead to a lot of conformity to the male standard of women. Women were being told how and how not to act which is the same idea of what the documentary stated, that females allow other people to make the decisions for how they should be. In the documentary there was more of a blame game that pointed towards the media companies and their definitions of what a female should look like.
The documentary wasn’t totally false in its sentiments, the media does play a large role in the lives of females but in all honesty it wasn’t totally unbiased. The documentary seemed to set out with the goal of blaming media influences such as magazines for the negative body images of young girls. The media cannot be the only one to blame for negative body images that young girls may have, they have many other social influences such as friends, family, school and group activities that can impact their body images. The media has been a part of female influence since the beginnings of television. As Coontz says “the powerful new medium of television broadcast nightly pictures of suburban families where homemaker moms had dinner on the table every night and raised healthy children who never talked back or got into any trouble that couldn’t be solved by a fatherly lecture,” which goes to show that although the ideal woman may have changed slightly, there has been media influence on what a woman should be (Coontz, 44). The media has set standards for women that they can choose to uphold in this new world where women have equal rights as men.
In this video clip the viewer can see the evolution that a typical woman goes through for a billboard advertisement. In certain ways these distorted images that are presented to the public as real life women can add to the negative body images of young girls for they are always shooting for something that is impossible to obtain. If the woman in the advertisement doesn’t actually look like that what makes people think that they can and should look like that as well? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hibyAJOSW8U
Does anyone have any suggestions for way to go about restoring young girls body images?
The image of women in today’s culture seen in magazines, television, and movies can be portrayed unrealistically. These popular industries are forcing these images of beautiful skinny women into the minds of young girls, ultimately bringing about insecurities in their self-image. The documentary that we watched in class, Cover Girl Culture deals with the extreme advertisement created by the fashion industry. Beside from the fashion industry, celebrities from the music and movie industries also tend to promote the idea that there is only one type of beautiful, which only comes from skinny women. Throughout this film advertisement companies in magazines seem to emphasize only pretty and skinny girls to promote their product. These ads should focus more on the realistic body image of young girls since they are ultimately promoting a negative image to girls around the world. It is sending the message to young women that in order to fit into society’s norms it is important to be a certain size and wear select clothing. These images can impact young girls drastically and force them to do whatever they can to achieve what they see in the media. These types of companies realize the control that they have over young girls and should center their advertisements to girls that comes from all sizes. Young girls openly admit in this documentary that they feel bad about their image after looking through a magazine, where no one looks similar to them. Young girls understand that these models that they see in the magazines are a small percentage of what women really look like, which makes it that much more desirable.
In comparison, the documentary Generation M, Misogyny in Media & Culture, shows the negative attitude toward women and young girls brought on by the American culture. This reveals how advertisement informs girls that their empowerment comes from their appearance and the use of sex. Music stars like The Pussycat Dolls and Britney Spears appear to encourage young girls to use only their sexuality to get the attention that they desire. Young girls view these celebrities as role models, which is not a positive influence on these vulnerable teens. Images seen throughout the media are forcing teens to be sexual and adapt to these images seen everyday. This documentary continues on the same track as Cover Girl Culture from the viewpoint of the beauty industry thriving on girl’s imperfections. These role models that have a great impact on the young girls need to acknowledge that beauty is not everything a girl needs in life. A woman can be successful no matter what she looks like. Also in this documentary it shows how the dieting industry is starting at such a young age because of influence of television and also parents, which can eventually lead young girls to become anorexia and bulimia.
Both the fashion and music industry are implanting these types of harmful images to vulnerable young teens. I believe that the music, movie, and fashion industries need to start transforming the unrealistic body image of women and begin to focus on all different type of body images for women. It is also important for parents to constantly instill in their daughter that being healthy is more important than simply being skinny. Both these documentaries show us the effect that the media has on young girls in today’s society and how it can ruin their self-image.
1. Do you think society’s images of “beautiful” women will every change?
2. What celebrities today do you think promote a positive body image to young girls?
Childhood is a topic that has taken a very high interest in society for a long time. The article “American Childhood as a Social and Cultural Construct” by Steven Mintz and the documentary Consuming Kids both discuss childhood and the changes it has taken throughout the years. The documentary and the article are similar in many ways but also different. Both the documentary and the article had strong emphasis on society and how marketers have been able to change the way children act and behave.
“American Childhood as a Social and Cultural Construct” by Steven Mintz is written about children’s childhood and the transformation of “childhood” over past centuries. Mintz defines childhood as “romanticized as a time of care-free innocence, when children should play freely, untouched by the cares of the adult world” (Mintz, 48). Both the article and the documentary have a strong over-all belief that the word “childhood” has evolved over the years. They believe that advertising is a large reason for the change in children and the length that children are suppose to be children. Another similarity was that during the eighteenth century they started to create furniture in specific colors with different graphics of animals or nursery rhythms. This was the start of the child advertising. This was similar to the documentary because it was about children advertising and marketers creating ways to create brand loyalty from a very young age. In the documentary they discuss how advertising to kids with objects like Dora the Explorer bedding helps children to remember this characters and TV shows. They will then “need” the latest toys and bedding to be the cool kids, this started as early as the seventieth century. Throughout both pieces we have seen how outside sources have had great influences over our children. The largest similarity between these two works was the idea that parents are giving their children what they want or the newest thing in order for them to fit in and make them happy.
There were many differences between “American Childhood as a Social and Cultural Construct” and Consuming Kids. One large difference was that Consuming Kids was mainly about advertising to children and the effect it has on their childhood and “American Childhood as a Social and Cultural Construct” was mainly about the differences in raising their children during different centuries based on gender, race, social class and society. During the “colonial America, a parent’s duty was to hurry the child toward adult status” (Mintz, 49). They needed them to work and be older then they were to support their family. During the documentary they only talked about the changes in children’s childhood within the last century. During the documentary we saw how marketers were able to mesmerize children and their influence over them. During the article we saw how race, gender and your social class influences childhood.
I do agree with both the article and the documentary. Both have great points and really make the watcher and the reader think about the advertisements that their children are watching and looking at. I believe that children have become obsessed with having the latest objects instead of enjoying what they have around them and socializing with their peers. Instead of playing outside they would rather play with their new game-boy or latest electronic. It is upsetting that children used to be excited to play outside and be happy with whatever toy they had; unfortunately today children have been exposed to a world where bigger is better and your “not cool” if you don’t have the latest things. We are living in a world of consumers. By marketers targeting your children they have discovered that this is the age to create the best brand loyalty. They see everything and ear everything and they then go to their parents to achieve what they see. I do believe that marketing certain objects to children is ok but marketing in the right way to children is the key to success. Marketers should never let children believe that they aren’t good enough or they should grow up faster. Advertising to the right age group with the right product is the key to success. Don’t let our children grow up faster then they already do.
Discussion Questions:
Mintz says that “in recent years, the gap between poor and working-class and affluent children in rates of attending four-year colleges has widened”. Do you believe that this is true? And if so why?
Mintz says that children are being seen as objects to be shaped and molded for their own good. Do you agree with this statement?
Do you believe that society has taken away the playfulness of childhood?
Two hundred years ago the word “childhood” and “youth” were referred to as someone as young as five and has old has early twenties. What do you think the ages of “childhood” are today?
Due to the rapid proliferation of technology, and communication, today’s society is evolving and changing at rate never seen before. For the first time in the history of man the world is truly globally connected. Today’s children are more exposed to adult issues, and the perils of the “grown-up” world than ever before. Many professionals, and individuals in today’s world have grown critical of how quickly our children are growing up. The 2008 documentary “Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood,” sheds light on the intense marketing fury children face daily, at the earliest of ages. However, after reading the article “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural,” by Steven Mintz, I discovered that children in the American Colonies were also asked to grow up extremely quickly.
I believe there are several take away points that can be derived from contrasting the article, and the documentary. The creators of the documentary focus on the intense marketing, and the media exposure today’s children face. While the article highlights several various issues that at one time or another have impacted America’s youth. With that said, I feel the major takeaway lies in this difference. That takeaway point is that every generation is challenged, faces adversity, and is given the opportunity to rise above those challenges, better themselves, and our American society as a whole. Early colonial children were asked to financially contribute to their family at an early age. Children that we would consider to be “too young” would work in the fields as early as age five. These two sources of media remind of a phrase I am sure we have all heard and that is the “greatest generation that has ever lived.” This is the generation that was born into the Great Depression, and went on to fight in WWII. This generation faced incredible adversity, and produced individuals such as Ted Williams. Mr. Williams is considered by many to be the greatest baseball hitter of all-time. At the peak of his baseball career, famous players such as Ted Williams, and Joe DiMaggio went on to serve in WWII. I believe that every generation will face a unique challenge, and the responsibility lies with the parents, educators, and mentors to prepare these young children for the challenges they will face.
As you can see each generation of children has had to face and overcome their own unique challenges. Today’s children face the daily marketing blitz attempting to convert them into cradle to grave customers. Colonial children faced their own challenges of being asked to financially contribute to their household as soon as possible. Multiple generations of American children have faced the prospect of growing up quickly due to parents serving our country in foreign wars. As you can see the documentary “Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood,” sheds light on the current issues today’s children face, while the article, “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural,” by Steven Mintz, reminds us that children have faced unique challenges since the creation of man. Overall, I believe that a greater responsibility lies with today’s parents to help filter, and protect their malleable, young children from the plethora of information that is accessible to today’s children.
Discussion Questions:
1. Are there any unique challenges you believe our generation has faced?
2. Do you feel that today’s marketers are negatively affecting today’s youth? If so, should any blame fall on today’s parents?
3. In what ways has your childhood differed from you parents, grandparents etc.?
In the article “American Childhood as a Social and Cultural Contract” , Steve Mintz explains the history of child rearing and the evolution of maturity of children throughout the centuries. Mintz describes the differences of children used for labor in the early 1900’s compared to children raised in a post world war II era. Some characteristics that are important to note are the ability of children to cope to a shifting culture. In today’s world , it is more likely for children to be faced with the stress of parent’s divorce , online bullying, insufficient nutrition and “increased sexual maturation”(Mintz). However, compared the video, Mintz continues to discuss the importance parental involvement in adolescent homework, play time and personality molding. The author also poses the question: Are our children today better off than generations before? The answer to this question is interesting, yet difficult to answer. Each generation is faced with hardships and difficulties than the one previous. Nevertheless, it is significant to understand the way that “inadequate schooling, substandard housing , deficient health care and unstable living arrangements” can affect today’s children(Mintz).
Compared to the article, the video “Consuming Kids” highlighted the significant problems with media advertising to children. Young children are very malleable and their mind is similar to a sponge; eager to learn and obtain a personality. However with fewer or no regulations on children’s advertising, major companies and marketers are manipulating the minds of our youngest generation. Advertisers use a tag line of “any means necessary” to appeal to kids and get them “hooked” at a very young age. They are targeting children and holding on to their consumers for life. The problem with exposing young kids to this intense market of products is the social impact it has on their generation. No longer are we buying products for their use, but for social status. Also, the advertising is not only limited to television and radio; it is infiltrating schools, play areas, birthday parties and sporting events. The affect of media on America’s children is real and very apparent. As each year passes, more ads are produced that are selling a more “mature way to play” by presenting dolls with less clothing and action heroes that are more violent. Media advertising is entering the minds of young children and undoing their psyche. Many critics are concerned that this type of exposure will reinforce a self indulgent, shallow personality in kids. The movie begs to ask questions such as; “What values are being sent to our children? What kind of generation will they grow into?”
I believe that children’s advertising, television shows, music and entertainment definitely need to be regulated. As a babysitter and an older cousin to young children, I can literally see the brainwashing affect that some TV shows have on kids. Many of my neighbors act like the popular “Hannah Montana” character, mimicking her diva attitude and rebellious mindset. I think that our society places too much an importance on name brands, which affects how our children develop a sense of individuality and morals.
Outside Link : This link is to the popular “Cingular Commercial” that came out years ago showing the affect of young kids and texting.
In the documentary Tough Guise, Jackson Katz investigates the crisis in masculinity and why men believe they have to put on a front in order to be a “real man.” The documentary starts out with intense images of women who have been brutally abused by men and pictures of men with guns to capture the audience’s attention. These images show the negative effects of the tough guise and how it can not only hurt themselves but others too. I found it extremely interesting when Jackson Katz compared the Wizard in “The Wizard of Oz” to the tough guise and says that “masculinity is a mask to hide humanity.” (Katz) I agree with Katz when he says that young boys learn that they need to be more masculine from the media. “In a national poll from the study, almost three fourths of children aged 10-17 describe males on television as violent. More than two thirds describe them as angry. The children’s perceptions are validated by the study’s independent analysis of how men act and how masculinity is portrayed in the most popular programs boys watch.”(Children 1) Men in most media shows are shown as big, strong, tough, and in control. I also believe that it has become part of the cultural norm to be more masculine because men are usually seen as the head of the household, while the women stay home to clean and cook for their husbands. Jackson Katz also points out how masculinity has increased dramatically over the years in the media, he proves this by his G.I. Joe example. The little figurine toy called G.I. Joe has had his bicep size increase from 12.2” in 1960 all the way to 26.8” in 1998. Jackson Katz thinks that masculinity is not natural. He did a really good job of defending his belief by asking the question, “Why do White kids act Black?” The tough guise is all a lie, young boys put on a performance because they believe that by looking mean, they will be more respected. Now that women are starting to take a stand against men and are fighting for equal rights, these men with the tough guise feel threatened. Because they feel this way they believe they need to put the women back in their place by using violence. The documentary concludes with Jackson Katz talking about how to put an end to this tough guise. Men need to start acting more vulnerable, which takes a lot of courage to do. Men also need to stand up for what’s right and start supporting women. On the other hand women need to show men that they value men that resent the tough guise. I believe that the ending wasn’t as strong as the beginning. The beginning used a lot of violent pictures to get the audience engaged and really made me feel that the tough guise is becoming a more intense problem in our society. I do not think that men will ever be able to be more vulnerable and I think that there needs to be other ways to put a stop to the violence. In ending, this documentary really interested me and got me thinking about why men act the way that they do and if it is natural or not.
Children Now. “Boys To Men: Media Messages About Masculinity.” Mediate.com – US and World Leading Mediation Web Site – Find Mediators. Children Now. Web. 25 Jan. 2012. . http://www.mediate.com/articles/children.cfm
Discussion Questions:
1.) The video talks about how in order to put an end to this “tough guise”, men must start being more vulnerable, standing up for what’s right, and supporting women. Also media must change and women need to show that they value men that resent the tough guise. Do you think it is possible to put an end to the “tough guise”?
2.) The video focuses on the negatives of masculinity (examples: abusive relationships, reckless driving, children killing at a young age) Are there any positives to masculinity?
Over the past century, there has been a vast change in the female role and lifestyle in society. In the early 20th century, females were usually viewed as being traditional in the sense of staying home to cook and clean, take care of the children, and maintain the household. The article, “The Evolution of the American Family” by Stephanie Coontz describes how the family unit and females have truly changed over time. The documentary, Cover Girl Culture, shows how the new female image is being portrayed to younger females and its effects on the female youth. The documentary film and article both illustrate how the female gender has significantly changed over the years and has reached a new point of worshiping self-appearance and is being questioned.
In the article “The Evolution of American Families” by Stephanie Coontz, she describes how the family structure and role of women has always been changing. Coontz states on page 41, “by the 1920’s, for the first time, a slight majority of children came to live in families where the father was the breadwinner, the mother did not have paid employment outside the home, and the children were in school rather than at work.” This time period created the “traditional” family and female role, which is relatively new in our history. We label this as what life should be like. Coontz also states on page 46, “Divorce rates have come down since their peak in 1979-1980, especially for college educated couple.” This break in the “traditional” family life might have been viewed negatively, however, women also began working more and pursuing higher education during the end of the twentieth century. Stephanie Coontz concludes on page 46, “American families have always been in flux, and many different family arrangements and values have worked for various groups at different times.” As time progress, people who grew up in one period do not always agree with the new period of growth. There has always been a change in lifestyle and how the family is structured. However, we are seeing a new type of change in the female youth of our nation that might affect the family structure of tomorrow.
In the documentary, Cover Girl Culture, young girls were asked what they would like to be when they grew up; they answered models. When asked why, they hesitated but answered that they wanted to be rich and famous (Cover Girl Culture). The documentary also interviewed a plastic surgeon who further analyzed this question and said it was true that many young children do not aim for the traditional jobs such as a police officer, nurse, or veterinarian, but rather pursue fame and fortune (Cover Girl Culture). Young girls are being “hypnotized” by ads on television and magazines showing how models are the perfect figure and have everything that they could ask for. This unprecedented advertising is changing how females portray themselves and also what they are setting out to become in life.
I believe this situation is causing a major problem in our female youth, which will have an effect on future family life. Young girls are being pressured by advertisements to become “perfect.” This lays the foundation for girls having self-confidence and self-esteem issues when they consistently compare themselves to models. Only a fraction of women are capable of looking like models but yet the majority compare themselves to this minority. Being so consumed on ones image and with the goal of becoming a model as a job may mislead the female youth to an unfortunate lifestyle. Females are being viewed as sex icons and this may distort future family structures and how women may be portrayed. A very interesting video discusses how young females are indeed changing and that they are growing up too fast (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfqXmidvBWY). The question is, what effect will this have on the young females when they grow up? Overall, change in family structure is imminent because it has been changing over hundreds of years, but we must be careful how we lay the foundation for future generations to come.
Discussion Questions:
1.) How might this “Cover Girl Culture” affect our female youth when they grow up?
2.) In what ways should we limit this advertisement bombardment, or should we not?
3.) How might the family structure change in the next 50 years?
Brigitte Vargas
Group 2
The documentary “Consuming Kids” and the article “ A Consumer in the Family” written by Linn discuss how industries advertise their products to children and how they affect the families. The next article that is viewed is “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct” written by Mintz discuses the timeline of the development of children and the different stages.
In the article “A Consumer in the family”, Linn discusses how the industries are putting stress into the parents when the item that is being advertised is questioning the parent’s morals. Linn also discusses the nagging factor that most marketing companies are using. The nag factor is when a child will do anything and ask as many times until he or she receives the item. Once again this could put stress to parents that can’t afford certain items because of the social class they are in. The article mentions that the studies that are being conducted aren’t informing the parents about the reason behind the study and how it could negatively affect the parent. Linn states, “The problem is that while parents are trying to set limits, marketing executives are working day and night to undermine their authority”(Linn, 38), which shows that the marketing executives don’t care for the parents as long as they know the child has the control of getting what he or she wants. This shows that children are in danger not only in the health issues but also in how they develop into society.
In the Documentary “Consuming Kids” shows that parents are the least of their worries and how children are the new influence on what parents buy. The documentary also states how media and technology is becoming a great influence on how marketing companies advertise their items. The video shows that children are easily influenced by the advertisements because of the colors or the social benefit. The documentary stated that throughout the advertisements they aren’t solely focusing on the product but the way the child or teen will feel once they have the product. The video also states that boys and girls are advertised differently because the girls are mostly advertised with beauty and social meaning while boys are advertised with violence and power.
The article “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct” states the development of childhood throughout the colonial period until today (Mintz, 49). Mintz is stating how in the early period children would go outside and help the family with chores. The article states how throughout history, parents may not be home due to work or divorce and the child wouldn’t have parental control at all times. Mintz mentions that the home is a place of stability but now in the present there isn’t much stability for some children because of family problems.
The common theme throughout all sources, I found that children aren’t acting as children but much older because of the products that are being sold to them and they way they act. The age between tweens is now 6- 12 while before it was 12-14 (Consuming Kids) but because of the society today, they are taking the child out of childhood. Health is also a major issue that was discussed because of the products being sold is not only toys but fast foods which can bring a child with diabetes or obesity. Both the documentary and article about consuming kids mainly focuses on the advertisement of the child and the negative affects whereas the article “ American childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct” is based on how the child has been affected by technology and society.
I found an outside article that reflects on the book written by Linn and another that discuss the marketing on kids in today’s society. Seth Stevenson who wrote the article “See Spot Run: Are commercials really bad for kids”, states that he at first didn’t believe what Linn had to say until he talked to her on the phone. He was convinced that commercials and marketing do affect the child and the parent’s authority. Stevenson also states that children today aren’t looking to play with toys but rather be entertained. With all the articles I believe that children are becoming to advance and not enjoying their youth as much as they can because of the media and products being sold to them.
Discussion Questions:
1. Do you think the nagging factor always works with parents even if they have a strong backbone?
2. Do you believe technology has made the child develop faster? Why?
3. Do you think marketing companies should stop undermining parent’s authority?
Christie Merrick
Sociology of the Family
Group 4
Week 1
The perception of man as “tough, rugged, and powerful” is one that has become increasingly prominent in today’s society. In everyday life, it is easy to see how stereotypes play out, however this is one that people overlook because it has just become a part of life. In the documentary “Tough Guise,” one is able to see how this stereotype has come into play and how it has affected all of society, not just man himself. In the beginning of the video, it shows pictures and videos of women being beaten, men with large weapons, fights in sports games and on television, WWF, and war. These are only a few examples of what is around us that leads men to believe that being a so-called “macho-man” is the correct way to be. Throughout this documentary, we are introduced to different examples of the effect this has brought unto the world around us. One example that stood out to me was the use of the Wizard of Oz. In this movie, a man hides behind a curtain and a mask so that he can feel as though he is powerful, strong, respected, and tough. This is most likely how many boys and men feel in society today. This video hits the spot when it shows the way in which media portrays men as dominant. One cannot flip through the channels on their television without seeing wrestling, a show with crime and men with guns, women being portrayed as sexual objects, or music videos. In the video, it claims that these are the major reasons boys and men act the way they do. Statistically, eighty five percent of murder cases are performed by men, ninety five percent of violent physical assault cases are by males, ninety five percent of domestic violence cases are at the fault of the male, and one fourth of men will perform an act of violence against his partner. According to Stephanie Coontz, in the past fifteen years family life has become more stable. Divorce rates have dropped which means there is less domestic violence. (Coontz 46). Newspapers have created headlines stating “Youth Violence,” however, what is going on is not actually youth violence, it is a majority boys killing boys and girls, not kids killing kids. There has been a huge epidemic in recent years of men assaulting women and it is a fact that one million American women are stalked annually. This is a large number of women to be living in fear of what move a man may make next against them. Many boys are brought up to believe that “if you want respect you got to earn it.” This should not be the case. This is what leads to so many tragedies in American life, including the Columbine shooting. Tragedies such as this are done because boys are bullied in school and having a gun or a weapon gives them strength against others that cannot be contested.
This past century has been the bloodiest of all human nature. I do agree with what this video is saying about how boys and men have become victims of the media. It is very rare in everyday life that one can flip through the television channels and come across a show that does not have some act of violence or degrading image toward women. This is making boys and men think that this is the right way to live their life. In fact, it is not. When boys are sensitive and able to have a heart and care for others, that makes them a well-rounded person. There is nothing honorable about a man who believes he is better than all others and more powerful and intimidating. These are the men who live empty lives.
Discussion Questions:
1. Do you believe that the reason 76% of males binge drink in college is because of pressure to be more intimidating?
2. Do you believe that “sexualization of violence” has anything to do with men becoming more aggressive? Or do you believe that this is just entertainment for men?
The documentary Tough Guise, was all about masculinity of men, and how they are supposed to act and look to be “real men.” This documentary goes on to explain that men are brought up these days to be tough, independent, strong, athletic, and muscular. It is believed that if you are not this stereotypical type then you are called names such as queer, fag, wimp, girl. Most men believe that in order to be considered a real man, then they have to act and look tough. One of the discussion questions that I came up with for this documentary is that; “men are portrayed and seen as tough, muscular, independent, strong people. This is the masculinity of males. But, are males this way because of the media? Or is it a combination of how they are brought up in their households, along with the media?” This is one of the main ideas that this documentary is addressing.
I think that a huge part of men being known as these masculine tough guys is due to the media. In the documentary, Tough Guise, it talked of how much men and their appearances have changed from the 50’s to today, even through figurines that young boys are playing with. Movies back in the 50’s would show men with smaller frames holding small guns. Now, men in movies have to have big arms with big guns. Even figurines bodies are muscular, showing males that they need to look like this in order to be considered a “real man” (Katz, Tough Guise). Also shown in the documentary is men and boys being portrayed as athletic beings. Going to the clip of young boys playing sports being told to “suck it up” if they were to get hurt. (Katz, Tough Guise) The media, and parents are the ones stipulating how males should look and act. I believe that this is not right, males are becoming more and more violent, and by them becoming this way is making it seem as though it is acceptable in our society because the media is making it okay.
This leads me to talk about how the documentary is stating that society is making it okay for males to be violent. News papers, the news, movies, media, these are all detrimental to society by making it appear as though it is a social norm for males to act out and be violent towards others. The documentary was discussing such situations as murder and rape, and that if a male were to commit a crime as this then it would barely appear in the papers. But, if a female were to murder or rape someone it would be everywhere in the news. This is because people are finding it a social norm for males to be violent and act out towards others, and because the news is not making it an obscure thing for a male to act this way, then society is becoming more acceptable and prone to this kind of attitude that males have. (Katz, Tough Guise) Males are always going to be more dominant than females because the media displays men this way. That they are stronger then women by both physical and mental attributes.
Moving on to the article, “The Evolution of the American Families,” I found several points made in this article that directly compare to things stated in the documentary Tough Guise. This article discussed the many roles of males and females in the American family. One thing that stuck out to me in the article, which I thought related to the documentary and went with the theme of the masculine male, was the discussion of the family at the time of the Great Depression and World War II. The men were supposed to be the ones working, but they were also the ones being shipped off to fight in the war because they are “tough.” But, usually men were the ones who worked away from the home bringing in the money for the family. A quote in the article, “ Wives who worked in the war industries while the men were away garnered social approval—as long as they were willing to quit their jobs when the men came home” (Coontz, 42). This to me showed that men were the ones who were supposed to be strong and independent. The women were not to help with income. Another quote, “Politicians rewrote the tax code to favor male breadwinner families over dual-earner families, explicitly to discourage wives from working” (Coontz, 43). This just goes to show that the males were to ones in charge of the important things, and that they were the reliable, independent half of the family.
Both the article and documentary made males out to have to be a certain way to be accepted within the society. If you were not strong, independent, looked a certain way, muscular, then you were not considered to be a “real man.” Over time men have been up-played to be bigger and better every year. This will never change unless the media does something about how males are portrayed through movies, shows, magazines, the news, etc.
Discussion Questions:
1) Men are portrayed and seen as tough, muscular, independent, strong people, this is the masculinity of males. But are males this way because of the media? Or is it a combination of how they are brought up in their households, along with the media?
2) Is masculinity being constructed as a cultural norm?
Stephanie, Coontz. “The Evolution of the American Families.” 2010
The documentary “Beauty Mark,” is narrated through the perspective of Diane Israel, a former Boulder, Colorado competitive athlete turned psychotherapist. (http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=236&template=PDGCommTemplates/HTN/Item_Preview.html). She chose to make this documentary to demonstrate how beauty is dictated through society. Throughout it, she addresses the reasoning for why she is the way she is and what experiences have led her to becoming herself.
Diane interviews personal trainer, Brenda Maller, about her feelings regarding her self-esteem. She says, “I feel sad sometimes that I can’t truly love myself for who I am, and I’m never enough” (Beauty Mark: Body Image and the Race for Perfection). Many of the pre-teens interviewed in the “Cover Girl Culture” video demonstrated similar feelings. They show this through criticizing themselves. They too are not accepting of their bodies and if given the chance they would make a change in hopes of becoming more beautiful. Like the creator of the “Cover Girl Culture” documentary, Diane seeks to find the reasons women feel this way.
Diane discusses how the media specifically portrays what is considered a beautiful woman. Jane Brody, Personal Health Writer for The New York times states, “One of the problems that we have with body image in this country is that someone else is dictating what a body is supposed to look like and not everyone can fit into the same mold” (Beauty Mark: Body Image and the Race for Perfection). The media clouds the minds of women with idea that beauty is specific to one size and shape. Although in “Cover Girl Culture,” many of the employees of Teen Vogue try to dispute this, it is evident that a very thin, lanky, tall girl is the ideal model for their magazine. Not every woman fits this shape and thinking they must look a certain way is negatively impacting the self-esteem of young girls and women worldwide.
Both videos address the idea of what is to blame for these negative body images women feel towards themselves. Diane Israel recognizes that it is not the media that has caused her to be the way she is. There are psychological and social factors that have all shaped her as a person. Within the documentary, she discussed growing up in a household with a controlling father and a mother who had all of the physical beauty most women would desire, but on the inside was hollow and depressed. Diane discussed always feeling as though she was disappointing her parents because she was born a girl when really they had wanted a son. She even admitted to being raped on a family vacation. The culmination of all of these experiences together has shaped her into become a woman who wanted to control her weight and her looks through excessive exercise and eating. She admitted that these were aspects of her life she knew she could control. She focused on her weight and food to distract her from her problems. This contrasts “Cover Girl Culture”, which was more focused on the way in which the media impacts girls and women within society. Diane recognizes that the media is causing an impact, but her feelings stem from other factors.
I find it interesting that Diane discussed not only her journey as an athlete battling with body issues, but also how other athletes felt the same way and had turned to steroids or anorexia to achieve their goals. To the public, they looked like perfect, in shape, superstar athletes, which are constantly gaining positive attention, when on the inside they are continually being suffocated by the idea that they are not enough. By the end of the documentary, I somewhat expected Diane to say that she is doing great and everyday she feels her best, but instead she admits that sometimes when she stops, she feels vulnerable. I like the truthfulness to that statement and how she admits that there will be no finish line to this journey. Instead, she has to take life one day at a time.
Discussion Questions:
Do you agree that the media is to blame for causing women to feel negatively about themselves?
What are some other forces you feel are causing young girls and women to feel this way?
Do you think the typical mold for what the media considers beautiful will ever change?
People tend to think that marriage has drastically changed throughout time. Stephanie Coontz explains how this isn’t necessarily true. In her video lecture, she explains how new marriage view are actually “extremely traditional” and traditional marriages are actually fairly new. When I first heard her say this in the video it really didn’t make much sense to me. However, She proceeded to give examples that made it clearer. She stated how dual earner families aren’t something that is relatively new and has quite a history. Also, Males weren’t considered the “head” of the household until late 19th/early 20th century. Some things that are considered new were actually traditional were one parent families due to high death rates and when a spouse passed away this led to step families which is also considered to be not as traditional.
Then comes the topic of whether marriages are actually out of love or just for the sake of reproduction or wealth. Personally, I think it is hard to imagine a marriage without love. The only exception might be a marriage that is arranged and as Dr. James Walton says in the additional information posted below, almost 50% of all marriages today are still arranged. I can’t imagine a marriage that is just for the sake of wealth of power but you still see it happening today. You see these younger women marrying old men just for their money and to me that’s not true marriage.
In Coontz article, “The Evolution of American Families”, She explains how because of the industrializing in nineteenth century families became smaller and closer. She stated, “ Marriage came to be seen primarily about love, although the law continued to support men’s legal and economic authority in the home. The distinction between home and work, both physically and conceptually, sharpened.” (Coontz, 36). So here we see that marriage started to become less about wealth and/or power. I think today there is more marriage out of love than before but not necessarily a love that will last. Granted, there are many people who marry once and are happily married for the rest of their lives but divorce, single parent homes, and step families seems to be more prominent than ever due to failed marriage or even no marriage at all.
Additional Information:
A History of Marriage by Dr. James Walton
Discussion Question:
Coontz states that one-parent families and step -families date pretty far back in history due to high death rates. If it weren’t for high death rates, do you think these type of families would have still existed in the past and why?
In the article “A Consumer in the Family” by Susan Linn(1), the topic of how the media affects childhood behavior is explained. She says that the parents are not the ones at fault. In fact, it is the media that has set the children’s behavior against the wishes of their parents. The media gives the children something they need to convince their parents to buy a certain product. They have what is called the “nag factor.” The nag factor is inscribed into the child’s brain at a small age without them even knowing it. Through social media such as television, radio, magazines, and the internet, children learn that nagging can get them what they want. Although it may not be plain to see, the marketers do put the nag factor into advertisements. It can be shown here in this McDonald’s advertisement:
In this commercial, we can see that the “fry kids” take the fries and try to run away. This is teaching kids that they can have what they want even if they have to resort to other means when they are not handed what they want. The marketers undermine the parent’s authority through this process in an attempt to sell their product. This idea corresponds very well with the documentary Consuming Kids(3). Consuming Kids addresses the same situation. They discuss how kids are immersed in advertising every day. Kids are always surrounded by brand names and logos. The media industry has placed advertisements everyone so that they are impossible to avoid. The current media industry is going after kids like they never have before. The kids nowadays are bombarded with messages from so many different places that no parent is able to shield them. The documentary also explains that the current media is why kids are so used to violence. The companies that make the movies and give their movie a rating is not concerned with if the movie is healthy for a child of a certain age to watch. Instead, they are only concerned with if that child’s parent will let that kid see the movie based on the rating. The media industry has even started to get to children of a very young age. Products that claim to promote educational growth in an infant have become very popular. These products, however, do not have any proof that they give any advantage towards your child’s education. In fact, some say that these early educational DVDs limit your child’s vocabulary. At this very young age, children are taught that being in front of a screen is good. This limits the child’s imagination and freedom of thought to express them self. This also prevents children from going outside in the fresh air and playing sports with friends. Not only does children involvement in consumer culture stop them from going outside, but a test has shown that the more media a child uses, the more likely they are to score higher on a depression and anxiety test.
Through both of these sources, it is clear that kids are being bombarded with messages and advertisements every day. This message prompts the children to act in bad behavior and even go as far as putting the children’s health and emotional state at risk. Although we are aware of this media industry monopoly, it is hard to say what the solution should be. Some say the parents should take more control, while others say that stricter media regulations are what is best. Either way, it is clear that kids are being surrounded by social media telling them how to act, and that is not what is best for the future.
Discussion Questions:
1) Think of any current kids commercial. Can you see how it may affect the behavior of children?
2) Do you remember any commercial from when you were a kid? What message do you think it was trying to send you?
3) What do you think our lives would be like if the media industry had full control over everyone?
Sources:
(1) Linn, Susan. Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood. New York: New, 2004. Print.
Cover Girl Culture expressed so many of the concerns of women of all ages, but particularly adolescent girls today. From the time girls are very young, they are fed images of an ideal figure and are presented with the characteristics of an ideal woman. The documentary was thorough in its analyses of several fashion magazines. It also provided great insight into the world of fashion, and its impact on the current ideal image of a woman. The interviews with the magazine contributors and editors were perfect examples of how the industry presents severely distorted images. Though what these interviewees said may not reflect what they personally believe, they had to remain loyal to the company that employed them, which helps to further illustrate the fact that the women portrayed are simply used to sell products.
These businesses are based on training women to believe that they need a certain product to look beautiful. A model, by definition, is a representation of a proposed structure. Magazine advertisements use these human models to give women something to aspire to. They soon believe that the model is what they are supposed to look like and will become more likely to buy any product that can bring them a little bit closer to this “model” status.
Cover Girl Culture seems to go hand-in-hand with Stephanie Coontz’s article, “The Evolution of American Families,” as they discuss the exploitation of families by advertisers. In both the documentary and the article, an image of perfection is adopted by families and they believe that they are expected to emulate certain standards. In the article, Coontz references the “Ozzie and Harriet images,” (Coontz 45). “Ozzie and Harriet” was a radio show that developed into a television sitcom in the 50s and 60s that seemed to portray the ideal family lifestyle. This lifestyle included a loving husband and wife and their relationship with their two sons. It depicted the strong idea of the nuclear family being the strongest unit of relationships. Cover Girl Culture and “The Evolution of American Families” demonstrate the damaging effect that advertisements and the media can have on expectations.
In both Cover Girl Culture, and “The Evolution of American Families,” women are expected to be the weaker gender of the species that can contribute little more than their looks or their nurturing nature to society. Though it is widely more accepted now for women to go to work and school, many believe that true success comes from fame and beauty.
It is upsetting to me that people feel as though they need to make comparisons between themselves and others. Those individuals without enough self-esteem may begin to believe that they are less-than-perfect if they don’t have a perfectly slim figure, or don’t live in a two-parent household. This is obviously not true, though, and these people need to understand that diversity is the real norm. No two people are exactly alike, just as no two families are exactly alike. People believe that they need to achieve a certain standard and conform to everyone around them. I agree with Coontz when she wrote that we should not try to “recreate some (largely mythical) ‘traditional’ family of the past,” (Coontz 47). I would like to live in a world where people can be proud of themselves and their background because it is unique, rather than be embarrassed because it doesn’t match the majority.
This link is to a commercial for the TV show, “Modern Family.” It is a TV show that challenges the common stereotypes found within sitcom families. It is a slightly more accurate representation of today’s families, as they account for divorce, remarriage, adoption, gay marriage, and arguments.
Cover Girl Culture. Dir. Nicole Clark. Zen Pen Films. Internet.
Coontz, Stephanie. “The Evolution of American Families.” Web.
Thomas Coffey
Group 6
Blog 1
After reading the article “American Childhood as a Social Cultural Construct,” and viewing the documentary Consuming Kids, it is clear to me that the role of children in America is an ever changing idea that is greatly shaped and influenced by society. In today’s world, children have the access to and knowledge of technology such as cell phones and the internet that a child even in my generation did not have. Advances in technology is what I believe to be the social and cultural change for the newest generation of children Steven Mintz talks about in his article. In the article, Mintz claims “Childhood is not an unchanging, biologically determined stage of life, childhood is a social and cultural construct that varies by region, class, and historical era(Mintz 48).” I believe the internet age is a type of historical era that Mintz had in mind when he came up with this idea. Children’s increased knowledge and use of the internet and social media has changed what it means to be a child. Instead of running over to a friend’s house to see if they can come out to play children are now messaging each other on face book about a new YouTube video that just came out. Consuming kids is a great example of Mintz’s idea that childhood is shaped by the environment children are in. Never before have children been the target of so many marketing efforts. Part of this is due to the increased buying power and influence children have in the family. Everything from car purchases to what food to buy is heavily influenced by children today. Car commercials feature popular children characters in order to make children want the mini-van being advertised. The car wasn’t cool to children until they saw Dora the Explorer driving in the car. Marketers also have multiple ways in reaching children which makes appealing to them even more important. Internet games that feature companies such as Oreo or Pepsi can be found on company’s website for the sole purpose of brining children to the site and reinforcing their brand.
In his article, Mintz claims that children in today’s world are growing up faster. Sex is being experienced early by children amongst many other coming of age moments in a person’s life. I believe that technology and the massive amount of media children are exposed to that does highlight sex and other explicit behavior. No matter how hard parents try, in today’s world sheltering children from sex and other inappropriate behavior is nearly impossible. I think a great example of this is in a video I found on YouTube titled Ethical Dilemma: Should Kids be exposed to Media. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0ui7yG63OM- In the video, young girls are asked their favorite T.V. show and favorite actors. The video then shows the show and corresponding actress Miranda Cosgrove’s music video in which kissing and violence are both shown. These girls were 6 or 7 years old being exposed to kissing and violence and view it as acceptable because they see a TV. star doing it. The influx of technology and media children are being exposed to in today’s world is without a doubt the biggest social and cultural force guiding childhood today.
Kara Battaglia
Sociology of the Family
Blog 1/25/12
Group #2
I found the documentary, Consuming Kids, to be very interesting. I had never thought of how much advertisements and the media really do target kids, but it was very apparent after watching the documentary. Not only was I oblivious to the extent at which companies target children in order to sell products, I was also oblivious to how deliberate and manipulative their tactics to do so are. For example, the documentary mentioned how McDonald’s and Coca Cola products are commonly shown in kids movies or television, which causes the child to want those products even if they are unhealthy and parents disapprove. Commercials say things such as “this is the best product ever,” knowing that children, being very impressionable, will take this literally and nag their parents. Companies encourage children to nag, even though it creates discord with their parents, in order to sell things. I believe this is very manipulative and that marketers shouldn’t target children as much. It is a shame that because of advertisements and commercials, kids’ minds are mostly fixated on what their parents will buy them next in order to be “cool.” This documentary really made me aware of how marketing uses children for their own benefit, even if it is not for the child or family’s wellbeing.
The article by Linn, “A Consumer in the Family,” pertains to the documentary. Linn discusses how marketing experts put much thought into how to effectively target children, even if its not ethical. She mentions how marketers research the importance of nagging, and target children in situations where nagging might be most effective, such as having a single or divorced parent who is often influenced by guilt (Linn, 35). Nagging isn’t the only problem; another problem has to do with exposure. Children are constantly exposed to marketing whether it is online, on tv, in magazines, on the radio, etc., which makes it more difficult to set limits, Linn says. Linn mentions how some people suggest that the responsibility of the purchase still lies in the parent and that parents should still say “no”. She thinks, however, that parents have an innate desire for their children to be happy and that the marketing industry takes advantage of this, making it hard for parents to say “no” to their children’s nagging (Linn, 39).
“American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct,” by Steven Mintz also relates to the documentary. It mentions how marketing to kids can be very aggressive, but focuses more on the history of raising children and how the family and society as a whole should have more influence on a child than advertisements. It recognizes that sadly, this is not always the case, and that changes need to be made to restore more stability into the family in order to combat the influence of media and advertisements (Mintz, 58) Mintz thinks that American society is not as child-friendly as it seems and that this is partly responsible for how influenced children are by the media and advertisements. He says that in America, many young people grow up in poverty without health care and that there are few resources for child care (Mintz, 57). Also, many children today grow up in divorced families and are raised by single parents. He thinks America needs to provide better care for the young in order to make an progress and for children to not be so influenced by factors in popular culture (Mintz, 58). I agree with Mintz and do think that some parents need to be more involved with and talk to their children more so that they don’t get so influenced by everything in the media.
I posted a link that is relevant to all three things I previously mentioned. It goes into detail about how companies market to children and talks about how much time and money some companies put into specifically targeting kids. It then discusses the concerns of using children to sell products, and concludes that marketing to children should be carefully restricted, which is also what I think.
Discussion questions:
What steps do you think parents can take to limit the influence marketing has on their children?
Do you think it is ethical to target children so strongly?
Do you think that these marketing tactics affected you as a child?
When America’s defines “real man”, they typically give them label such a strong, tough, physical and powerful. These ides of what a real man is have been part of society for millions of years. This ideology has been supported and seen in the family development throughout history. In the documentary, ” tough guys” by Jackson Katz you see with a real man has turned into. He shows America’s new portrayal of a man to be someone who needs control, demand respect and is powerful. He shows that throughout the years violence has become more prevalent for men, in how to gain respect and control. Many boys look to the media for role models. Today the media makes the role models extremely muscular and intimidating. The boys feel that guns will give them the power and respect they desire. But boys also get the same impression from sports. Today’s sports glorify fighting and extremely fit bodies. Sports are evolved from normal looking bodies to extremely toned and extremely muscular forms. Fighting has become a center and draw when it comes to promoting and gaining fans in the world of sports. Many highlight reels and clips of gamers are on the hardest hits, fights or how intimidating and opposing team has.
This has allowed it become something that is glorify and looked to as that needs to be done in pretty much all sports. In some ways this shows that boys no longer need a gun to be tough, but shows that anything going against this image is not tough. The movie explains that many boys feel like they are put in a box and being outside of that box is considered not acceptable. Boys have dealt with having day social norms that allow them not to express emotion. This can lead to many negative impacts and effects of how kids grow up. When you look at the article “The Evolution of American Families” written by Stephanie Coontz. Which show how the role in family has changed over the years. She talks about the role of which men took in the family dynamic and how it influenced their lives. It talks about how marriage used to be considered the correct and only way to raise a family. How Man used to have all the power in the family years ago. Now women can run a family and be every self-efficient. Which can be hard to handle for many men who are used to having the power. Many men still feel that the family should be run the way and weren’t prepared for the change and movement that swept the country. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDPm67rZ2Co
Many men felt that the women’s role was to keep the house and mind the children while they made the money. This changed during WWII when women took a bigger part in the working force.
Both the article and the movie do mention the influence of the ideas such as being the sole breadwinner or the moneymaker. This allows for little room, since many today times are changing and you are seeing more men taking on the stay at home dad role. But the stereotype of putting people in can be seen as a bad thing since when times did change the impact on the family wasn’t great as seen in the article and was more damaging when you see it in the movie. But both do influence and in-courage the idea of keeping the connections with in the family. But show the totally different ways that American has labeled the roles in American society.
1. What can be done in the media to change the way, men and the country view “A Real Man”?
2. When does the image change and who is the one to change it
“The Evolution of American Families” an article written by Stephanie Coontz and “The Way We Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap”, a lecture given by the same woman, focus on how views of families differ around the world, and how the American family has evolved through time. Coontz argues in both the lecture and her article that marriage has been changing and fluctuating for a very long time. Things that we thought are new to our generation have in fact been part of society before and the things that we deem traditional are actually not the way that marriage always was.
The “traditional family” wasn’t always what we think it is today. When America was first settled, women weren’t seen as the nurturer and stay at home mother and the man wasn’t seen as the provider and protector. “Men often married women because they needed someone to help them on the farm or in their business.” (Coontz, 35). Women were originally a major part of providing for the family just like men were. It’s not until recently that the idea of the “homemaker” and the “provider” came around. Today, a lot of families are back to that original family where both men and women work.
The definition of what a family is, is always evolving. In Coontz’s lecture she explained that there have been many changes in the family over the last thirty year. More changes than has ever taken place before. The has been a rise in the marriage age, marriage is not the only place where people first have sex, single parents and gay couples with children are much more prevalent in our society than ever before and it is much more accepted now. Some marriages are childless and while that used to be unheard of it is greatly accepted now. Divorce is more readily available to anyone who is unhappy which often leads to remarriage and stepfamilies being brought together. Finally, women now have the right to say no to shotgun weddings as a result of pregnancy.
This video show the changing views of people in the USA. In even a few people have changed their definition of what a family is and who is included in the family.
One last thing that I found interesting that Coontz discussed was that people never used to marry for love. They married for social and economic stability and in order to have ties with other families. Parents used to arrange marriages for their children in ways that would best benefit them. However, “during the second half of the 18th century… the power of elders to dictate to the young and of the elites to control the daily life of the lower classes weakened.” (Coontz, 37) People were horrified that the young started wanting to date for love instead of for power and advantage.
I agree with Coontz that the views of marriage have been changing greatly over the past years and in my opinion it is a good thing. People in society today would never accept the way things used to be and I think it is for the better. While there are still some difficulties in marriages people are happier because they get to decide for themselves who they love and who they want to spend their lives with and when they become unhappy they can choose to leave. I think this is for the best.
Discussion Question:
• In Colonial society, people got married for social and economic reasons and hoped that love would develop. In our society, do you think marriage is more about love or social status? How would you feel about marrying someone for their wealth instead of for love?
Eileen Connolly
Sociology of the Family
Group 3
Blog Post #1
In the film, “Killing Us Softly 4,” Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D. (2011), uses an impressive collection of print and film advertisements that she has gathered over a long period of time to show how advertising is used to sexualize and sell products, and to further spread the modern societal expectations of women. Often, we find publication authors and editors espousing their concerns for the frighteningly body conscious American youth, and telling the public how they are making changes to ensure that more realistic and healthy images of men and women will be placed in the content of their advertisements. Jean Kilbourne shows with decades of advertisements, that if anything, advertisements have become more provocative and sexualized. The images she provides also show that though these images are generally geared toward women, these images have a profound effect on the psyche of modern men as well. Both women and men are judging their bodies more harshly as a result of these ever-pervasive, unrealistic images.
In the article, “The Evolution of American Families,” by Stephanie Coontz (2010), Ms. Coontz discusses how family is defined differently in different areas/cultures, and how it has evolved over time. It was stunning to see that the very domestic image of the family, as most we are taught to assume was the standard, only developed in the past 200 years or so. Previously, women did half of the labor around the homestead and were seen as important in keeping the family afloat. After World War II and in the 1950’s, this changed when women were seen more and more as one who “had dinner on the table every night and raised healthy children who never talked back or got into any trouble that couldn’t be solved by a fatherly lecture” (Coontz, p. 44). Even today, you will often hear the threat of “wait until your father gets home!” in television, movies, and books. This standard continues to place women in the position of subservience, as though they cannot handle familial conflict without the help of their strong, male spouse.
In both the film and the article, the socialization of women is discussed. The family is a very important medium in the socialization of young boys and girls, but in the modern age, so is the media. All of the advertisements that were discussed by Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D. were shockingly heterosexist and Caucasian-focused. The images that are seen by children from a very young age have an incredible impact on the formation of their self-image and on what they view as important in life. It seems to me that no matter how far women have come in earning rights and carving out a place in the workforce, females are still taught to base their worth on their looks. Even though Stephanie Coontz discusses the progression of women into the workforce and their new roles in a developing modern family, it is amazing how very little the media perception of women has changed with the evolution of the family. There are images for every age group showing females that their worth is based on their appearance and sexuality. Disney movies, as entertaining and innocent as they seem, are the perfect way for girls to learn what society says is important.
As females age and transition into their teenage and adult years, there are print and television ads that further reinforce beauty as the standard of worth. Females, and males alike, are bombarded by images everyday that show an unattainable standard of beauty. Many of the models and celebrities featured in these images are beautiful by genetics, but many get extra help from airbrushing. The industry of photoshopping and airbrushing images to be more “perfect” has gotten so out of hand, that in Europe laws on the subject are being considered in an attempt to correct the problem. These laws would require all photoshopped pictures to be labeled. This would be extremely beneficial because it would let women and men know that the image that they may be tempted to compare themselves to is actually not a real image at all, but a computer generated composite that creates an impossible standard.
Further, it is important to realize what the effect that a very Caucasian-centered ideal of beauty has on men and women of other races and cultures. It is spreading the message that in order to be beautiful and worthy in modern times, you must be thin, sexy yet still innocent, and have the features of a light-skinned White person. Often, this isn’t something that we think about, but it can have a very damaging effect on how young men and women of other races and cultures feel about themselves, and what is considered normal.
Below is a video made by a young African American girl portraying how young African American girls see themselves and the stereotypes of their own race:
All of this in mind, it is important to realize the effect that family and media can have together on the socialization of children into gender roles. Family, no matter the gender of the parents or the blending of blood and non-blood relatives, has as profound an impact on the socialization of a child as media and peer groups do. Despite the strides that women have made with rights and in the workplace, women are often seen for their appearance first and foremost. It is important for families to realize what their children are seeing and to make sure that male and female children realize that there is more to life than being good looking or famous. It is up to the family to be a source of support, no matter how we define “family,” and to teach that women and men can aspire to be more than sex objects or a cog in the wheel of consumerism. Further, it is important for the family to teach young men and women that the media images that they are seeing are often photoshopped and airbrushed, and are not an accurate standard to compare themselves against. As the family evolves, it is important for the family to continue to be a source of empowerment and support for young people and encouraging them to be their best selves, not to conform to a rigid and impossible standard of worth. Finally, for the families themselves, it is important to be aware of the 3rd party effect. Because we are aware of advertisers trying to influence us, we then believe that those advertisers no longer have power over us. Being a strong person and part of a strong and supportive family requires us to remember that the media will effect us no matter what, and to constantly work to maintain a healthy self image and to be a healthy part of the lives of those around us.
Coontz, Stephanie. “The Evolution of American Families.” Families As They Really Are. Ed. Barbara J. Risman. W.W.Norton & Co., 2010. 30-47. Print.
Kilbourne, Jean. “Killing Us Softly 4.” Lecture. 27 Jan. 2012. Youtube.com. 14 Aug. 2011. Web. 27 Jan. 2012. .
Marie Hollister
Sociology of The Family
Group 6
Week 1
Both Steven Minz’s article “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct” and the documentary Consuming Kids portray childhood in this country as something socially constructed, for better or worse. The article charts the history of the experience of kids throughout history and how it has changed. It used to be that being a kid was seen as something vulnerable, useless, and negative, such as in colonial America. However, as we have progressed into the twentieth century, childhood began to be viewed as an important time of development and it is even viewed nostalgically (Mintz 49-50). From the documentary, it is shown that today there are two main contradictory views of kids. One is that childhood is to be used as a marketing tool, appealing to their sensibilities and creating a whole world separate from that of adults. Parents may not even be completely aware of this “other world” – as much of it takes place on the internet (as in chat rooms and gaming sites) as well as movies, TV shows, video games, and in school. On the other hand, kids (especially girls) are being forced to grow up even quicker, though not necessarily into responsible adults. Instead, girls are being marketed highly sexualized images such as dolls and clothing.
They are also encouraged to be materialistic and focus on their outer image rather than inner growth (Consuming Kids). This concept of the “tween” is a main marketing niche for advertisers. The article also points out that the idea of adolescence did not emerge into the end of the nineteenth century with the Child Study movement. However, this latter concept was not created in order to exploit children, but rather to aid them in the “emotional and psychological turmoil” that was occurring in their body (Mintz 52). All of this has contributed to a confused idea of what childhood is and what it is meant to be.
Both the article and documentary bring up an important (and negative) aspect of American society, that being the exploitation of childhood. Mintz explains how child labor was not outlawed until the 1930’s and mandatory high school education until the 50’s (52). Consuming Kids discusses the prevalence of deceptive ads that gets by the critical thinking abilities of children. Basically, they do not know that they are being manipulated by advertisers and thus are not able to distinguish between what they really want and what they are told to want.
Social and economic class is discussed in both regarding the high impact that this classification has on children’s welfare. Though race and gender are no doubt important, it is actually not the main predictor of their developmental success. This includes parental interaction; many “working-class and poor mothers and fathers are much more likely to believe that child development occurs naturally and spontaneously,” as opposed to middle-class parents who take more an active role in the stimulation of this growth, such as organizing their activities and being involved in sports and homework, the latter being the more healthy and holistic approach (Mintz 54). The documentary shows a similar portrayal of economics, in that class difference can affect children negatively. One example is the branding of the majority of children’s products, such as clothing, food, and toys. Stores that lower classes can afford, such as Wal-Mart, have much more of this, almost to the point where everything is branded with TV and movie characters. In order to find alternative options without branding, one usually has to shop at “upper class stores” that have plain products (Consuming Kids).
Finally, both the article and documentary emphasize the fact that we need to decide as a society how we want to value our children. Do we want them to be objects of corporate greed and marketing, and grow to be individuals that think that their worth is based upon appearance and having things? We should instead foster a community in which they are accepted for who they are and where they can be free to develop at a rate which is best for them. Parents should not feel like their role is being undermined by media, and kids in poverty should be given the same nurturing and opportunities as their middle and upper class counterparts.
This is a clip from YouTube that shows that commercialization is not just prevalent in the United States. It shows the opening to the annual “Late Late Toy Show” that is a nationally televised event in Ireland every Christmas. It introduces all of the “coolest” new toys that are out each year, and the interesting part is that each toy is introduced by a kid. Getting to be on the show is the dream of many young Irish children, as I learned when I studied abroad there. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xGl4Qc0VZE
Mintz, Steven. “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct.” Families as They Really
Are. Ed. B. Risman. WW Norton, 2010. 48-58. Print.
Barbaro, Adriana and Jeremy Earp. “Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood.”
Media Education Foundation. 2008. Web. 27 January 2012.
Both, the article “American Childhood as a Social Construct” and the documentary “Consuming Kids” involve discussion of how the lives of children are ever changing. “American Childhood as a Social Construct” compares and contrasts children from colonial times to children in the 1900s to children of today. Childhood used to be seen as a deficiency and children were made to grow up as fast as they could to become adults and work and provide for their families. During the colonial times there were far fewer categories of life stages. Infant, youth, and adult were used to specify what stage of life someone was in. It was the parents responsibility to grow the child into an adult as quickly as possible. As time went on these stages developed and parents started to care for and nurture their children. Childhood was then seen as a carefree time to enjoy and have fun. Now there may be this idea that childhood is supposed to be carefree and enjoyable but children of today are in very high-stress society. Children of today have “highly pressured, hyperorganized, fast-track childhoods” (Mintz, p.55) that are not carefree and enjoyable. A portion of this has to do with the fact that the media is consuming children.
The documentary “Consuming Kids” opened my eyes to see exactly how much children are bombarded with the forces of the media. Children of today see all this marketing and think that they have to be something that they are not. They feel as if they need these products to live a normal life and be accepted by everyone around them. I believe the overall society has matured over time and children of today know more, are aware of more, and experience more than children of earlier times. Children used to be sheltered, they were not exposed to the “real world” until youth or adulthood. Children of today, as we see in the documentary “Consuming Kids”, are constantly being influenced by these outside factors, constantly exposing them to the real world. This is documentary focusing on children from about the 1960’s until today, where as the article focuses on a longer time frame.
The two are similar in the way that they describe how lives of children are changing and have changed in the past. We also see similarities in the way that society influences childhood. The overall population think they know what is right for their children, and how they should handle the situation and everyone follows that direction, but it is not always necessarily the right decision.
It disgusts me how much children are being influenced and they don’t even know it. Children are being constantly influenced and this has a negative affect on their life. More and more children are being diagnosed with ADHD, obesity and mental health problems. I believe this has to do with the way that children live their lives today. It amazes me how the media affects children compared to 50 years ago. The world has come so far, but not necessarily in a good way, seeing the affects of the changes in the long run.
This is a website I found discussing childrens health relating to the media. There are different links to click on to read about different information, I thought it was intersting to read about.
Mintz, Steven. “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct.” Families as They Really Are. (2010): 48-58. Print
Jhally, Sut, Jean Kilbourne, and Jackson Katz. “Consuming Kids.” Media Education Foundation | Educational Videos for Teaching Media Literacy and Media Studies. Web. 29 Jan. 2012. .
“Children Now—Media’s Impact.” Children Now. Web. 29 Jan. 2012. .
Robert Feldman
Group 5
Week 1
The video lecture presented by Stephanie Coontz and the article “The Evolution of American Families” was very insightful and eye-opening. Stephanie began by pointing out that the ideal of a male bread winner didn’t come around until the nineteenth century and it didn’t actually happen until about the 1920’s and was short lived. Most of history had duel earning families. She then mentioned something very surprising fact, which was that step families were the most traditional form around due to divorces. Stephanie also talked about the many ways in which different cultures handle divorces. Something I found shocking was that there was more adultery in the past than there is today. Also in the lecture she pointed out that marriage wasn’t invented because of love, it was done to make connections and strengthen ties. Along those lines, in the past marriages were arranged and the reason for marrying someone was to become economically stable. In the article Stephanie says that “the European nobility generally used the term “family” not to refer to married parents and their children but rather to the larger kinship group from which they derived their claims to privilege and property.” (Coontz30) This statement just reinforces what she was saying from her presentation. The main points that both the presentation and the article is trying to get across is that “family” and the norms of family are forever changing and ideals, theories, and roles are forever changing as well. An example of this would be from the article she said “For the first time in sixty years, the age of marriage and parenthood fell, the proportion of marriages ending in divorce dropped, and the birthrate soared. The percentage of women remaining single reached a hundred year low. The proportion of children who were raised by a breadwinner father and a homemaker mother and who stayed in school until graduation from high school reached an all-time high.”(Coontz44) This statement just reassures my previous theory of family ideals and roles are forever changing.
I felt that both the presentation and article by Stephanie Coontz was extremely informational and has given me a lot to think about when looking at family roles. It is very amazing to me that the roles and ideals of a family can change all the time. But on the other hand I see a lot of things that remain the same. For example how in the past people would marry to have economic stability, there is still a lot of people doing that today and not for “love”. What I learned most is that each culture and generation have very complicated family roles and structure.
This link gives a lot of background and information of family ideology throughout the centuries. It also shows many examples of the changing types of family’s throughout time. http://clc2.uniservity.com/GroupHomepage.asp?GroupId=10000549
Another link listed below relates a lot to this topic. This article talks a lot about how the traditional family is a little outdated. Meaning that the father doesn’t always have to be the bread winner and the mother doesn’t have to stay home and take care of the house and kids.
Work Cited: Coontz, Stephanie. Families as They Really Are. WW Norton, 2010. 30-47. Print.
Pat Del Santo
Blog 1 (Monday Night)
Group 1
The unrealistic goal of perfection as forced onto young girls and women of our generation forms the basis of the documentaries “Cover Girl Culture” and “The Purity Myth”. However, “The purity Myth” is more focused on the sexual roles of women, whereas “Cover Girl Culture” highlights the effect of the fashion marketing industry on young girls. “The Purity Myth” begins by describing the double standard that women are held to of abstaining from sex until marriage. The documentary refers to this idea as purity. For example, sex is viewed as a good or humorous act for men, whereas sex for women makes them dirty or slutty. The documentary cuts to a clip of the movie “The Forty-Year Old Virgin” and contrasts the way men are viewed in relation to sex with a clip from another popular movie depicting a woman as a slut for her acts (Valenti). For men, this popular culture reference appears to be a joke, but for the woman it appears much more shameful. This was an effective way at getting the viewer to see the blatant double standard that is readily apparent in American society today. However, it is also possible that this difference in treatment may be attributed to differences in the biology of men and women. Since there are real biological differences in thinking processes as caused by hormones, brain development and millions of years of evolution, certain differences between men and women are here to stay. Although, that is not to say that poor treatment of women by subjecting them to the pressure of perfection should be one of them. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoCPDvQBG5Y) This clip provides some insight into the differences between men and women at the brains structural level. It helps to explain why men and women tend to react differently to similar situations.
Another important issue addressed in the documentary are the current attempts at preventing young people from being sexually active. Valenti exposes the role of government, celebrities and various religious groups as a main source for this problem. For example, we are told that over fifty million dollars a year in tax payer money is spent on abstinence only education. Yet, countless studies have shown this method to be ineffective. Even still it remains the major approach to the issue as is shown by this video clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5Xy-RQgLFI). This concept left me wondering why newer and more effective methods are not being developed. Also interesting was a clip that shows Jessica Simpson portrayed as a role model by today’s media, which is based only on her conventional beauty as well as her abstinence from sex until marriage. This is despite her sexy music videos and public persona as an “air-head” (Valenti). I thought Valenti’s use of well researched studies combined with specific celebrity references was a good way of portraying the problem.
While “The Purity Myth” touches on the medias portrayal of conventional beauty and its effect on young girls,”Cover Girl Culture” provides a much more in depth analysis of it. For instance, it shows how marketing organizations focus on the shortcomings of the average girl. Specific examples of this occur when advertisements were shown asking girls if they wanted a better butt, or bigger boobs (Clark). Other examples include clips of young girls explaining that if they could change one thing about themselves, it would be their face (Clark). These girls should not be faced with such stressful pressures over their image at such a young age. As a result I believe it is important to find a way to limit these messages to young girls. This can be partially accomplished by parenting methods that limit exposure to images of the superficial life that celebrities are portrayed living. While this documentary did a good job exposing the way that marketing perfection hurts young girls, I think it focused too much of its attention on overly skinny models. It is difficult to see how a girl who is unhealthily skinny would be a role model to anyone. It seems that reality television shows such as “Keeping up With the Kardashian’s” are larger cause for the unrealistic desire of perfect looks and a glamorized lifestyle.
In the video lecture “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap” and corresponding written article “The Evolution of American Families” by Stephanie Coontz, I learned a lot of eye opening facts about marriages and their changes over the past century in the United States. Coontz is well knowledged in this field and is a good speaker; she gets her message across pretty easily. Many of the changes discussed were positive things that are expected as we grow as a society, but there was also a few things touched upon that weren’t so great.
I was very surprised to hear that adultery was much more common in the past and sometimes it wasn’t even frowned upon by society. Coontz said that it was “perfectly acceptable” and the wife would be looked at as wrong if they were to complain to their husband about cheating. Back then people married for a many different number of reasons, and more often than not the reason was not because of love. People would get married because the man had gotten the woman pregnant, financial reasons, for social status, and other material reasons. Nowadays people have much more freedom to choose who they want to marry and actually marry somebody solely on the principle of love, which is how marriage is meant to be.
To me the main point brought out in the video and lecture were that “the good old days” really weren’t the good old days, and some people were just as corrupt as people view the world today. The progressive movement of marriage is a testament to the progress of human rights as a whole in the United States. It is crazy to think that as short as 40-50 years ago in this country a man was allowed to beat his wife, cheat on his wife, and leave here whenever he pleased without any problems. Nowadays we see people marrying solely on love with each of them having equal rights within that marriage.
Coontz comments that this is a “historical paradox”. She argues that the things that have made marriage more wonderful has at the same time made marriage a weak institution and vice-versa. When their was a strict insitution of firm rules saying things like your stuck with the first person you marry etc., it can make the 2 people in the marriage really loathe each other and not put in any effort into having a healthy relationship. This can be related to many things in the world, for example, how people argue that with no drinking age young people will drink in moderation instead of going out with a binge drinking mentality because technically it is against the law for the them to do it, so they feel the need to go crazy.
To conclude I would say that Coontz does a good job in her lecture and article conveying the message that marriage has changed for the better in the last century. It has changed from being no more than 2 people who live together who are technically “married” to something based off of love where 2 people work together to maintain a good relationship.
Work Cited: Coontz, Stephanie. Families as They Really Are. WW Norton, 2010. 30-47. Print.
Jessica Zikaras
Professor Thompson
Sociology 140
30 January 2012
Week 1 Blog Response – Group 2
The documentary “Consuming Kids” showed many different opinions on the influence of media in the lives of children. It explained how children have become a market and are targeted by businesses. Most businesses shown in the film do not see this as exploitation, but rather as respectable marketing skills. They say the responsibility is up to the parents to protect their children. My question is – are parents who try to avoid marketing towards children actually trying to avoid the inevitable?
In the documentary, the amount of advertisements that were shown in movies, on children’s clothing, and even in school field trips to places like Petco and Sport’s Authority was absolutely crazy to me. It is said that children are exposed to over 3,000 commercial messages per day. I do agree that a parent can try and “protect” their child by only allowing a certain number of hours a day to be spent watching television, for example. The problem is that the marketers are smart enough to get to these parents’ children whether or not the parent has such rules. The companies are literally studying children, in what I feel is a sickening and deceitful way. They know what kids want and how to get to them. The documentary portrayed this idea in a very provoking way, even comparing these marketers to pedophiles.
“A Consumer in the Family” is an article that reiterated how influential children are in the economy today. Author Linn described children as “naggers” and said this is a skill children are learning in order to get whatever they want. Whether parents give in because they are sick of hearing their child whine or some other reason does not matter. I feel that children these days are hardly ever told no. In a study of 750 kids ages 12 to 17, it was shown that a child may ask their parents for something nine times before giving in. Again, parents do have an influence on how much their child “nags”, but it is truly unfortunate how children as consumers have become the culture.
In the article “American Childhood as a Social Cultural Construct”, Steven Mintz describes the changes children, and their roles, have gone through over the years. It was interesting to me the things he noted were more likely for children to experience today. Examples of these difference circumstances include experiencing parent’s divorce, a working mother, more time unsupervised, etc. With all of these new variables to consider, this article reminded me that we cannot exactly blame media and the marketers on the new “nagging” generation. As American adults, it is common to feel “worried that children are growing ever more disobedient and disrespectful” as generations continue. Although there is no proof that this is due to the media and such marketing skills as shown in “Consuming Kids”, I do think this has a huge impact on the lives, attitudes, and beliefs of children today.
The question then becomes, how will this influence their life in the future? The other video that I chose to watch was called “The Age of the Millenials”. This 60 Minutes broadcast described a new generation of people in the workforce. These are the people born in the 80’s/early 90’s that were brought up never hearing the word no, as the other articles have also mentioned. The video describes a group of people that stroll in to work around noon, carrying their iPods, and wearing their flip flops and expect this to just be accepted. They have a lack of work ethic and still count on their mothers to call in to work for them when they are sick. The fact that this new generation is arising now, as we see an increase in children being targeted by marketers, is no coincidence, I believe. Children are growing up being given what they want, and they are turning in to adults that do not know how to work for it. http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4126233n%3fsource=search_video
Discussion Questions:
Do businesses have a responsibility to be ethical and not focus on exploiting children? Or are they solely businesses?
Is the only solution to this branding problem government regulation? Or can parents stop the madness on their own?
Works Cited
CBS News. 60 Minutes: “The Age of the Millenials”. 25 May 2008. http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4126233n%3fsource=search_video
Linn. “A Consumer in the Family”
Mintz, Steven. “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct.” Families as They Really Are. (2010): 48-58.
Jhally, Sut, Jean Kilbourne, and Jackson Katz. “Consuming Kids.” Media Education Foundation | Educational Videos for Teaching Media Literacy and Media Studies. 29 Jan. 2012.
For decades, body image has been a vital topic of interest in the realms of sociology and psychology. Body image is described as “a subjective picture of one’s own physical appearance established both by self-observation and by noting the reactions of others” (Ferguson11-28). Self -observation and peer influence are of the utmost importance when it comes to body image, because it is exactly these factors that cause women (as well as males) to perceive themselves in such a negative manner. Having this body dissatisfaction can lead to many psychological problems such as eating disorders and depression that are pervasive diseases. Our western culture holds such high standards for an ideal body image for women, and these unattainable standards lead to body dissatisfaction through two main routes. Actively through communication of ideal body types, statements made by peers, comparing personal value based solely on body image, and passively, which include indirect unconscious provocation of body comparisons (Ferguson 15). The documentary “Cover Girl Culture” we watched in class describes the above influences perfectly. In the documentary we see how impressionable young girls view their own body image, and how different media mold their views. The media includes television, music, movies and magazines and all these venues are selling messages to young girls about how they should look, what they should wear, and what they should attain to be. If girls follow these standards then they are considered to be “perfect “and are doing what’s told is “normal”. What is encouraging to see however, is that the girls in the documentary understand that what is exposed to them isn’t a true ideal for body image, and it is not what they should strive to be. This YouTube commercial gives a good idea of what young girls are exposed to in the media and what it says about body image. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnJQJFlyDGY&feature=related. In the documentary “Beauty Mark” a present day Psychotherapist Diane Israel describes her struggle with exercise bulimia and her fear of becoming fat since she was a child. Growing up in a controlled and torn family, Israel focused her time on running and training for races, triathlons, and was very successful before having to stop because her body was physically deteriorating because she stopped eating. Israel and other athletes that suffered from the same problem realized that there were so many opportunities ahead for them before they fell on the wrong path. In the documentary, Israel went around the country to find out how our body image ideals are shaped. She interviewed countless people that have the same thought processes and conclusions regarding the topic. It is simply the fact that somebody is dictating what a body image should be, and we cannot all fit into that mold. As described in the video, it’s the parent’s job to help create the child’s image, until their peer groups (around middle school age) become prevalent. When talking to a manikin producer, he admitted that the body types they produce for men and women probably represents less than 1% of the population; that is chiseled bodies, toned and sculpted arms etc. Why do we create such an ideal? Because it sells. Medical, cosmetic, and entertainment industries benefit largely because of the biased body image ideal. Consumers want to reach that ideal of perfection, and think by buying into these products and ideas they will remain as they are forever when in actuality they are engaging negative actions to reach a goal that is insane and unattainable. Another interesting fact in “Beauty Mark” was when Israel interviewed a spokesperson for the Dove Real Beauty Campaign. When asking women to pick one word to describe themselves, about 2% chose “beautiful”. There is so much pressure to look perfect, skinny, and model-esque that it diminishes the idea of what it means to be human and to be comfortable within your own body. Both documentaries make valid points and bring to light body image ideals, eating disorders, and other topics that today’s youth are being exposed to. It is important to make clear to young boys and girls that the ideals that they are surround by are not positive messages. As Israel made clear, it is one’s upbringing that makes or breaks their self-confidence.
Discussion Questions:
1) If there are such negative connotations associated with the way body image is expressed in the media, why aren’t steps being taken to change them?
2) Do you think that upbringing is correlated with high or low self confidence?
Ferguson, Christopher J. “Who Is the Fairest One of All? How Evolution Guides Peer and Media Influences on Female Body Dissatisfaction.” Review of General Psychology. 15.1 (2011): 11-28. Print.
Laura Pratico
Group 4
Blog 1
The documentary Tough Guise, by Jackson Katz, provides a powerful look at the ideas of masculinity of men and how men are perceived as violent throughout the media. In the beginning of this documentary, Katz asks men what they think it means to be a “real man.” Their responses were along the lines of being strong, muscular, tough, independent, powerful, physical, athletic, and respected. If you didn’t measure up to this notion of being a “real man” you will get called names such as a wimp, weak, girly, sissy, a fag, etc. One important thing that Katz said that describes “real men” is that “being a so-called real man, means you have to take on this tough guise. In other words, you have to show the world only certain parts of yourself that the dominant culture has defined as manly” (Katz Tough Guise). I think this is a very important idea Katz’s has because this is where the whole tough guise notion of masculinity started because men have to put up a front in order to look tough around each other. I agree with Katz when he says that the main source boys learn this is through the media because violent masculinity is a cultural norm and it is an accepted part of masculinity. There is a connection between being a man and being violent and the media portrays this through movies, video games, music videos, sports and others.
Violence is not talked about as a gender issue, but men are responsible for 90% of violent crimes. The media continues to make movies that involve violence against women. Throughout the world, violence has been gender masculine and it is unusual when women are violent towards men and when men do it, it is so normal its masculine character is invisible which is one of the things we have to try to make it visible. Katz says, “making masculinity visible is the first step to understanding how it operates in the culture and how definitions of manhood have been linked to dominance and control” (Katz Tough Guise). This is a vital point in trying to understand the American notion of masculinity and how it is perceived.
Katz did a good job talking about how over the last 50 years the man’s body is becoming bigger, stronger, more muscular and more violent, while the opposite is happening to women’s bodies, which are becoming slimmer and less threatening. The outcome of this is that big beefy men have taken up more symbolic space. Katz says, “the changes of masculinity are a response of a perceived threat to the traditional and dominant idea of masculinity” (Katz Tough Guise). A lot of men react poorly to these changes of men experimenting with new attitudes towards women and relationships, work, parenting etc. This is an important topic because it deals with the different gender roles of a family and some men don’t want women to become equals with them because the men think they will lose control. I think that if men and women can become equals, there will be less violence in the world.
An important topic the documentary addressed is the social and cultural pressures to be masculine. The rise in anti gay violence is one of the clearest indications that a lot of young men are insecure and anxious about their sexual identities. Why do men have to act violently towards other men to prove that they are “real men”? The social and cultural pressures are the reason why men perform this notion of masculinity and why masculinity is not natural and why they are not just born masculine. The culture tells boys that you become real men through power and control and that respect is linked to physical strength and the threat of violence. Katz asks a really important question; what does this do to our society of training boys to act this way? One way to answer this question is to look at all of the school shootings done by young boys. One reason boys act this way is because violence is portrayed as a normal and natural part of being male through the media. Guns and manhood are made clear to young boys early on, which is why boys are more likely to lash out violently. The technology of video games doesn’t help because there are many violent video games that young boys play for hours at a time, which may be one of the effects of why young boys act out violently. Sports are also a big part of a man/boy’s life and wrestling is one of the most violent male sports, which shows boys that real manhood is linked to the size and strength you have. I think Katz did an excellent job presenting an honest portrayal of the vulnerability side of masculinity by showing Mark McGuire crying during one of his press conferences. This shows that a big shot like Mark McGuire, who is looked up to as someone who is very masculine and tough, has real emotions and he isn’t afraid to express them to the world. I think this documentary takes a good look at what men think masculinity is and how the media perceives it. It shows how the media has shaped boys lives by showing male violence and linking it to control and domination over women and other men
The article, “The Evolution of American Families”, by Stephanie Coontz, compares to the documentary, Tough Guise, in several ways. One point about the evolution of American families that Coontz made in the article was that “the divorce rate more than tripled in the 1920s” (Coontz 42). This shows that families started to have problems, which could be linked to violence, and the families were not happy. Coontz goes on to say that “during the Depression, divorce rates fell, but so did marriage rates. Desertion and domestic violence rose sharply” (Coontz 42). This represents the comparison between the Evolution of the American family and the Tough Guise documentary because it shows that domestic violence started early on and it continues to be a problem in the present day. Coontz also talked about how “politicians rewrote the tax code to favor male breadwinner families over dual-earner families, explicitly to discourage wives from working” (Coontz 43). This demonstrates how males were supposed to be the dominant gender and supposed to be in charge of important matters of the family, while women were just supposed to do domestic chores.
This article talks about women becoming the sole breadwinner of the family. One reason they are becoming the sole breadwinners are because the men are getting laid off, while the women continue to work in more stable industries like healthcare and education.
Discussion Questions:
1. Why is violent masculinity a cultural norm and why is violence accepted as a part of masculinity?
2. Do you think the media is the main reason why men think they have to put up a front in order to look tough around each other?
Lindsey Guidarelli
Dr. Thompson
Sociology of the Family
Group 1 Week 1 Blog Response
The documentary “Beauty Mark” by Diane Israel follows her struggle through Anorexia and Exercise Bulimia from a young age (2008). When she was only 12 years old she felt that the only way she could control her downward spiraling family dynamic. She describes her father as controlling, and her mother as an unstable woman who’s obsession with appearance kept her in and out of hospitals Diane’s entire life. Diane felt that by throwing herself into marathons and triathlons she could escape this family drama and finally have control over something in her life. This eventually led to her running her body down, and becoming incredibly weak and burnt out. As the documentary goes on, she interviews other females who have struggled with their body images and went to extreme lengths to try and become what they thought was “beautiful”, and could then become confident in themselves. Many females today struggle with the way they look, and strive so hard to become what society tells them is beautiful.
In Diane Israel’s situation, many girls will turn to perfecting their appearance in order to hide deeper issues in their lives. Israel internally struggled with the idea that her father always wanted her to be a boy, and she only received positive attention from him when she excelled as an athlete. Because she wanted her father’s approval so desperately, she would stop at nothing until she was the best, even though this eventually led to her ruining her body. In addition, Israel was also forced to have the horrible memory of being raped when she was a young girl, along with the fact that her mother was constantly struggling with depression. From a young age she remembered her grandma speaking of her mother’s struggles and commenting, “at least she’s beautiful.” Hearing this imprinted the idea in Israel, that no matter how much a woman hurts or struggles, beauty will solve these problems. This is the backward message that is often present in society. Henderson-King and Brooks conducted a study of the image of beauty in society and found that what the majority of the population considers “beautiful” directly correlates with success (2009). They also found that because of this same idea, young women see their bodies as “projects” that constantly need to be bettered rather than “objects”. This then leads to eating disorders, body dysmorphic disorder, and cosmetic surgeries.
Young girls are very impressionable and when these images of stick-thin models, actresses, and celebrities are constantly being thrown in their faces by the media. This then causes these girls to believe that these impossible bodies are what they should look like. In addition, young girls with body image problems will turn to harming their bodies in order to attain this impossible image. This idea is reinforced in the movie “Cover Girl Culture” by Women Make Movies. Young girls are interviewed about what they like about their bodies, and what they do not like. It is heart-wrenching to see young adolescent girls admitting that they do not think they are pretty because of the images they see in the media everyday. The image that our society has of “beautiful” is very distorted, and because this image does not change to what reality is, it gets passed down from generation to generation and never changes.
Clark, Nicole (Director). 2009. Cover Girl Culture [Motion Picture]. United States: Zen Pen Pictures.
Henderson-King, D., & Brooks, K. 2009. Materialism, Sociocultural Appearance Messages, and Paternal Attitudes Predict College Women’s Attitudes about Cosmetic Surgery. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 33, 1.
Israel, Diane (Filmmaker). 2008. Beauty Mark [Motion Picture]. United States: Salmon Pictures.
In the article, “The Evolution of the American Families”, you learn the different definitions of family in certain cultures. All the different types of families show you there is no universal definition of family that fits reality (Riseman 33). You also see how the family has evolved through centuries. In the video, ‘The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap”, Stephanie Coontz talks more about the misconceptions of families, and how marriage has changed. One misunderstanding we have is that one-parent households are new. However, one-parent households were common due to the high death rates. Now there are one-parent households not because of high death rates but because of divorce (Coontz, online video). I also believe that since it is not socially unacceptable to raise a child out of wedlock, women do not feel pressure to get married.
Coontz discussed how marriage was not for love, but more for making connections and being practical. The article also mentions how marriage was much less sentimentalized in the 19th century (Riseman 35). Not only has marriage changed but also family has changed in a major way due to the way children are raised. The parents no longer choose whom their children will marry. Instead of saving up for a dowry, parents save money for their children’s education (Coontz, online video). Parents are having fewer children and they are making them work at a young age. Just from my parent’s generation I believe raising your kids has changed tremendously. My grandparents did not encourage my parents to go to college, and if they wanted to go, they had to pay their own way. I believe most parents want a better life for their children, and that is why they encourage education, and provide financial support if possible.
In the article, it was discussed how television broadcasted pictures of suburban families portrayed to be “perfect”. The wife was shown at home, cooking, cleaning, and raising the kids while the husband was the breadwinner (Riseman 45). The video I found, titled ‘The Evolution of the Family Structure and Values through Television”, talks about how the family has transformed on television. In the 1950’s, you saw the typical white, middle class family in suburban communities. Women were seen as the passive housewife, and the men made the money. Television has shifted to show diversity. There are shows such as Gilmore Girls, which shows a young single mother raising her daughter without a husband. Also, Modern Family reveals a different type of family, in which there is homosexual parents.
I think the evolution of television is beneficial to children growing up. Kids may believe there family is different from what society deems normal, however, with these television shows, kids may realize there is no standard family structure. In real life, we benefit from the changes in families and marriage. For example, it is socially acceptable for women to get pregnant out of wedlock. Also, gay and lesbian couples can get married.
Discussion Questions:
Have you ever felt your family was not normal?
Do you believe love is the most important thing for a marriage?
Do you think children of this generation are babied?
Works Cited
The Evolution of Family Structure and Values through Television. Prod. Amelie Lemieux. Dir. Meghan Turnbull and Joanna Szypulski. YouTube. 23 Mar. 2010. Web. 29 Jan. 2012. .
Cover Girl Culture is an eye-opening documentary that reveals the truth about how Teen Vogue sells their magazines to women and young girls depicting an unrealistic image of women. As a result, young girls look at these pictures of “beautiful” women and then feel bad about themselves. In the video, young girls were asked if they could change something about themselves, what would it be? Most girls want to change their face because they are not pretty enough. These young girls are looking at magazines like Teen Vogue and Seventeen Magazine and are developing a poor self-image because no matter how hard they try, they cannot look like the perfect model in the picture. What magazines do not say under the pictures of these models is that the photos are airbrushed. When was the last time you took a picture of yourself and your skin was actually glowing like a picture in a magazine? Unless you airbrushed your picture, or drew all over yourself with a highlighter then put a black light up to yourself, the answer is never.
Although the documentary did not sample a wide age range of girls, I believe that most girls look at magazines and only feel worse about themselves. Teen Vogue is not encouraging women and girls to embrace their curves and crooked teeth. Instead they are offering ways to shed the weight and to straighten those teeth for the perfect smile. The documentary shined a bright light on the reality of the media and its impact on girls.
It was interesting to see how the Teen Vogue employees are in total denial that their product is causing a problem for young girls. They are ignorant to the fact that the media tells girls and women everyday that they can improve their body to be perfect, when perfect is intangible. Although Teen Vogue is to blame for printing advertisements of only young, skinny, flawless models in their magazines, consumers are also to blame for buying such “literature.” Teen Vogue would not be making magazines if there were no audience to sell them to. Magazine companies are not at fault on their own. Everyone is to blame here. Americans are constantly dreaming about bigger and better things. Magazines depicting beautiful, perfect women feed that hunger. The question then is when has it gone too far? And at what point should a higher authority take over and end such companies?
“The Evolution of the American Family” explains how there is “no universal definition of family that fits the reality of all cultural groups and historical periods” (Coontz 33). It is also true that there is no universal definition of beauty that can hold true for all cultural groups and historical periods. Beauty is not just a pretty, skinny girl as most magazines and media sources depict. Its definition depends on who you ask. I believe that beauty is the whole package that encompasses not only looks but personality, sense of humor, confidence, and self-esteem to name a few.
Just like the definition of the family and gender roles have changed over time, so too will beauty and what the perfect woman looks like. Women used to be considered beautiful when they were very curvy. Now beauty has evolved into being stick thin without any curves. With time the definition of beauty will change. Until then, the media will continue to bombard our everyday lives with images of perfection since we Americans continue to demand those images.
Coontz, Stephanie. “The Evolution of American Families.” Ed. Barbara J. Risman. Families As They Really Are. W.W. Norton, 2010.
Katelyn Aziz
Sociology of The Family
Group 6
Blog 1
Looking at childhood throughout the past four centuries, Steven Mintz discusses how childhood has changed because of the culture and society we live in in his article “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct”. As time has progressed, children in the middle class have had multiple opportunities to live an innocent childhood, where as in older years children had to milk cows or harvest crops in order to contribute to their families (Mintz 51). The change in views of how children should be raised stemmed from the ideas that children have different mindsets than adults (Mintz 49). Branching off of this idea, marketers are now directing advertisements to younger children because they are more impressionable. This sparked the Adriana Barbaro and Jeremy Earp to look into why advertisers are directing their ads at children and create a documentary “Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood”. Since children are more impressionable, advertisers are marketing products to younger and younger children in order to spark their interest in certain products (Consuming Kids). The younger children are exposed to these products, they will then be lifetime users of the product (or so it is thought). Although this may or may not be true, it is looked at that this is causing children to grow up faster (Consuming Kids). Mintz also comments in his article that middle class families allow their children to have computers and televisions in their room. In having these products in their room, it is allowing advertisements to be directed at and viewed by children.
It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that childhood was looked at as a distinct part of life (Mintz 51). Since the division of age groups, it has made it easier for advertisers to target different age groups for specific products. In present day, it is allowing marketers to target different make-ups and clothes styles to the “tween” age group (Consuming Kids). In seeing actors/actresses wearing particular clothes, that makes those clothes look cool. Then the children want to buy those clothes because they think that they will then be cool. Since children don’t understand that these advertisement companies are targeting them, they automatically want the clothes and make-up and accessories that these people are wearing and will bug their parents until they get it. In “Consuming Kids”, a clip from The Simpson’s where the kids are bugging the dad all day and night to go to a specific theme park. Providing that clip in the movie helps prove the point that children are very easily persuaded to want things that they have seen on the TV in advertisements. There has been great debate about how children are supposed to be viewed; targets for advertisements or innocent young adults? Although this debate is continuing on, advertisement companies are using their freedoms to target children into making children want to buy their products (Consuming Kids).
In order to allow children to grow up and have ideas of their own, having advertising companies targeting them will not allow them to feel as though they will have any freedoms. There are so many pressures in today’s society and with the increasing number of advertisements on the television and the computer as well as social pressure, it will only force children to try to fit in and conform instead of trying to find out who they are as a person. Social pressures are being a big stressor in today’s teens and they need to find a way to express themselves instead of trying to conform.
The following link looks further into how advertisements will affect a child. In this particular study, the researcher decided to produce a longitudinal study to examine the effect of TV and adds on a child’s weight, as they grow older. It is interesting to learn that if a child spends more time watching TV and playing on the computer that their chances of being overweight later in life increase.
References
Mintz, Steven. “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct.” Families as They Really Are. Ed. B. Risman. WW Norton, 2010. 48-58. Print.
Barbaro, Adriana and Earp, Jeremy. “Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood.” Media Education Foundation. 2008. Web. 27 January 2012.
In the documentary Tough Guise, the narrator talks about how men and boys feel the need to put on a front of toughness. He talks about how this has come from different places, including the media, movies, and even the news. I think that it is true that these mainstream sources support the idea of men and boys needing to be tough. Our culture tells us that masculinity is not something we are born with but rather something that we have to strive for by imitating others who we are told are tough. However, this imitation is what really leads to all of the violence. People should be taught to be themselves, not to act like other people. especially not the other people that we are currently told to be like. However, if in the movies they showed real people doing normal everyday things, people wouldn’t go to see them. So really, everyone is responsible for this influx in violence that we see in the movies. No one wants to watch a boring movie, they want some kind of action and conflict. They want to see something that lets them forget about their own lives and live vicariously through the characters in the movie. This leads some people to act like the characters in the movies because the lives of the people in the movies seem so much more exciting then the lives of the people watching the movie. It is really up to the individual to realize that movies aren’t reality. You can’t go around acting like an action hero or you will get hurt or hurt someone else.
The movie also talks about violence rising in younger boys. Int he cases of shootings in schools, the narrator only talks briefly about the main issue behind the shootings; the bullying that caused the kids to bring guns into school. I’m not saying that shooting people is an acceptable way of dealing with bullies, however society needs to find a way to stop people form being bullied because it does lead to violence, either by the bully or the ones being bullied. Parents and teachers need to do a better job watching out for these things, it is really their responsibility to keep track of their kids or students especially since the maturity level of younger kids seems to be decreasing as these problems were much rarer in past years.
These problems could stem from the changing definition of family. Currently a “normal” family in the US consists of a father, mother, and children. This is not how it was in the past where families were larger and relied more on other members of the family such as grandparents, aunts and uncles. Today many families are spread throughout the country and even the world so there is much less interaction between more distant members of a biological family.Maybe it is this lack of interaction with other outside of school has lead to the increase in violence in youths. Today there are a lot more things that kids do alone, whether it is watching t.v. after school or playing video games, there is a lot less extracurricular interactivity between some kids. Those who don’t play sports or do other school sponsored extracurricular activities could be seriously separated form other kids in school, especially if they are only children with working parents. They could have very little interaction with anyone outside of school. The closeness and larger size of families in the past meant that most if not all children would have others to be around outside of school, however now that that is gone, there is a greater chance that kids will be “loners” if they aren’t participating in school activities. This may be the cause of some of the violence we are seeing in younger boys.
Discussion question:
1) Do you think that it is possible that the distance between family members could be leading to a lack of social interaction in some kids?
2) Should movies and other forms of entertainment be forced to change and involve less violence?
The two documentaries that I watched were “Tough Guise” and “The Bro Code”. Both of these documentaries dealt with the issue of how a “manly man” should act in society. They both deal in-depth with how the “manly man” should act towards women.
The documentary “The Bro Code” focuses on the way men are told that they should, and it is okay to control women and view them as sexual objects. All walks of media from music, movies to magazines train men that it is ok to womanize and control women. The documentary points to the MTV show “Jersey Shore” as an example of how media is training young men and even young women the wrong values. According to “The Bro Code”, “Jersey Shore” reinforces the sexist values that “The goal of men is to get sex with as many women as possible, and that the goal for women is to compete with other women for the coveted prize of being the hottest” (Keith 6:00). This is what teenagers are learning when they watch this type of material. It is well known that teenagers are impressionable and mimic what they see. Therefore, these are the values that teenagers are learning and living out.
I found it interesting that “The Bro Code” touched upon the issue of the parental role in all of the media teachings. “The Bro Code” states “there needs to be a parent that says enough is enough” (Keith 8:00). I agree with this notion that there must be a parental influence that makes sure that their kids are not mimicking what they see or hear in the media. Children need to know what is right and wrong behavior and that is taught by the parents. I understand that not every child is blessed with strong parental guidance, which is why media needs to take a hard look at itself and realize the influence they are having on society. Perhaps there should be some censorship or a governing body that makes the media tone down the bad influences.
The documentary “Tough Guise” also deals with the issue of what constitutes as a “manly man”. It mimics the plot of “The Bro Code” in that media has a huge impact on what a “manly man” should be. According to “Tough Guise” media is the reason that men believe they must be physical, strong, tough and respected to be a real man. Media also shows that a real man should assert dominance, power and control over women. This type of thinking is what has lead to such a violent society of man. The documentary goes on to explain that men who put a front of masculinity do so at the expense of their own relationships and their ability to be a good human being. Therefore, if we as a society can stop this front of masculinity, we can not only better the live of women who are being taken advantage of but also help men who have been struggling with be a man.
Discussion Questions.
1. What do you think the role of parents should be in stopping the sexist values that are being portrayed?
2. How should the media or government go about thwarting the sexist stereo types that are being portrayed?
Throughout history, the view of childhood and the role of children have changed. Children were looked upon to do work around the house or even work outside the home in order to make money for the family. As time moved on, children had less and less responsibility because the view of childhood changed and children were looked at as more of a precious group instead of one with responsibility. As times and views on childhood changed, all children had to worry about was school and maybe a small amount of chores. In the documentary “Consuming Kids” and the article “American Childhood as a Social Cultural Construct,” both explain how children act in their respective society and their affects on their families’ economics.
Even though the two sources both talk about children in society, they each touch on different aspects of childhood. In “Consuming Kids,” they talk about how the media directs their attention to the youth, and hooks them on merchandise. Through media advertising, sales sky rocket. The documentary claims that corporations use the youth as their target audience and take advantage of them. Children don’t know much about the tactics of advertising and become easily attached to something. In the article “American Childhood as a Social Cultural Construct” they explain how parents have complete control over the way children act and look at things. As time has passed parents have looked at the role of their children differently. The article pinpoints the parents as the reason children have become the target audience for the media. Both the documentary and article express how the media impacts the way the youth portray things.
In the past century, video games, television programming, and other types of entertainment have become a huge part of children’s lives. Steven Mintz said, “We also forget that the introduction of every new form of entertainment over the past century has been accompanied by the dire warnings of its impact on children.”(Mintz,56) This explains that while entertainment was being created, creators were well aware of the impact entertainment would have on children and went through with it anyway. People should have noticed the impact that media would have on children. Television commercials are the biggest part because all kids watch commercials every day. While watching a show, children are bombarded with multiple commercials, selling and advertising products, every few minutes. Corporations know that the children watch the commercials more then adults do so they use children as their target audience. They do this because if they can attract people to watch their commercials, their sales could go up. In both sources they explain how both the media and parents control their children. Parents want their kids to fit in and to not be an outcast to their age group, so they will listen to what the children want and make sure they can get along with everyone.
I personally believe that the parents should be able to monitor their child and how they act. Setting children in front of a television and giving into their demands is not affective. It is not the media’s fault that parents are not able to control their kids because by letting the child watch television and play games all day long they start to act like the characters on television. If parents don’t do anything to prevent it, all of the blame should fall on them, not the media.
The video I used that can be connected is called, “Consumerism, Media and Youth Culture”. In this video it explains how teenagers listen to the media and they feel the need to be “cool”. This forces teenagers to buy their product. The link to this video is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3gEFwQo_7k
The video Consuming Kids talked about a lot of key points about marketing to children. Marketers have researched the way children think and they use this knowledge to manipulate children into buying their products, and to have them stay hooked on their brands. One of the speakers in the video mentioned that these marketers want “cradle to grave loyalty.” The amount of marketing to children now is scary comparative to centuries ago, when the childhood was seen as a “state of deficiency” (Mintz, 49). The video stated that children account for about 40 billion dollars in consumer spending every year. The article by Mintz talks about the differences between today’s American children and those of the past. In the past childhood has gone from seen as time to prepare children for adulthood, a rushed time that was wasteful, to a time to be sheltered and innocent, to the latest push of jumping kids into any sort of media that is possible. The video shares a view similar to Mintz because the video talks about how much media is involved for children. They are always around brands from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed they are surrounded by these brands that are shoved into their brains by the media. The article and the video link closely because they both feel that American society in some way is hindering the child by these new forms of media. Mintz discusses a study by Daniel Kline in which he defines three types of psychological violence that are brought upon children today. These types are the violence of expectations, labeling, and representation. These all relate to societal pressures that are put upon children so that they seem “normal”. I agree completely with the last form of psychological abuse that Mintz suggests himself. “Seeing children as objects to be shaped and molded for their own good” (Mintz, 57). Many marketers use this shapeable and moldable time to hook children onto their brands for the rest of their life. One speaker in Consuming Kids said: “the primary value that is being sold to kids over and over again is the value that things or stuff or brands will make us happy”. That is the main problem with the marketing approach. I do not feel that it is necessary terrible to market to children, it is just the way that things are being marketed, it is almost like if you do not have the product they are selling, you life will not be as good as everyone else’s. Marketing aimed at children needs to be altered to help stop the problems it has been causing. This video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab9zbqHJ_p4 shows the marketing done by food companies and how they act like they are trying to help children and care about them, but most people know that is not necessarily true. They are creating brand loyalty and they do not try to help children, because by feeding them their products they are only causing things such as childhood obesity and diabetes. In my opinion our country needs to take a step back and stop worrying about how much money they are making and look at what they are doing to the children, who are the future of this country.
Discussion Questions:
1. We have all been victims of this deceptive marketing generation. Do you remember as a child any brands that you were hooked on or any specific toy or character that everyone in school had to have?
2. How do you think, as Americans, we can make a shift away from being so materialistic and consumeristic, we are the next generation of marketers and researchers, so how do we stop this trend of deceptive marketing?
3. Do you feel that the reason you buy products is only because of the marketing? Or are there other factors that contribute to the decision to buy something?
Stephanie Coontz’s article, “The Evolution of American Families”, and lecture, “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap”, are extremely similar. Each discusses marriage and families in general and the ways it has gone through changes during history. Each discusses the different forms of families. From what I was able to derive from the two sources of information was that families as well as marriages overall progressed for the better.
I found the video a little more interesting as the changes in her voice tone helped a bit to keep my attention. Coontz explains marriage in particular from the older days and how it differs from other times. She makes references to how much influence the church had on marriage and families. I was very surprised that adultery was actually more common in the past, especially since divorce was harder to do. When I thought back on it, committing adultery was easier to do then to get a divorce, nowadays divorce is much easier so more people would rather just get a divorce instead of committing adultery. The court system she explains made it extremely hard to get out of marriages; she cited one case where there was extreme evidence of the husband being so violent that both the wife and children feared him. The judge wouldn’t grant marriage relief because the wife was said to have thrown something a couple times and because of her record not being completely clean they were forced to stay together. Women have not had many rights until fairly recently she explained, because of that the wife really had very little options to end the marriage. Therefore husbands probably didn’t worry as much as they would now that if they were caught committing adultery that their wife would be able to successfully divorce them. The women’s movement has made it possible for women to make tremendous strides in marriage. Today marriage is much more dependent on love then what it was in the past. Beating your wife in the older days was far easier and is seen now to be very wrong. Parents would have their kids assist with their retirement by having them work for some type of earnings. It was normal to be stuck in a miserable relationship because you did not love the person, today people would never be in a relationship unless they are completely happy, and therefore it would be nowhere near normal for that to happen.
The article discusses many of the same things that are covered in the video lecture by Coontz. The “Good old Days,” Coontz tries to get us to see that they are not as nice as they sound to be. One thing I thought was directly on point and showed me that she really had a deep understanding of the topic, was when she explained we can only lessen the weakness and build on the strengths. I did not see any extreme differences between the article and video lecture; they are about the same topics and cover the same main points. Overall I agree with the way Mrs. Coontz has described the evolution of marriage and the family has occurred.
The most popular advertisements are targeted to children. In the documentary, “Consuming Kids,” they showed a statistic that there is 700 billion dollars in spending on children a year. In the 80s’s until now, spending had increased from 4.2 billion a year to 700 billion a year. The children are bombarded with messages designed not to make their lives better, but to tell them something. (Linn, 32) The marketers have a hold on children to convince them, from the cradle that life is about buying. In maternity wards around the nation, PBS kids celebrated the release of Teletubbies and gave away Teletubbie gift packs which included copies of their videos. The children aren’t even a day old before they come warped into the consumer market. Marketers send messages through TV, commercials, billboards, and food labels. They are extremely catchy with their songs, bright colors, and famous characters endorsing the ads. Society, mixed with the media, is making these material items the most important aspects in a child’s life. Society is taking the playfulness out of children. (Risman, 48)
In a study called the Nagging Factor, researchers explained that marketers stay on top when children nag their parents to buy the products they want. One type of nagging was persistence nagging which repeats itself. The other type of nagging is importance nagging which is when the child puts a reason of importance on the product. The main target of products is children because of their vulnerabilities and that adults won’t usually buy the products their children want if they aren’t there nagging them. The advertising industries have blatant disregard for the plight of parents, and its exploitation of children’s developmental vulnerabilities. Researchers at Western International Media divided parents into different categories. They do this to help marketers’ fine tune their strategies for encouraging nagging. It is very interesting that many parents are the type that gives into nagging. These parents are called indulgers, Kids’ pals, and conflicted. Indulgers give their children anything they want. Kids’ Pals are adults that want to have fun with their children. Conflicted parents are usually divorced or single parents who buy their children items because they have a lot of personal guilt. (Linn, 35)
Another aspect of consuming kids is that is creates havoc on the family life. There are two mainstream views that the parents are to blame, or that society is to blame. The marketing industry purposely comes between children and parents. (Linn, 33) It is hard for me to understand how it is solely the parent’s problem when their children are being influenced from TV, school, and especially other children. The parents are not in control when other children at school talk about, bring in their new toys, or are eating the famous labeled foods that children love. When they are in control, they have the ability in their house to limit the amount of advertising that their children are exposed to by not buying the famous products or allowing their children to watch television. The parents have to pick their battles though and the relationship with a child has a lot of give and take that needs to be factored in.
A related article http://www.economist.com/node/835503 discusses how Companies have discovered that it is often more effective to recruit a child as an in-home marketer than to try to convince a parent to buy their products. It also describes how advertising companies are being defensive saying that parents are responsible for managing their children’s exposure to marketing.
Discussion questions:
What types of advertising were you not allowed to watch or have when you were young?
Have you seen your parents change from how they parented you regarding advertisement and products to how they parent your younger sibling?
The video “Consuming Kids” and the Steven Mintz article “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct” both present ideas on the changing childhood of Americans. Both agreed that the lives of children in America has changed greatly over time. Mintz talked about how childhood was rushed in past centuries since youth labor was prevalent and parents wanted their children to bring in a supplementary income. Later parents began to extend the idea of childhood by supporting the idea of innocence, but today children are growing up more quickly and having sex at younger ages. I think all of these prove Mintz’s theory that “childhood is a social and cultural construct that varies by region, class and historical era (Mintz, 49).” In this day and age I think that this definitely holds true since now children have access to cell phones, the internet and more technology at very young ages. This is similar to the “Consuming Kids” video since the video discusses how technology helps aim advertisements at children. At one point the video said children are often on the computer, with the television on and with an ipod headphone in one ear (“Consuming Kids”). I think this is a good description of what children are like today and this makes it much easier for advertisers to target children since they are always around the technology that is used by marketers. Previous generations of children spent much more time outside and were not as easy to target since they were not around advertisements as much as they are today. The two are different in that Mintz believes that “Americans have failed to adapt” (Mintz, 58) to the changes in how children grow up and how they are subject to media that may not benefit them. On the other hand “Consuming Kids” seems to put the blame on advertisers whose one goal is to make money. In my opinion it is the parents job to ensure there children grow up in a positive environment, if this means that they do not get to watch television or go on the internet for 10 hours each day, then so be it. When trying to sell things why shouldn’t companies try as hard as they can to make money? Parents need to raise there children the way they see fit, not the way that their child wants to be raised based on the commercials they see on TV. If this means making your kid upset that they didn’t get McDonalds or get to see a violent movie its fine because the parent is the one with the final decision to make on how they raise their kids and they shouldn’t let the child determine how they are raised.
The following is a link to a video containing multiple commercials that are aimed at children. The commercials are all for junk food and contain many images that are clearly aimed at kids such as cartoon characters and child actors that the young viewers can relate too. The consuming kids video extensively discussed how advertisements are aimed at children and these ads show that this is true.
Sources:
“Consuming Kids”
Mintz, Steven. “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct”
Nayyab Khan
The Family
Blog #1 (Monday Night)
Group 4
The documentary Tough Guise shed light on a very serious topic that is easily ignored in our society. It began by explaining the “tough guy” or ‘the persona of a real man’ that guides the life of millions of young men all across the globe. The video shows that today there is a social norm according to which a real man is seen as someone muscular, tough, someone in control who shows no signs of weakness or emotion. In some instances if you do not measure up to this ‘social norm’ boys are called names like fag and queer, therefore men are put under a great deal of pressure to put up this act. As seen in an interview, a young girl explains how some of her male friends feel the need to act tough in front of others where as in private the display emotions just as any other normal person. Then this question arises that where does this image of being tough man actually emerge from? This image is often projected to young male adults through media (Katz, Tough Guise). Even in instances of toys, we can see the change that has lead to enhancement of bodies of toy figurines to fit those of a muscular man. The narrator brought up a very interesting subject. He said “media helps construct violent masculinity as a cultural norm” (Katz, Tough Guise) .This is to say that masculinity is now directly proportional to the growing violent crimes committed by men. The documentary provides several statistics where 85 % of the murders are committed by men. Additionally 90 % of the assaults are committed by men whether they assault women or young male adults. Men are also responsible for 95 % of the domestic violence crimes, 95 % sexual abusive crimes and the list continues on. As pointed out by a psychologist and therapist Daniel Linder, often a sociopath criminal who “conjures up a tough guy” image to deceive people which lead to feelings of aggressiveness and other criminal behavior. The narrator talked about how in some instances this has become a part of our daily life where news reporters or other media do not feel the need to mention that a crime was committed by a male, or male adults were shooting their fellow school mates. On the other hand, if a female commits a felony, it is a topic of great debate. The narrator makes it clear, that as a part of this society, we are equally responsible for these crimes because we are in fact the ones that are sources of pressure in young male adults’ lives. Therefore in order to reform our society and decrease the number of crimes that kill hundreds of people across the world, we must take actions. We need to portray image of young adults where it is okay to be a soft-hearted person. A norm where power is not measured by your control over other people but in fact your success or your respect for others. This may not be an easy change but only small steps can lead to a better community where people do not have to put up a front to please others or to fit in with the society.
Children are consumers too. Smart marketers have their sights on children because they recognize that their young, sponge-like minds are easily susceptible to flashy marketing. The two sources “Consuming Kids” and “A Consumer in the Family” describe how the marketing community steals the attention of America’s youth and successfully plant their messages into children’s brains. According to the article, children are raised to believe that life is about buying and having the best and coolest product that is available. Children’s spending has raised to the level of about 40 billion dollars a year, and adult spending as a result of child marketing is about 700 billion dollars a year (Consuming Kids). Along with the documentary, “Consuming Kids”, this article mentions how important child marketing is to our economy. Not only will kids purchase items by themselves via allowance money, birthday or Christmas money, and money given to them by their grandparents or parents, but they also have a direct impact on which products adults buy as well. Children directly impact which products parents will buy. “Consuming Kids” describes that children can determine which kind of car gets bought, what kind of computer gets bought, and even where the next family vacation will be taken. Children have more power than we think in our economy. According to the documentary, since the deregulation of children’s’ television by Congress during the Regan administration, children’s’ spending has increased by 33%. The documentary explicitly lays out the “Nagging” problem in which kids will constantly beg their parents for a product until that parent is so tired of hearing their child complain, they will give in and buy that product. Not only that, but also many children will cry and/or throw temper tantrums to get what they want. “Indulgers” are parents who give in to their child’s every whim (Linn, 34). The marketing industry even goes as far as to promote that children nag their parents in order to get the desired product. “A Consumer in the Family” stresses that because children are bombarded with marketing from morning until night, it is now become a collective effort to care for and raise children. The next article “American Childhood as a Cultural Construct” recognizes the effect of the marketing industry as well. This article however, focuses on how children are raised, and how this has changed in recent years. It focuses on childrearing, the nature of children’s play, schooling, and the participation of young people in work. This article gives a new perspective on a child’s well being and causes the reader to consider if children are growing up faster in today’s society than they were in the past, and the effects that advertising has had on this change. Kids are bombarded with marketing in this day in age. Their minds are like sponges that absorb all they see on television and what they experience in their daily lives. Life is about getting and buying for these kids, and our community and parents need to work together to advocate that this type of marketing profoundly remaking the psyches of children.
This youtube video shows how marketing is permeating the everyday lives of children.
Possible questions to discuss:
How are advertisers too eager to market to children?
How does the internet effect which products children ask their parents for?
To what level should the government involve itself in the regulation of children marketing?
Since children do not understand the power and control that these advertisements have on their minds, it is up to their parents to help them understand what marketing is and why they are being targeted. It is hard to believe that children in our society could be taken advantage of so ruthlessly, but is that what our society has come to? It is also disturbing to think that the only way to reduce this effect on children is to eliminate television and internet from their lives, which does not seem like a feasible solution.
Olivia Betulia
Sociology of the Family
Group 3
Week 1
The documentary Cover Girl Culture and Stephanie Coontz’s article “The Evolution of the American Family” are topics that are pieces that are difficult to compare. The documentary Cover Girl Culture focused on the issues that young women face due to the media representations and advertisements of how the ideal female should look. The documentary establishes the ways in which popular magazines expose the fashion and celebrity culture to be a dream world that females idolize and make great efforts to attain. Unfortunately, girls are taught from a young age that skinny is pretty and pretty is looking exactly like models who are stick thin, tall, and curve less. The video interviews young girls on how if they could change one thing what would it be. Obviously steaming from insecurities, the girls wish to change attributes that are skin deep such as their face or their weight. The makers of the documentary than interview the creators behind the magazine and most of the women who are involved with their magazines production all think that they are doing a good thing and are helping to promote a healthy lifestyle. During the clip we viewed in class, one woman from Teen Vogue actually explains that the reason models must be so skinny is because the designers make their clothes to fit for only those sizes. So why can’t the designers make bigger test sizes? Why must the bone-thin body be the ideal body? The documentary aimed to demonstrate how warped the media is and to expose the damage it is doing to girls’ self-esteem and mindsets.
Of course, American culture has always had a standard for females that has been representative during every time period. In the late 19th and 20th centuries, females were deemed “homemakers” (Coontz 43). The normal family had a father as a breadwinner and a domesticated mother. According to “The Evolution of the American Family”, “The proportion of children who were raised by a breadwinner father and a homemaker mother…reached an all-time high” (Coontz 44). So in turn, gender roles were determined. Till this day, the domestication of the female is still a standard that even though females may make their own money with a very good job, they are still expected to fulfill the cooking and cleaning of the homemaker female.
Coontz has described, “The powerful new medium of television broadcast nightly pictures of suburban families where homemaker moms had dinner on the table every night and raised healthy children who never talked back or got into any trouble that couldn’t be solved by a fatherly lecture” (44). Media mediums similar to that of television broadcast like the magazines in Cover Girl Culture show how important and influential the media truly is placing the blame on why girls feel pressured to be skinny and have a twisted body image.
Although the documentary was right in providing the evidence for young girls having such a negative body image, I don’t believe the media is all too blame. The way children are brought up by their parents has a lot to do with how girls feel about themself. It is their responsibility to teach their daughters a healthy lifestyle and to create a meaning of “beauty” for them. Although, I do not disagree with the pressures that the media places on young girls, but I do feel that it can be lessened to a great deal if they have parents who make an effort to teach their girls and help them develop their own ideal of beauty.
This clip is useful because it provides an example of the pressure on girls.
What is beauty and who can become beautiful? Society has taught young adolescents and even adults that beauty CAN be achieved in a quick and “easy” way, through plastic surgery. Anyone can become beautiful if they can cough up the right funds. However, plastic surgery has now become the new drug in this society of trends and fads, and now many people are becoming addicted to it. Beauty was once in the eyes of the beholder but now in the twenty-first century, the makers of Hollywood movies and television shows, as well as fashion magazines now define beauty.
The media has helped boost the popularity of plastic surgery. Shows like “Dr. 90210″ and “Niptuck” have made viewers believe it is alright to change their body through surgery if they are not satisfied with their looks. These television shows make plastic surgery more accessible to viewers when they otherwise would have never thought about it before. Many of these viewers tend to want to change things about their image that do not in fact need changing. The disease Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD), “is a chronic mental illness in which you cannot stop thinking about a flaw in your appearance, a flaw that is usually minor or imagined”(Mayo Staff Clinic). Whether you are an A list celebrity, a house mom, or a maid many people are falling into the devastating grasp of this disease. This youtube clip is a mini documentary: http://youtu.be/QbBem8H6HS4, about different women and their reasons why they decided to go through plastic surgery.
Sometimes many women do not go through the torture of plastic surgery for themselves. Sometimes a spouse or a parent may force either their significant other or child to go through the strenuous labors of plastic surgery because they are not pleased with their loved ones appearance. Many women turn to breast enlargement because their husbands like bigger breast. In some foreign countries some parents force their children to have surgery on their eyes in order to make them appear more open. The media has taught viewers to believe that if you do not like a certain appearance of your loved one you must enforce them to go through surgery and change it.
I believe that parents should block their kids from view movies, television shows, or reading magazines that make kids question their beauty. The way an individual views beauty starts at a young age, it starts within their family. Kids are so easily influenced by media and the popular vote. This video shows how African American children tend to pick the white doll over the black doll because it looks better and when asked why they did not pick the black doll, they would simply state, “because it looks bad” : http://youtu.be/ybDa0gSuAcg. What has society and the media done to these children? They have allowed African American kids to believe that their skin color is bad, its no wonder so many African Americans try to bleach their skin in order to become lighter. This documentary talks about how skin bleaching has become a huge epidemic in Jamaica http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9T9SNi-u6M .
Many individuals have and still are trying to warp their image into something that the media has claimed as beautiful or glamorous. Many people believe that the short ccut to success in life is to find a quick fix to change their identity, whether it be from plastic surgery or skin bleaching. Kids are taught at a young age what beauty is and is not.
Reference:
Staff, Mayo Clinic. “Body Dysmorphic Disorder – MayoClinic.com.” Mayo Clinic. Web. 29 Jan. 2012. .
Successful youth advertising at the expense of modern family values is exposed in the documentary Consuming Kids and Linn’s article “A Consumer in the Family.” Consuming Kids focuses on marketer’s easiest and most successfully target audience, children. Children, nearly at birth, are brainwashed by brand’s advertising in virtually all aspects of their lives. From the cereal they eat for breakfast to the sleeping bag they go to bed in, children are walking billboards to company’s brands. Linn’s article “A Consumer in the Family” focuses on how this affects entire families, specifically parents.
Prior to watching/reading these documentaries, I was generally unaware of youth marketer’s ruthless target advertising, however after; the realization is simply frightening. Their ruthlessness is derived from their freedom as there are no laws regulating children advertisement. Children’s consumption of essential products, like food and soap, and nonessential products, like iPods and cell phones, are branded throughout their entire childhood. There is no arguing that children need to eat, perhaps eat cereal and macaroni and cheese, but today’s children need to eat cereal with toys in the bottom and macaroni and cheese because it is in the shape of Spongebob Square Pants based solely on the persuasion of the brand. Advertising researchers study how many times children blink in accordance to certain colors, shapes and sounds in order to go after children as successfully as possible. In addition, companies are expanding the age of their target audiences. For example, Seventeen magazine no longer targets girls ages sixteen to eighteen; they go after girls as soon as they can read. What use to be rated R is now a PG13. Furthermore, what a featured researcher of Consuming Kids worries most is how children’s values are changing. What brand you wear and how much you paid for it is now considered a value in children’s lives. Also children’s values are sexualized. A child is not a child when they dress as Barbie and Bratz dress. Children are forced to grow up younger and younger as time progresses and as advertising becomes more successfully invasive in their lives. Even more severe than value systems, advertising is affecting children’s health. Why would a child go outside to play cops and robbers when they can play it on a video game on their couch? And why would a child eat fruit while playing the video game when they can eat colorful sugary snacks that have their favorite super hero on it? You may answer this question because their parents let them or because their parents allow this, however, according to Linn, parents are becoming less and less compatible against advertising due to the “The Nag Factor” or “pester power” (Linn 33). Advertisers do not just persuade children into brands, they teach them how to get it too. It’s alarming to think big companies “wreak havoc on families just to make a buck” (Lin 35). The nag factor basically teaches children the more you ask you parents for something, the easier they are to cave. “The prospect of spending a month saying no 2,160 times to a child you love is enough to drive any parent crazy” (Linn 38). Parents are incapable from hiding their children from these theories. Even if children aren’t watching the television at home, children are exposed to the brands at school or virtually anytime they step foot out of their house. Parent’s cannot “pick their battle” when it encompasses nearly all aspects of their children’s lives (Linn 38). Steven Mintz article “American Childhood as a Social and Cultural Construct” states over the past four centuries, the American childhood as a whole has drastically changed “(Mintz 49). I personally think it has changed drastically in the time gap between me and my 18 year old brother and our eight and nine year old step brother and step sister. Children’s values have changed. For example, when my brother and I were young children the products that Gabby and Jack want now simply didn’t exist. Even cell phones were unheard of until high school whereas now, my nine year old step sister has a cell phone and has had one since her eighth birthday. I don’t think it’s what children and parents want for their children as much as what they think they need.
Related Video:
This shows a toddler in time out, with his iPad, in other commercials of the same company he is either surfing the web or talking on a smartphone. While comical, reality isn’t farfetched from this commercial; Kourtney Kardashian’s baby is about this age and has an iPad.
Discussion questions:
1. Compare your childhood to younger siblings/young cousins childhoods now, do you find it has drastically changed just within those 10 years?
2. Can youth targeted advertising be directly blamed for childhood obesity and other health problems?
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Sociology of the Family 
Gabrielle Mazzucco
Sociology of the family
Group 1
Week 1
The two documentaries that I viewed were “Bro Code” and “Breaking Our Silence.” Each of these documentaries focused on the image of the ‘manly man’ and how men in our society treat women. Each takes a different perspective on this important matter.
The documentary “Bro Code” focused a lot on how men put women in a category separate from humans. Men look at women in this society as objects that they can toy around with. Films, music videos, magazines, and many other forms of media give men the sense that women are not of an equal status. The thing that I noticed most about this documentary was that men thought that it was okay to verbally abuse women whether it is directly towards them or behind their back.
The dehumanizing of women as sex objects was a big part of this film. There was a part of the film that talked about the porn industry. The thing that was most surprising to me was that the porn industry makes most of its money off of rape/hate porn or ‘Gonzo porn.’ It is horrible to think that men are actually turned on by beating women and it is something that is being promoted in our everyday society.
Abusing women is something that should not be tolerated, yet, every day the media abuses women. MTV’s “Jersey Shore” was an example that was used in the documentary that showed the prime example of how men are expected to act in this society. Men are expected to go out find as many girls as they can, bring them home, and brag about it. The women are seen as whores while the men are seen as heroes.
The second documentary that I watched, “Breaking Our Silence,” is about how men need to become more aware of abuse towards women. Men need to take a stand against the media and realize that it is not ‘cool’ to abuse a woman physically or mentally. This was a short, 11 minute, documentary that took place in Boston, Massachusetts. During a parade with an attendance of 25,000 people, a group of men made a float for the parade that promoted putting a stop to the abuse of women. The film showed a few women with smiles on their faces when they saw the float. Many people looked surprised in a good way. It is fantastic that these men are leaving behind their manly man attitude and taking a stand for something that is important and looked over.
The media needs to stop influencing men from a young age by showing them that it is okay to look down upon women and treat them as if they are not human. The only way to stop the abuse of women is to stop this ‘macho man’ society.
Discussion questions:
1. Guys, did you feel like when you were growing up if you didn’t playoff the macho man attitude that you would get made fun of for it?
2. Do you think that if society was different that you would still act the same? (not saying that all men are the same)
http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=246&template=PDGCommTemplates/HTN/Item_Preview.html
http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=219&template=PDGCommTemplates/HTN/Item_Preview.html
Blog 1: Stephanie Coontz Video Lecture and Article Critique
The video lecture and article by Stephanie Coontz, “The Evolution of the American Family” provided historical information for viewers/readers to understand the family systems of early America. Both pieces focused primarily on Coontz belief that families are fluctuating at rapid speeds and because of this, it is vital to recreate the family values and forms of the past not try to restore the “traditional” ones (Coontz, 46). Coontz eludes in both the video lecture and article that the focus on restoring American families should arise from a desire to minimize the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of family forms by not pointing fingers and by lending a helping hand (Coontz, 47).
In her video lecture, Coontz states that everyone faces challenges, but that the clock cannot be turned back. She recognizes that marriage is similar to the Industrial Revolution in that it is irreversible. She states that marriage brings as many problems as it does benefits. In stating that marriage has changed in the last thirty years more than it has in the last three thousand five hundred years, she enables readers to understand one of the reasons that marriage is an irreversible revolution—women joining the workforce.
The family of the past consisted of a husband, wife and children. The fathers were known as the breadwinners while the mothers embodied the role of “doing housework, sewing and childrearing” (Coontz, 37). The article states that wives and mothers entered the labor force in the 1950s and 1960s in response to new opportunities (Coontz, 45). The new opportunities women were given brought with them many difficulties as well. Women found themselves having trouble leaving the home to work when they could not find childcare. The stress that is accumulated by having two workers in the family is increasing while it does not have to be. The additional stressor of finding childcare makes women more vulnerable, affecting the family structure for many families (especially the young ones). In recognizing that the family is affected by women in the workplace, Coontz attempts to persuade that the problems that families and marriages face should inspire people to create “new” family values rather than reconstruct the “traditional” family of the past (Coontz, 47).
I agree with Stephanie Coontz in that it is vital to focus on the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of families in order to improve the family structure. I agree that providing a helping hand in order to see the change happen should be practiced rather than it returning to what used to be.
http://universityhonors.umd.edu/HONR269J/projects/hchunt/timetable.htm
The link attached above provides viewers with a historical timeline of the successes of women in the workplace during the 1950s. One of the events on the timeline that is of particular interest to me was the sitcom “I Love Lucy” that alludes to Lucille Ball. I found this event the most shocking and appealing because it contradicts the article and video lecture. Instead of facing difficulties, women, like Lucille, who joined the workplace became very successful. The best part of all is that in the creation of the well-known sitcom “I Love Lucy,” Lucille Ball gave birth to her first child, Lucie Desiree Arnaz, while being a working woman. I believe this contradicts the notion that mothers had a difficult time while being workers. Lucille Ball was a mother, wife and working female who in many people’s eyes succeeded.
Discussion Questions:
1. Is your family structured the way families of early America were? Provide examples to how your family is different or similar to the early “traditional” families (1950s).
2. Do you think marriages today, in comparison to marriages of early America, are more about love and happiness or wealth and power? Why?
3. Males of the class: Would you feel inferior or incompetent if your wife was the breadwinner of the household?
Erin Curran
Group 3
The movie Cover Girl Culture showed all the different views to the controversial topic of advertising towards the younger generations. The movies main focus was showing the damaging effects these advertisements have on a younger generation. These advertisements mold the younger kid’s brains to want certain products or look certain ways. The video showed how these girls feel they need to look a certain way to be happy in their lives. The video did not just portray the girl’s views but the people behind these magazine article advertisements. These were an important view to show to the viewers. It reinforces the point that most of the people behind the magazines truly believe they are doing the right thing. In one scene from the video and executive at teen vogue said that the magazine uses average girls to show that all types of girls are portrayed, while the person was speaking clips from the magazine showed off the typical model type. (Cover Girls Culture) These executives don’t understand how the influential these ads are to young girls. Although many of the magazines out are geared towards an older generation, young girls are the predominant readers, and they are the ones whose minds are still in a big stage of development. Most of the times these ads and peers who also see these ads can trump the lessons that are being taught at home. This video did a great job of getting across how this is effecting the youth. I always knew that these ads had negative impacts on people, but it really brought the point home hearing girls as young as 11 say they would change stuff about themselves already. (Cover Girl Culture) These young girls aren’t even fully grown their bodies are still in a transitional period, but yet they have things they wish were different already. The video also did a good job of showing how these girls want these bodies and looks, but there not real. These advertisements are fantasies to sell the magazines. The photos are all photo shopped to make the celebrities and models look better. The airbrushing and photo shopping that is going on can be seen in these youtube videos. These videos show the real picture and then how it was changed to make the model or the celebrity look better, as said in Cover Girl Culture these ads are making young people strive for something the models and celebrities don’t even have. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbBmX2Qnv3Y&feature=related (Youtube.com). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqZ0bJhRUVs&feature=related )Youtube.com) These are the people that are being looked at as role models these days. In the movie it was said that these are the people young kids want to be like, there are no more Gandhi’s in our world. (Cover Girl Culture). In my opinion most of the celebrities looked better before the retouching. The video also mentioned that what was once beautiful curves, and natural looking, has now turned into no curves and being as skinny as one can be. (Cover Girl Culture). The photo in this link is an example of the point the video was trying to make about the past and today. http://cdn.blisstree.com/files/2012/01/when-did-this-become-hotter-than-this.jpg
The video really brings to life all the issues these girls are dealing with and at such young ages because of the advertisements. It shows what the media is doing by making their target age so young. In relation to the cover girl culture video I came across some videos that bring up the same points as the movie. In an article about a French company trying to start a lingerie company for young girls, a main concern was that these girls are too young to be in the mind set of deciding how they should look. (cnn.com) Marketing is only getting younger with each day. Another article I came across talks about how in 2011 the U.K pulled some advertisements because the photos were so retouched. According to the article the photos were giving girls a false sense of image. (dailystrength.org) “Clearly these images serve to distort the self image of teenagers, particularly young girls, as they strive to achieve the weight or skin tone of these altered celebrities.” (dailystrength.org)
“The Evolution of Families” by Stephanie Coontz speaks of how what people perceive as a family has changed over time. Throughout time the dynamic of what a family is has changed many times. It also has different meanings for different cultures. In certain ways this article can be brought back to the Cover Girl Culture video. Both talk about the said norm is and both show how people follow that said norm. The said norm for families in America for a long time, and it is still around today, is said to have one mother and one father. That father works while the mother stays at home with the children and does the housework. In Cover Girl the said norm is to look like a supermodel. Both the video and article explore how the said norm can change on a daily basis. The said norm of a family has changed many times throughout history and is still changing today. Cover Girl makes mention to how a fuller woman with curves is what used to be the norm and attractive, that is what girls strive to be like. Now girl are striving to be as skinny as they can, because that is what they are seeing in the ads. That is also what they are being told is pretty and how they should look. I believe both show how what a society or community says is a norm slowly becomes that norm. People are highly influenced by peers, ads, television and celebrities. Many people want to fit into what is said to be norm at a certain time and will do whatever for it. Marketers feed off that, especially with the younger generation since they are the ones still developing and figuring out who they are.
I personally like the video and message it brought with it, It showed viewers how the executives target these younger kids because they know those are the ones whose minds are still developing. It showed how these ads have a more meaningful message to many, not just a message of the clothes or makeup. When bringing the article and video together I think it shows how fast a norm can change and how people will try to keep up with what others say is normal.
Discussion Questions
Girls of the class: When you were around the ages of the girls in cover girl what did you think of these ads you would be seeing daily?
Do you agree with what was said in cover girl about how our generation and the ones below us role models have changes drastically? When you were younger did you look up to these models and celebrities are your role models?
In your experience do the norms at Siena change and if you so do you yourself or have you experienced other trying to keep up with these norms or other peers?
Sarnof-Ross, Cyndi “Banned Advertisements Could Lead To Higher Self-Esteem for Young Girls” 2011. http://www.dailystrength.org/health_blogs/cyndi/article/banned-advertisements-could-lead-to-higher-self-esteem-for-young-girls
Strickland, Ashley “Adult-inspired lingerie marketed for young girls” 2011. http://articles.cnn.com/2011-08-18/living/young.girls.lingerie_1_lingerie-ad-bras-young-girls?_s=PM:LIVING
http://www.youtube.com
Cover Girl Culture
Coontz, Stephanie. “The Evolution of Family” 2010.
I find it really interesting how the “Macho” man ideology has been supported through historical monuments in family development. In the documentary Tough Guise, Jackson Katz explores what young men perceive a “Real Man” to be, i.e. A Real man is someone who is powerful, demands respect, is tough, and is someone who is in control. We often as a culture talk about groups such as minorities, women, non heterosexual people, but we do not analyze the power of the dominant group in this culture; the white male heterosexual and why their use of suppression and violence is accepted as a cultural norm. It is known that men are more violent towards both men and women, then women are. They make up 85% of murder against their own gender, they are responsible for 90% of assaults, 95% of domestic violence, 95% of dating violence and yet this has not been addressed as a societal issue. Why is it that violence is accepted as part of the male culture? Men are not born with this preconceived notion of what it means to be a man, they become shaped through social and cultural pressures that make it acceptable to exhort your dominance over others by disrespecting and belittling them. Media portrays a man as being strong and invulnerable that should be able to be dependent on themselves, this suggests that men are emotionally unavailable and that they are incapable of being compassionate or caring which is clearly not the case. The history of the evolution of the american family also supports the notion that the man should be able to be the provider and the “Sole bread winner” of the family whereas women should be the homemaker and take on caring for the children and doing household duties. This conception made men the authoritative figure in their household and politicians created tax codes to support male breadwinner families over dual earner families, just contributes to the growth of disparity between men and women in the family (Coontz, 41).
By watching the documentary on tough guise the disparity between men and women are influenced through media representations of them. By creating movies and pornography that depicts violence as “Sexy” and allows men to be seen as fulfilling a sexual fantasy by maintaining dominance over women I believe helps contribute to the reasoning behind the statistic that 1 in every 4 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. This media portrayal also allows men to be emotionally withdrawn from the women and this is reinforced because these men are achieving their goals by being this controlling person.
Jackson Katz states that we first need to make this conception of what it means to be masculine visible that way people can learn to question it and eventually change the definition that society has shaped. Katz also hopes that men will learn that vulnerability, compassion and the ability to care for others are still part of what it means to be a man. By having role models such as Mark McGuire that emphasize how things like therapy ( which is often seen as mostly for women) has helped lead to his growth as an individual.
Mark Walsh-Group 5, Blog 1
Stephanie Coontz’s article, “The Evolution of American Families”, and lecture, “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap”, are generally one in the same. They both discuss marriage and families throughout history and how both have changed, mainly because of changes in marriage. Most of the changes she talks about are good; however, there are some weaknesses that have arose from the progression of marriage.
In the video lecture, Coontz talks about the old days and discusses how different marriage was from what most people think it was like. It was interesting to hear that adultery was more common in the past and that in many cases, it was not discouraged. It must have been easy for a husband to cheat on a spouse knowing that divorce was not an option for the woman. This brings truth to the fact that marriages back then were often unhappy and shared no love between spouses. They were for financial, social, and other material reasons. Coontz talks about how in today’s world, we can marry the person we love. This is a huge benefit of the revolution of marriage. We now have the option of spending time with a person and deciding if that person is the right person to marry, another benefit that we have today. Her main point seemed to be that it is impossible to go back in time and go back to the way things used to be, and even if we could, that would be the wrong decision. We can only minimize the weaknesses of this revolution and enhance the strengths.
In Coontz’s article, she writes about many of the same things she talks about in her lecture. In the end of her article, she writes, “We should not assume that recent changes in family forms and practices are inevitably destructive.” (Coontz, 46) This is particularly true when she talks about children born out of wedlock. In the old days, these children had no rights and were looked at as accidents. Through the progressive movement of marriage, these children now have rights just as a child conceived to married parents. When Coontz brings up points like this, it makes the reader appreciate how far human rights have come.
Coontz’s article and lecture are virtually about the same exact topic and discuss the same facts. What Coontz wants the reader to realize is that when people refer to the “Good old days”, they are not what we imagine them to be like. In those days it was legal to beat your wife, it was fine to have an affair, it was normal to be in a miserable relationship with someone you did not love, and it was common for parents to have their children work in order to sustain their retirement. Like with any change there are certain things that need work; but, overall, the changes have been for the better and they have empowered both men and women with different abilities. Coontz is right on when she says we can only go forward and improve the weaknesses and enhance the strengths.
Personally, as you could have guessed, I agree with Stephanie Coontz. There have been so many benefits that have come from the changes in marriage and families. I completely agree with her when she says that we can now only minimize the weaknesses and build on the strengths.
Additional Information:
http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/origins/print.cfm?articleid=25
Maren Serafine
Blog Post #1
Group # 6
Decade after decade the growth and development of children has been a main focus considered by many individuals. Throughout the article “American Childhood as a Social Cultural Construct” and the documentary “Consuming Kids,” I was able to find many similarities and differences discussing the ideas of childhood and change over time.
Both pieces of work put a strong emphasis on the important role that society plays on children’s well being. Whether it is media or our societal differences, children are influenced by many outside sources and these sources have changed drastically over time. We see in the documentary that children once were excited about going to the store to buy penny candy- and yet now, the focus of children is placed on computer games, cell phones and other technologically advanced devices. Children have become extremely focused on the ideas of consumerism. This is discussed in the article as the author, Steven Mintz, states that children suffer from “the violence of representation, where children and adolescents are exploited by advertisers, marketers, and purveyors of popular culture…” (Mintz 57). Through this comparison, we see how both pieces show how outside forces greatly influence what we consider as childhood. We see in the documentary how marketing largely influences children, and in the article how childhood is largely influenced by society, race, gender and family influences. Through these influences, we are able to connect both pieces to understand the changes that childhood is facing in today’s day and age. The documentary and the article also both discuss how the perception of a child has changed over time. We see how a child has become much more consumed in the world of technology, and how childhood is not all about going outside and playing anymore. Rather, childhood has become much more focused on technology. In comparison to the documentary, the article also discusses how the idea of playing has been lost in childhood, and how children have become much more likely to consider technological forms of play rather than the outdoors.
The documentary and article have many similarities, yet they also have differences. “Consuming Kids” is a documentary largely focused on the consumer side of childhood and the abilities that marketers have on gaining the attention of children. In contrast, the article “American Childhood as a Social Cultural Construct” puts much more attention on social class, race and gender. These pieces are different from each other in the ideas that one is more consumer oriented and based on the facts of the consumerism of children over time, and the second is more focused on family-oriented changes that affect the lives and changes of childhood.
I agree with both the documentary and the article, and it blows my mind to see how drastically childhood has changed over time and how it will continue to change. I feel that there are many factors that influence the change of childhood, just as Mintz says throughout his article. The link I have found is a quick youtube video that shows how great the influences of society have on a child. Through this video we realize how impressionable children are and how they are capable to pick up and act out every little thing they see within society. This can relate to marketing and to family oriented practices that the reader learns about in the article “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct” and the documentary “Consuming Kids.” I largely believe that outside influences such as parenting and marketing have taken a toll on the growth of children and the ideals of childhood. Children are losing their innocence much sooner due to things that they are seeing and soaking up. Throughout childhood, what many children see becomes how children think. They are like sponges and soak up everything that is happening around them, and in many instances, they will repeat what they see. Therefore, through the practices that society and marketers have created, children are losing their innocence much earlier than they used to.
Mintz, Steven. “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct.” Families as They Really Are. (2010): 48-58. Print.
Discussion Questions:
Do you believe that society is taking the innocence away from childhood? Why or why not do you feel this way? Do you believe that American society is child friendly?
Steven Mintz states “childhood was defined as a period during which young people should be insulated from the stresses and corrupting influences of the adult world and free from adult-like responsibilities” (Mintz 52). Do you still believe that this can be used as the definition of childhood? Is childhood still considered a purely innocent time in a person’s life? Why or why not?
Prior to the 18th century, children were forced to speak, read, and contribute to their family’s economic status as quickly as possible. Do you believe that our society would ever come back to this idea?
Steven Mintz discusses that “in no other advanced country do so many young people grow up in poverty or without health care..” (Mintz 27). What would you do to change this idea? How would you think of effectively getting children out of poverty and the services they need to stay alive?
Mary Hoar
Group 1
Cover Girl Culture and Girls: Moving Beyond Myth are both documentaries that focus on the difficulties of being a girl in today’s society. Cover Girl Culture is focused on how the media affects young girls body image and how it can have a negative impact on them. The media is telling young girls that they have to be pretty and skinny in order to be perceived as “beautiful.” When asked what they would like to change about themselves, most young girls said either their face, height, or figure. Girls as young as 12 spend hours getting ready in the morning putting makeup on and worrying about what to wear in order to be “liked” by other kids at school. The documentary blames fashion magazine editors, such as Vogue and Elle magazine, for these problems among girls. However, the models in the magazine only represent such a small percentage of women, and most women do not look like models. What we see in magazines is not beautiful, but when exposed to it at such a young age, young girls grow up thinking that the girls in the magazines are beautiful and if they want to be beautiful too they have to look like them.
This video is an example of how messed up the fashion industry is. A Ralph Lauren model was fired for being “overweight” at 5’10 and 120 pounds. Fortunately, the model does not agree with her agency that she is overweight. However, any other girl who is told she is overweight could have a very negative impact on her body image.
http://www.helium.com/items/783265-society-and-the-pressure-to-be-beautiful
These two links help reinforce that the media is having a negative impact on girls and putting a lot of pressure on girls to be “perfect.”
Girls: Moving Beyond Myth focuses on how girls are being pressured by media and boys to have sex. Girls’ bodies are maturing earlier, but that does not mean they are emotionally mature for all the complications of sex. Girls as young as nine years old are asking parents about sex and masturbation. The girls in the documentary talk about how a lot of girls are feeling pressure from friends and boys to go further than they are comfortable going. They are afraid that boys will not like them if they don’t have sex with them. When interviewed, a lot of the girls say that if a girl has sex with a boy she is called a “slut” or a “whore” but guys are “cool” for having sex with girls. One girl mentioned that since girls have such low self-esteem, if a guy calls a girl beautiful she will do whatever he wants. Girls are becoming sexually active at younger and younger ages due to pressure all around them.
Discussion questions:
Have you ever felt like someone judged you just based on the way you look?
Do you think stick thin is attractive?
Have you ever felt pressured by a boy/girl to do something you didn’t want to do?
Blog #1: Group 5
I viewed the video lecture by Stephanie Coontz, “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap” and I also read the article written by her called “The Evolution of American Families”. The video lecture focused more on the marriage component of a family and the myths of what a traditional marriage actually was. In contrast, the article focused more on how the definition of a family was shaped over time according to various global events and cultural diversity that was encountered within each period.
Within this video lecture Coontz spoke mostly about marriage and what we as a society today think is “new” but is actually “traditional” and vice versa. One thing that struck me that was actually traditional within marriages was the single parent family or the stepfamily. Although today we think that the step/single parent family has become a sort of recent trend, it was actually quite common in the earlier centuries because a parent would die of disease or hard labor. In addition, adultery was also quite common and throughout history sex outside marriage was also common. What we think of as traditional was actually new, for example the man being the breadwinner. In past history the man as well as the woman were both bringing in the money and participating in manual labor (Coontz, online video).
Coontz did say that “marriage in the old days was invented to get in-laws” as opposed to todays world where marriage is about “love and choosing who you want to marry and if you even want to marry” (Coontz, online video). I found it to be quite important that Coontz mentioned these points because that is what ultimately dictated the reason that past time marriages were more stable because there was no choice as to whom you would marry and men held superior rights and women just followed the man’s rule. However, in today’s society marriage tends to be unstable due to the independence that women gained and the new idea of actually finding love.
After viewing the video I thought that today we tend to be stuck in the idea that we need to revert back to the traditional ways of how marriage was, however, we must realize that these changes have brought about much reform in terms of women’s rights and freedom to choose. Although the nuclear family seems to be separating due to both parents working and new technologies, we must not shun these new outcomes rather we need to make improvements to the new and forget about the old in order to strive as a society.
In regard to the article, Coontz stated that the term family was something that encompassed different traits by various cultures throughout American history. There seemed to be no universal definition of a family, however most societies referred to it as “the term to endow certain sexual relations and biological connections with special privileges and obligations” (Riseman, p. 33). I thought this was a sound definition that could be used in today’s society when categorizing what a family actually is because a lot of people in America tend to think of a family as having some sort of either true or artificial biological relation and having responsibilities and opportunity within that unit.
An interesting point that was brought up in the article was the idea that periods of change (i.e. industrial revolution, World War II, etc.) shaped the American family to a significant extent. In these times of irreversible change, the family unit needed to adapt to the changing environment and this is where we get our “modern” family (Riseman, p. 40). The Industrial Revolution lead to a rapid change to the nuclear family because of people needing to relocate to cities where there were smaller living spaces and less room for large extended families. In addition, World War II impacted the population through the baby boom as well as having women go back to domestic life and ultimately lead to the typical 1950s portrayal of family life in the suburbs. I thought that this whole idea of how global events, whether they were good or bad, have had an impact and continue to impact the idea of what a family really is. For example, in today’s society there is a need for dual income households with such a harsh economy, therefore babysitters have become somewhat part of American families as well as families in other nations. This shows how historical and economic events do indeed change the way we live and more specifically change the notion of what a family truly encompasses.
Related Online Source
http://voices.yahoo.com/the-history-american-family-524101.html
This article is about the evolution from the extended family to the nuclear family and how the Industrial Revolution, The Great Depression and WWII had profound effects on which type of family dominated.
Discussion Questions
After learning about the impact that the Industrial Revolution and World War II have had on shaping the American family, what are some other events that you think have shaped the American family or are currently shaping the American family today?
Do you think that people truly look for love today or do they marry for other reasons?
Works Cited
“The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap”. Online video clip. Youtube.com. Accessed on 24 January 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIeAnU7_7TA&feature=player_embedded
Riseman, E. B. Families As They Really Are. “The Evolution of American Families” by Stephanie Coontz. WWNorton, 2010.
Kanika Cummings
Group 2
Blog 1
“Consuming Kids” and “A Consumer in the Family” are the two documentaries that focus on how marketers capture children in wanting their products. Both documentaries reveal that the marketers will are cleaver in thinking of ways to get children hooked on their product. From television, radio shows and every billboard and sign around them in our world today is proof that there is no getting away for the constant pressure of buying things. They showed that children are easy to get a child’s attention in commercials and other forms of advertisement. Both “Consuming Kid” and “A Consumer in the Family” talk about “The Nag Factor”. This is basically marketers promoting kids to nag and whine to get what they want in a store or any place else that sells their product. There are actual advertisements that say to nag to your parents and you will get what you want. “A Consumer in the Family” reads, “In, fact, the marketing industry purposely comes between children and parents in many instances, potentially wreaking all sorts of havoc in family life. One of the most egregious examples of evidence that they do this comes from a 1998 study on nagging. Conducted not to help parents prevent nagging but rather to help retailers exploit nagging to boost sales” (Linn 33). In the “Consuming Kids” documentary the video shows advertisements from way before 1998 promoting children to beg for that product that they need so much and the ad ensures that they will get that toy or burger that they wanted. “Consuming Kids” showed they would do just about everything to get the viewers attention while promoting their product. Marketers would put advertisements in schools and on the bus on the way to school. The amount of media that children are experiences seems very overwhelming. “A Consumer in the Family” focuses on the marketers ideals on how to influence the children while the parents try to not let their children fall into the trap of the advertisements. The article said, “The problem is while parents are trying to set limits, marketing executives are working day and night to undermine their authority” (Linn 38). Another article called ”American Childhood as a Social Cultural Construct” also seeing the marketing of these companies to be aggressive also. This article focuses more on how the child has been brought up in their family while the other focused on the advertisements and how they influence the child like a middle class and upper middle class family influence their children with educational toys early in their childhood to get them learning as soon as possible.
I just liked this picture because it shows how a child is brought into a world of advertisements and is the target of all marketers
Discussion questions:
Do you think that the marketers are going overboard with the suffocating advertisements or is it just part of the culture that we have?
Do you think that there will be a change in the advertising world because of the dangers showed at the end of the “Consuming Kids” documentary?
The article “The Evolution of American Families” by Stephanie Coontz speaks to the idea of the family dynamic and what the definition of a family is while the movie Cover Girl Culture was more about placing blame on the magazine companies for young girls’ negative body image. The article takes more of a research approach on historical ideals of family which makes the article seem more credible under a critical lens. The documentary had credibility because it used actual quotes from those involved in the production of magazines and campaigns. The documentary sought to use the words against the magazines; they took their words and put them in contrast with the photos actually being shown to the girls within the pages of their magazines. An example of this would be when the women working for Teen Vogue were discussing how they believed that they used healthy looking young girls to represent the population of teen girls while recent magazine images of young, almost emaciated girls were being flashed on the screen.
In American culture there has always been a standard set upon females to look and act a certain way which is what both the article and the documentary showcase. The article discusses how women have been expected throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries to be the “happy homemakers,” willing to cater to the needs of her family and be practically voiceless in the household decisions. In a quote by Coontz she states “there was a renewed emphasis on female domesticity in the postwar years…They were urged to forego the challenges of the work world and seek fulfillment in domestic chores…Psychiatrists—who had largely replaced ministers as the source of advice for families—claimed that any woman who desired anything other than marriage, motherhood, and domesticity were deeply neurotic” (Coontz, 43). This idea that women were almost insane for wanting to have a sense of independence made it hard for women to break the mold during this time period, and lead to a lot of conformity to the male standard of women. Women were being told how and how not to act which is the same idea of what the documentary stated, that females allow other people to make the decisions for how they should be. In the documentary there was more of a blame game that pointed towards the media companies and their definitions of what a female should look like.
The documentary wasn’t totally false in its sentiments, the media does play a large role in the lives of females but in all honesty it wasn’t totally unbiased. The documentary seemed to set out with the goal of blaming media influences such as magazines for the negative body images of young girls. The media cannot be the only one to blame for negative body images that young girls may have, they have many other social influences such as friends, family, school and group activities that can impact their body images. The media has been a part of female influence since the beginnings of television. As Coontz says “the powerful new medium of television broadcast nightly pictures of suburban families where homemaker moms had dinner on the table every night and raised healthy children who never talked back or got into any trouble that couldn’t be solved by a fatherly lecture,” which goes to show that although the ideal woman may have changed slightly, there has been media influence on what a woman should be (Coontz, 44). The media has set standards for women that they can choose to uphold in this new world where women have equal rights as men.
In this video clip the viewer can see the evolution that a typical woman goes through for a billboard advertisement. In certain ways these distorted images that are presented to the public as real life women can add to the negative body images of young girls for they are always shooting for something that is impossible to obtain. If the woman in the advertisement doesn’t actually look like that what makes people think that they can and should look like that as well? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hibyAJOSW8U
Does anyone have any suggestions for way to go about restoring young girls body images?
Elizabeth DeFazio
Blog #1
Group 1
The image of women in today’s culture seen in magazines, television, and movies can be portrayed unrealistically. These popular industries are forcing these images of beautiful skinny women into the minds of young girls, ultimately bringing about insecurities in their self-image. The documentary that we watched in class, Cover Girl Culture deals with the extreme advertisement created by the fashion industry. Beside from the fashion industry, celebrities from the music and movie industries also tend to promote the idea that there is only one type of beautiful, which only comes from skinny women. Throughout this film advertisement companies in magazines seem to emphasize only pretty and skinny girls to promote their product. These ads should focus more on the realistic body image of young girls since they are ultimately promoting a negative image to girls around the world. It is sending the message to young women that in order to fit into society’s norms it is important to be a certain size and wear select clothing. These images can impact young girls drastically and force them to do whatever they can to achieve what they see in the media. These types of companies realize the control that they have over young girls and should center their advertisements to girls that comes from all sizes. Young girls openly admit in this documentary that they feel bad about their image after looking through a magazine, where no one looks similar to them. Young girls understand that these models that they see in the magazines are a small percentage of what women really look like, which makes it that much more desirable.
In comparison, the documentary Generation M, Misogyny in Media & Culture, shows the negative attitude toward women and young girls brought on by the American culture. This reveals how advertisement informs girls that their empowerment comes from their appearance and the use of sex. Music stars like The Pussycat Dolls and Britney Spears appear to encourage young girls to use only their sexuality to get the attention that they desire. Young girls view these celebrities as role models, which is not a positive influence on these vulnerable teens. Images seen throughout the media are forcing teens to be sexual and adapt to these images seen everyday. This documentary continues on the same track as Cover Girl Culture from the viewpoint of the beauty industry thriving on girl’s imperfections. These role models that have a great impact on the young girls need to acknowledge that beauty is not everything a girl needs in life. A woman can be successful no matter what she looks like. Also in this documentary it shows how the dieting industry is starting at such a young age because of influence of television and also parents, which can eventually lead young girls to become anorexia and bulimia.
Both the fashion and music industry are implanting these types of harmful images to vulnerable young teens. I believe that the music, movie, and fashion industries need to start transforming the unrealistic body image of women and begin to focus on all different type of body images for women. It is also important for parents to constantly instill in their daughter that being healthy is more important than simply being skinny. Both these documentaries show us the effect that the media has on young girls in today’s society and how it can ruin their self-image.
1. Do you think society’s images of “beautiful” women will every change?
2. What celebrities today do you think promote a positive body image to young girls?
http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=234&template=PDGCommTemplates/HTN/Item_Preview.html
http://www.covergirlculture.com/
Caitlyn McGowan
Group #6
Childhood is a topic that has taken a very high interest in society for a long time. The article “American Childhood as a Social and Cultural Construct” by Steven Mintz and the documentary Consuming Kids both discuss childhood and the changes it has taken throughout the years. The documentary and the article are similar in many ways but also different. Both the documentary and the article had strong emphasis on society and how marketers have been able to change the way children act and behave.
“American Childhood as a Social and Cultural Construct” by Steven Mintz is written about children’s childhood and the transformation of “childhood” over past centuries. Mintz defines childhood as “romanticized as a time of care-free innocence, when children should play freely, untouched by the cares of the adult world” (Mintz, 48). Both the article and the documentary have a strong over-all belief that the word “childhood” has evolved over the years. They believe that advertising is a large reason for the change in children and the length that children are suppose to be children. Another similarity was that during the eighteenth century they started to create furniture in specific colors with different graphics of animals or nursery rhythms. This was the start of the child advertising. This was similar to the documentary because it was about children advertising and marketers creating ways to create brand loyalty from a very young age. In the documentary they discuss how advertising to kids with objects like Dora the Explorer bedding helps children to remember this characters and TV shows. They will then “need” the latest toys and bedding to be the cool kids, this started as early as the seventieth century. Throughout both pieces we have seen how outside sources have had great influences over our children. The largest similarity between these two works was the idea that parents are giving their children what they want or the newest thing in order for them to fit in and make them happy.
There were many differences between “American Childhood as a Social and Cultural Construct” and Consuming Kids. One large difference was that Consuming Kids was mainly about advertising to children and the effect it has on their childhood and “American Childhood as a Social and Cultural Construct” was mainly about the differences in raising their children during different centuries based on gender, race, social class and society. During the “colonial America, a parent’s duty was to hurry the child toward adult status” (Mintz, 49). They needed them to work and be older then they were to support their family. During the documentary they only talked about the changes in children’s childhood within the last century. During the documentary we saw how marketers were able to mesmerize children and their influence over them. During the article we saw how race, gender and your social class influences childhood.
I do agree with both the article and the documentary. Both have great points and really make the watcher and the reader think about the advertisements that their children are watching and looking at. I believe that children have become obsessed with having the latest objects instead of enjoying what they have around them and socializing with their peers. Instead of playing outside they would rather play with their new game-boy or latest electronic. It is upsetting that children used to be excited to play outside and be happy with whatever toy they had; unfortunately today children have been exposed to a world where bigger is better and your “not cool” if you don’t have the latest things. We are living in a world of consumers. By marketers targeting your children they have discovered that this is the age to create the best brand loyalty. They see everything and ear everything and they then go to their parents to achieve what they see. I do believe that marketing certain objects to children is ok but marketing in the right way to children is the key to success. Marketers should never let children believe that they aren’t good enough or they should grow up faster. Advertising to the right age group with the right product is the key to success. Don’t let our children grow up faster then they already do.
Discussion Questions:
Mintz says that “in recent years, the gap between poor and working-class and affluent children in rates of attending four-year colleges has widened”. Do you believe that this is true? And if so why?
Mintz says that children are being seen as objects to be shaped and molded for their own good. Do you agree with this statement?
Do you believe that society has taken away the playfulness of childhood?
Two hundred years ago the word “childhood” and “youth” were referred to as someone as young as five and has old has early twenties. What do you think the ages of “childhood” are today?
Chris Howard Group #6
Due to the rapid proliferation of technology, and communication, today’s society is evolving and changing at rate never seen before. For the first time in the history of man the world is truly globally connected. Today’s children are more exposed to adult issues, and the perils of the “grown-up” world than ever before. Many professionals, and individuals in today’s world have grown critical of how quickly our children are growing up. The 2008 documentary “Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood,” sheds light on the intense marketing fury children face daily, at the earliest of ages. However, after reading the article “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural,” by Steven Mintz, I discovered that children in the American Colonies were also asked to grow up extremely quickly.
I believe there are several take away points that can be derived from contrasting the article, and the documentary. The creators of the documentary focus on the intense marketing, and the media exposure today’s children face. While the article highlights several various issues that at one time or another have impacted America’s youth. With that said, I feel the major takeaway lies in this difference. That takeaway point is that every generation is challenged, faces adversity, and is given the opportunity to rise above those challenges, better themselves, and our American society as a whole. Early colonial children were asked to financially contribute to their family at an early age. Children that we would consider to be “too young” would work in the fields as early as age five. These two sources of media remind of a phrase I am sure we have all heard and that is the “greatest generation that has ever lived.” This is the generation that was born into the Great Depression, and went on to fight in WWII. This generation faced incredible adversity, and produced individuals such as Ted Williams. Mr. Williams is considered by many to be the greatest baseball hitter of all-time. At the peak of his baseball career, famous players such as Ted Williams, and Joe DiMaggio went on to serve in WWII. I believe that every generation will face a unique challenge, and the responsibility lies with the parents, educators, and mentors to prepare these young children for the challenges they will face.
As you can see each generation of children has had to face and overcome their own unique challenges. Today’s children face the daily marketing blitz attempting to convert them into cradle to grave customers. Colonial children faced their own challenges of being asked to financially contribute to their household as soon as possible. Multiple generations of American children have faced the prospect of growing up quickly due to parents serving our country in foreign wars. As you can see the documentary “Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood,” sheds light on the current issues today’s children face, while the article, “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural,” by Steven Mintz, reminds us that children have faced unique challenges since the creation of man. Overall, I believe that a greater responsibility lies with today’s parents to help filter, and protect their malleable, young children from the plethora of information that is accessible to today’s children.
Discussion Questions:
1. Are there any unique challenges you believe our generation has faced?
2. Do you feel that today’s marketers are negatively affecting today’s youth? If so, should any blame fall on today’s parents?
3. In what ways has your childhood differed from you parents, grandparents etc.?
http://boston.sportsthenandnow.com/2009/08/22/the-lost-years-of-ted-williams/
Sociology In The Family 130
Blog Post Group #6
In the article “American Childhood as a Social and Cultural Contract” , Steve Mintz explains the history of child rearing and the evolution of maturity of children throughout the centuries. Mintz describes the differences of children used for labor in the early 1900’s compared to children raised in a post world war II era. Some characteristics that are important to note are the ability of children to cope to a shifting culture. In today’s world , it is more likely for children to be faced with the stress of parent’s divorce , online bullying, insufficient nutrition and “increased sexual maturation”(Mintz). However, compared the video, Mintz continues to discuss the importance parental involvement in adolescent homework, play time and personality molding. The author also poses the question: Are our children today better off than generations before? The answer to this question is interesting, yet difficult to answer. Each generation is faced with hardships and difficulties than the one previous. Nevertheless, it is significant to understand the way that “inadequate schooling, substandard housing , deficient health care and unstable living arrangements” can affect today’s children(Mintz).
Compared to the article, the video “Consuming Kids” highlighted the significant problems with media advertising to children. Young children are very malleable and their mind is similar to a sponge; eager to learn and obtain a personality. However with fewer or no regulations on children’s advertising, major companies and marketers are manipulating the minds of our youngest generation. Advertisers use a tag line of “any means necessary” to appeal to kids and get them “hooked” at a very young age. They are targeting children and holding on to their consumers for life. The problem with exposing young kids to this intense market of products is the social impact it has on their generation. No longer are we buying products for their use, but for social status. Also, the advertising is not only limited to television and radio; it is infiltrating schools, play areas, birthday parties and sporting events. The affect of media on America’s children is real and very apparent. As each year passes, more ads are produced that are selling a more “mature way to play” by presenting dolls with less clothing and action heroes that are more violent. Media advertising is entering the minds of young children and undoing their psyche. Many critics are concerned that this type of exposure will reinforce a self indulgent, shallow personality in kids. The movie begs to ask questions such as; “What values are being sent to our children? What kind of generation will they grow into?”
I believe that children’s advertising, television shows, music and entertainment definitely need to be regulated. As a babysitter and an older cousin to young children, I can literally see the brainwashing affect that some TV shows have on kids. Many of my neighbors act like the popular “Hannah Montana” character, mimicking her diva attitude and rebellious mindset. I think that our society places too much an importance on name brands, which affects how our children develop a sense of individuality and morals.
Outside Link : This link is to the popular “Cingular Commercial” that came out years ago showing the affect of young kids and texting.
In the documentary Tough Guise, Jackson Katz investigates the crisis in masculinity and why men believe they have to put on a front in order to be a “real man.” The documentary starts out with intense images of women who have been brutally abused by men and pictures of men with guns to capture the audience’s attention. These images show the negative effects of the tough guise and how it can not only hurt themselves but others too. I found it extremely interesting when Jackson Katz compared the Wizard in “The Wizard of Oz” to the tough guise and says that “masculinity is a mask to hide humanity.” (Katz) I agree with Katz when he says that young boys learn that they need to be more masculine from the media. “In a national poll from the study, almost three fourths of children aged 10-17 describe males on television as violent. More than two thirds describe them as angry. The children’s perceptions are validated by the study’s independent analysis of how men act and how masculinity is portrayed in the most popular programs boys watch.”(Children 1) Men in most media shows are shown as big, strong, tough, and in control. I also believe that it has become part of the cultural norm to be more masculine because men are usually seen as the head of the household, while the women stay home to clean and cook for their husbands. Jackson Katz also points out how masculinity has increased dramatically over the years in the media, he proves this by his G.I. Joe example. The little figurine toy called G.I. Joe has had his bicep size increase from 12.2” in 1960 all the way to 26.8” in 1998. Jackson Katz thinks that masculinity is not natural. He did a really good job of defending his belief by asking the question, “Why do White kids act Black?” The tough guise is all a lie, young boys put on a performance because they believe that by looking mean, they will be more respected. Now that women are starting to take a stand against men and are fighting for equal rights, these men with the tough guise feel threatened. Because they feel this way they believe they need to put the women back in their place by using violence. The documentary concludes with Jackson Katz talking about how to put an end to this tough guise. Men need to start acting more vulnerable, which takes a lot of courage to do. Men also need to stand up for what’s right and start supporting women. On the other hand women need to show men that they value men that resent the tough guise. I believe that the ending wasn’t as strong as the beginning. The beginning used a lot of violent pictures to get the audience engaged and really made me feel that the tough guise is becoming a more intense problem in our society. I do not think that men will ever be able to be more vulnerable and I think that there needs to be other ways to put a stop to the violence. In ending, this documentary really interested me and got me thinking about why men act the way that they do and if it is natural or not.
Children Now. “Boys To Men: Media Messages About Masculinity.” Mediate.com – US and World Leading Mediation Web Site – Find Mediators. Children Now. Web. 25 Jan. 2012. .
http://www.mediate.com/articles/children.cfm
Discussion Questions:
1.) The video talks about how in order to put an end to this “tough guise”, men must start being more vulnerable, standing up for what’s right, and supporting women. Also media must change and women need to show that they value men that resent the tough guise. Do you think it is possible to put an end to the “tough guise”?
2.) The video focuses on the negatives of masculinity (examples: abusive relationships, reckless driving, children killing at a young age) Are there any positives to masculinity?
Over the past century, there has been a vast change in the female role and lifestyle in society. In the early 20th century, females were usually viewed as being traditional in the sense of staying home to cook and clean, take care of the children, and maintain the household. The article, “The Evolution of the American Family” by Stephanie Coontz describes how the family unit and females have truly changed over time. The documentary, Cover Girl Culture, shows how the new female image is being portrayed to younger females and its effects on the female youth. The documentary film and article both illustrate how the female gender has significantly changed over the years and has reached a new point of worshiping self-appearance and is being questioned.
In the article “The Evolution of American Families” by Stephanie Coontz, she describes how the family structure and role of women has always been changing. Coontz states on page 41, “by the 1920’s, for the first time, a slight majority of children came to live in families where the father was the breadwinner, the mother did not have paid employment outside the home, and the children were in school rather than at work.” This time period created the “traditional” family and female role, which is relatively new in our history. We label this as what life should be like. Coontz also states on page 46, “Divorce rates have come down since their peak in 1979-1980, especially for college educated couple.” This break in the “traditional” family life might have been viewed negatively, however, women also began working more and pursuing higher education during the end of the twentieth century. Stephanie Coontz concludes on page 46, “American families have always been in flux, and many different family arrangements and values have worked for various groups at different times.” As time progress, people who grew up in one period do not always agree with the new period of growth. There has always been a change in lifestyle and how the family is structured. However, we are seeing a new type of change in the female youth of our nation that might affect the family structure of tomorrow.
In the documentary, Cover Girl Culture, young girls were asked what they would like to be when they grew up; they answered models. When asked why, they hesitated but answered that they wanted to be rich and famous (Cover Girl Culture). The documentary also interviewed a plastic surgeon who further analyzed this question and said it was true that many young children do not aim for the traditional jobs such as a police officer, nurse, or veterinarian, but rather pursue fame and fortune (Cover Girl Culture). Young girls are being “hypnotized” by ads on television and magazines showing how models are the perfect figure and have everything that they could ask for. This unprecedented advertising is changing how females portray themselves and also what they are setting out to become in life.
I believe this situation is causing a major problem in our female youth, which will have an effect on future family life. Young girls are being pressured by advertisements to become “perfect.” This lays the foundation for girls having self-confidence and self-esteem issues when they consistently compare themselves to models. Only a fraction of women are capable of looking like models but yet the majority compare themselves to this minority. Being so consumed on ones image and with the goal of becoming a model as a job may mislead the female youth to an unfortunate lifestyle. Females are being viewed as sex icons and this may distort future family structures and how women may be portrayed. A very interesting video discusses how young females are indeed changing and that they are growing up too fast (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfqXmidvBWY). The question is, what effect will this have on the young females when they grow up? Overall, change in family structure is imminent because it has been changing over hundreds of years, but we must be careful how we lay the foundation for future generations to come.
Discussion Questions:
1.) How might this “Cover Girl Culture” affect our female youth when they grow up?
2.) In what ways should we limit this advertisement bombardment, or should we not?
3.) How might the family structure change in the next 50 years?
Brigitte Vargas
Group 2
The documentary “Consuming Kids” and the article “ A Consumer in the Family” written by Linn discuss how industries advertise their products to children and how they affect the families. The next article that is viewed is “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct” written by Mintz discuses the timeline of the development of children and the different stages.
In the article “A Consumer in the family”, Linn discusses how the industries are putting stress into the parents when the item that is being advertised is questioning the parent’s morals. Linn also discusses the nagging factor that most marketing companies are using. The nag factor is when a child will do anything and ask as many times until he or she receives the item. Once again this could put stress to parents that can’t afford certain items because of the social class they are in. The article mentions that the studies that are being conducted aren’t informing the parents about the reason behind the study and how it could negatively affect the parent. Linn states, “The problem is that while parents are trying to set limits, marketing executives are working day and night to undermine their authority”(Linn, 38), which shows that the marketing executives don’t care for the parents as long as they know the child has the control of getting what he or she wants. This shows that children are in danger not only in the health issues but also in how they develop into society.
In the Documentary “Consuming Kids” shows that parents are the least of their worries and how children are the new influence on what parents buy. The documentary also states how media and technology is becoming a great influence on how marketing companies advertise their items. The video shows that children are easily influenced by the advertisements because of the colors or the social benefit. The documentary stated that throughout the advertisements they aren’t solely focusing on the product but the way the child or teen will feel once they have the product. The video also states that boys and girls are advertised differently because the girls are mostly advertised with beauty and social meaning while boys are advertised with violence and power.
The article “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct” states the development of childhood throughout the colonial period until today (Mintz, 49). Mintz is stating how in the early period children would go outside and help the family with chores. The article states how throughout history, parents may not be home due to work or divorce and the child wouldn’t have parental control at all times. Mintz mentions that the home is a place of stability but now in the present there isn’t much stability for some children because of family problems.
The common theme throughout all sources, I found that children aren’t acting as children but much older because of the products that are being sold to them and they way they act. The age between tweens is now 6- 12 while before it was 12-14 (Consuming Kids) but because of the society today, they are taking the child out of childhood. Health is also a major issue that was discussed because of the products being sold is not only toys but fast foods which can bring a child with diabetes or obesity. Both the documentary and article about consuming kids mainly focuses on the advertisement of the child and the negative affects whereas the article “ American childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct” is based on how the child has been affected by technology and society.
I found an outside article that reflects on the book written by Linn and another that discuss the marketing on kids in today’s society. Seth Stevenson who wrote the article “See Spot Run: Are commercials really bad for kids”, states that he at first didn’t believe what Linn had to say until he talked to her on the phone. He was convinced that commercials and marketing do affect the child and the parent’s authority. Stevenson also states that children today aren’t looking to play with toys but rather be entertained. With all the articles I believe that children are becoming to advance and not enjoying their youth as much as they can because of the media and products being sold to them.
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/ad_report_card/2004/12/see_spot_run.html
Discussion Questions:
1. Do you think the nagging factor always works with parents even if they have a strong backbone?
2. Do you believe technology has made the child develop faster? Why?
3. Do you think marketing companies should stop undermining parent’s authority?
Christie Merrick
Sociology of the Family
Group 4
Week 1
The perception of man as “tough, rugged, and powerful” is one that has become increasingly prominent in today’s society. In everyday life, it is easy to see how stereotypes play out, however this is one that people overlook because it has just become a part of life. In the documentary “Tough Guise,” one is able to see how this stereotype has come into play and how it has affected all of society, not just man himself. In the beginning of the video, it shows pictures and videos of women being beaten, men with large weapons, fights in sports games and on television, WWF, and war. These are only a few examples of what is around us that leads men to believe that being a so-called “macho-man” is the correct way to be. Throughout this documentary, we are introduced to different examples of the effect this has brought unto the world around us. One example that stood out to me was the use of the Wizard of Oz. In this movie, a man hides behind a curtain and a mask so that he can feel as though he is powerful, strong, respected, and tough. This is most likely how many boys and men feel in society today. This video hits the spot when it shows the way in which media portrays men as dominant. One cannot flip through the channels on their television without seeing wrestling, a show with crime and men with guns, women being portrayed as sexual objects, or music videos. In the video, it claims that these are the major reasons boys and men act the way they do. Statistically, eighty five percent of murder cases are performed by men, ninety five percent of violent physical assault cases are by males, ninety five percent of domestic violence cases are at the fault of the male, and one fourth of men will perform an act of violence against his partner. According to Stephanie Coontz, in the past fifteen years family life has become more stable. Divorce rates have dropped which means there is less domestic violence. (Coontz 46). Newspapers have created headlines stating “Youth Violence,” however, what is going on is not actually youth violence, it is a majority boys killing boys and girls, not kids killing kids. There has been a huge epidemic in recent years of men assaulting women and it is a fact that one million American women are stalked annually. This is a large number of women to be living in fear of what move a man may make next against them. Many boys are brought up to believe that “if you want respect you got to earn it.” This should not be the case. This is what leads to so many tragedies in American life, including the Columbine shooting. Tragedies such as this are done because boys are bullied in school and having a gun or a weapon gives them strength against others that cannot be contested.
This past century has been the bloodiest of all human nature. I do agree with what this video is saying about how boys and men have become victims of the media. It is very rare in everyday life that one can flip through the television channels and come across a show that does not have some act of violence or degrading image toward women. This is making boys and men think that this is the right way to live their life. In fact, it is not. When boys are sensitive and able to have a heart and care for others, that makes them a well-rounded person. There is nothing honorable about a man who believes he is better than all others and more powerful and intimidating. These are the men who live empty lives.
Discussion Questions:
1. Do you believe that the reason 76% of males binge drink in college is because of pressure to be more intimidating?
2. Do you believe that “sexualization of violence” has anything to do with men becoming more aggressive? Or do you believe that this is just entertainment for men?
Katelyn Black
Group 4, Blog 1
The documentary Tough Guise, was all about masculinity of men, and how they are supposed to act and look to be “real men.” This documentary goes on to explain that men are brought up these days to be tough, independent, strong, athletic, and muscular. It is believed that if you are not this stereotypical type then you are called names such as queer, fag, wimp, girl. Most men believe that in order to be considered a real man, then they have to act and look tough. One of the discussion questions that I came up with for this documentary is that; “men are portrayed and seen as tough, muscular, independent, strong people. This is the masculinity of males. But, are males this way because of the media? Or is it a combination of how they are brought up in their households, along with the media?” This is one of the main ideas that this documentary is addressing.
I think that a huge part of men being known as these masculine tough guys is due to the media. In the documentary, Tough Guise, it talked of how much men and their appearances have changed from the 50’s to today, even through figurines that young boys are playing with. Movies back in the 50’s would show men with smaller frames holding small guns. Now, men in movies have to have big arms with big guns. Even figurines bodies are muscular, showing males that they need to look like this in order to be considered a “real man” (Katz, Tough Guise). Also shown in the documentary is men and boys being portrayed as athletic beings. Going to the clip of young boys playing sports being told to “suck it up” if they were to get hurt. (Katz, Tough Guise) The media, and parents are the ones stipulating how males should look and act. I believe that this is not right, males are becoming more and more violent, and by them becoming this way is making it seem as though it is acceptable in our society because the media is making it okay.
This leads me to talk about how the documentary is stating that society is making it okay for males to be violent. News papers, the news, movies, media, these are all detrimental to society by making it appear as though it is a social norm for males to act out and be violent towards others. The documentary was discussing such situations as murder and rape, and that if a male were to commit a crime as this then it would barely appear in the papers. But, if a female were to murder or rape someone it would be everywhere in the news. This is because people are finding it a social norm for males to be violent and act out towards others, and because the news is not making it an obscure thing for a male to act this way, then society is becoming more acceptable and prone to this kind of attitude that males have. (Katz, Tough Guise) Males are always going to be more dominant than females because the media displays men this way. That they are stronger then women by both physical and mental attributes.
Moving on to the article, “The Evolution of the American Families,” I found several points made in this article that directly compare to things stated in the documentary Tough Guise. This article discussed the many roles of males and females in the American family. One thing that stuck out to me in the article, which I thought related to the documentary and went with the theme of the masculine male, was the discussion of the family at the time of the Great Depression and World War II. The men were supposed to be the ones working, but they were also the ones being shipped off to fight in the war because they are “tough.” But, usually men were the ones who worked away from the home bringing in the money for the family. A quote in the article, “ Wives who worked in the war industries while the men were away garnered social approval—as long as they were willing to quit their jobs when the men came home” (Coontz, 42). This to me showed that men were the ones who were supposed to be strong and independent. The women were not to help with income. Another quote, “Politicians rewrote the tax code to favor male breadwinner families over dual-earner families, explicitly to discourage wives from working” (Coontz, 43). This just goes to show that the males were to ones in charge of the important things, and that they were the reliable, independent half of the family.
Both the article and documentary made males out to have to be a certain way to be accepted within the society. If you were not strong, independent, looked a certain way, muscular, then you were not considered to be a “real man.” Over time men have been up-played to be bigger and better every year. This will never change unless the media does something about how males are portrayed through movies, shows, magazines, the news, etc.
Discussion Questions:
1) Men are portrayed and seen as tough, muscular, independent, strong people, this is the masculinity of males. But are males this way because of the media? Or is it a combination of how they are brought up in their households, along with the media?
2) Is masculinity being constructed as a cultural norm?
Stephanie, Coontz. “The Evolution of the American Families.” 2010
The documentary “Beauty Mark,” is narrated through the perspective of Diane Israel, a former Boulder, Colorado competitive athlete turned psychotherapist. (http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=236&template=PDGCommTemplates/HTN/Item_Preview.html). She chose to make this documentary to demonstrate how beauty is dictated through society. Throughout it, she addresses the reasoning for why she is the way she is and what experiences have led her to becoming herself.
Diane interviews personal trainer, Brenda Maller, about her feelings regarding her self-esteem. She says, “I feel sad sometimes that I can’t truly love myself for who I am, and I’m never enough” (Beauty Mark: Body Image and the Race for Perfection). Many of the pre-teens interviewed in the “Cover Girl Culture” video demonstrated similar feelings. They show this through criticizing themselves. They too are not accepting of their bodies and if given the chance they would make a change in hopes of becoming more beautiful. Like the creator of the “Cover Girl Culture” documentary, Diane seeks to find the reasons women feel this way.
Diane discusses how the media specifically portrays what is considered a beautiful woman. Jane Brody, Personal Health Writer for The New York times states, “One of the problems that we have with body image in this country is that someone else is dictating what a body is supposed to look like and not everyone can fit into the same mold” (Beauty Mark: Body Image and the Race for Perfection). The media clouds the minds of women with idea that beauty is specific to one size and shape. Although in “Cover Girl Culture,” many of the employees of Teen Vogue try to dispute this, it is evident that a very thin, lanky, tall girl is the ideal model for their magazine. Not every woman fits this shape and thinking they must look a certain way is negatively impacting the self-esteem of young girls and women worldwide.
Both videos address the idea of what is to blame for these negative body images women feel towards themselves. Diane Israel recognizes that it is not the media that has caused her to be the way she is. There are psychological and social factors that have all shaped her as a person. Within the documentary, she discussed growing up in a household with a controlling father and a mother who had all of the physical beauty most women would desire, but on the inside was hollow and depressed. Diane discussed always feeling as though she was disappointing her parents because she was born a girl when really they had wanted a son. She even admitted to being raped on a family vacation. The culmination of all of these experiences together has shaped her into become a woman who wanted to control her weight and her looks through excessive exercise and eating. She admitted that these were aspects of her life she knew she could control. She focused on her weight and food to distract her from her problems. This contrasts “Cover Girl Culture”, which was more focused on the way in which the media impacts girls and women within society. Diane recognizes that the media is causing an impact, but her feelings stem from other factors.
I find it interesting that Diane discussed not only her journey as an athlete battling with body issues, but also how other athletes felt the same way and had turned to steroids or anorexia to achieve their goals. To the public, they looked like perfect, in shape, superstar athletes, which are constantly gaining positive attention, when on the inside they are continually being suffocated by the idea that they are not enough. By the end of the documentary, I somewhat expected Diane to say that she is doing great and everyday she feels her best, but instead she admits that sometimes when she stops, she feels vulnerable. I like the truthfulness to that statement and how she admits that there will be no finish line to this journey. Instead, she has to take life one day at a time.
Discussion Questions:
Do you agree that the media is to blame for causing women to feel negatively about themselves?
What are some other forces you feel are causing young girls and women to feel this way?
Do you think the typical mold for what the media considers beautiful will ever change?
Blog 1
Group 5
People tend to think that marriage has drastically changed throughout time. Stephanie Coontz explains how this isn’t necessarily true. In her video lecture, she explains how new marriage view are actually “extremely traditional” and traditional marriages are actually fairly new. When I first heard her say this in the video it really didn’t make much sense to me. However, She proceeded to give examples that made it clearer. She stated how dual earner families aren’t something that is relatively new and has quite a history. Also, Males weren’t considered the “head” of the household until late 19th/early 20th century. Some things that are considered new were actually traditional were one parent families due to high death rates and when a spouse passed away this led to step families which is also considered to be not as traditional.
Then comes the topic of whether marriages are actually out of love or just for the sake of reproduction or wealth. Personally, I think it is hard to imagine a marriage without love. The only exception might be a marriage that is arranged and as Dr. James Walton says in the additional information posted below, almost 50% of all marriages today are still arranged. I can’t imagine a marriage that is just for the sake of wealth of power but you still see it happening today. You see these younger women marrying old men just for their money and to me that’s not true marriage.
In Coontz article, “The Evolution of American Families”, She explains how because of the industrializing in nineteenth century families became smaller and closer. She stated, “ Marriage came to be seen primarily about love, although the law continued to support men’s legal and economic authority in the home. The distinction between home and work, both physically and conceptually, sharpened.” (Coontz, 36). So here we see that marriage started to become less about wealth and/or power. I think today there is more marriage out of love than before but not necessarily a love that will last. Granted, there are many people who marry once and are happily married for the rest of their lives but divorce, single parent homes, and step families seems to be more prominent than ever due to failed marriage or even no marriage at all.
Additional Information:
A History of Marriage by Dr. James Walton
Discussion Question:
Coontz states that one-parent families and step -families date pretty far back in history due to high death rates. If it weren’t for high death rates, do you think these type of families would have still existed in the past and why?
Blog 1
Group 2
In the article “A Consumer in the Family” by Susan Linn(1), the topic of how the media affects childhood behavior is explained. She says that the parents are not the ones at fault. In fact, it is the media that has set the children’s behavior against the wishes of their parents. The media gives the children something they need to convince their parents to buy a certain product. They have what is called the “nag factor.” The nag factor is inscribed into the child’s brain at a small age without them even knowing it. Through social media such as television, radio, magazines, and the internet, children learn that nagging can get them what they want. Although it may not be plain to see, the marketers do put the nag factor into advertisements. It can be shown here in this McDonald’s advertisement:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh8kiL5syOc (2)
In this commercial, we can see that the “fry kids” take the fries and try to run away. This is teaching kids that they can have what they want even if they have to resort to other means when they are not handed what they want. The marketers undermine the parent’s authority through this process in an attempt to sell their product. This idea corresponds very well with the documentary Consuming Kids(3). Consuming Kids addresses the same situation. They discuss how kids are immersed in advertising every day. Kids are always surrounded by brand names and logos. The media industry has placed advertisements everyone so that they are impossible to avoid. The current media industry is going after kids like they never have before. The kids nowadays are bombarded with messages from so many different places that no parent is able to shield them. The documentary also explains that the current media is why kids are so used to violence. The companies that make the movies and give their movie a rating is not concerned with if the movie is healthy for a child of a certain age to watch. Instead, they are only concerned with if that child’s parent will let that kid see the movie based on the rating. The media industry has even started to get to children of a very young age. Products that claim to promote educational growth in an infant have become very popular. These products, however, do not have any proof that they give any advantage towards your child’s education. In fact, some say that these early educational DVDs limit your child’s vocabulary. At this very young age, children are taught that being in front of a screen is good. This limits the child’s imagination and freedom of thought to express them self. This also prevents children from going outside in the fresh air and playing sports with friends. Not only does children involvement in consumer culture stop them from going outside, but a test has shown that the more media a child uses, the more likely they are to score higher on a depression and anxiety test.
Through both of these sources, it is clear that kids are being bombarded with messages and advertisements every day. This message prompts the children to act in bad behavior and even go as far as putting the children’s health and emotional state at risk. Although we are aware of this media industry monopoly, it is hard to say what the solution should be. Some say the parents should take more control, while others say that stricter media regulations are what is best. Either way, it is clear that kids are being surrounded by social media telling them how to act, and that is not what is best for the future.
Discussion Questions:
1) Think of any current kids commercial. Can you see how it may affect the behavior of children?
2) Do you remember any commercial from when you were a kid? What message do you think it was trying to send you?
3) What do you think our lives would be like if the media industry had full control over everyone?
Sources:
(1) Linn, Susan. Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood. New York: New, 2004. Print.
(2) McDonald’s commercial – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh8kiL5syOc
(3) Consuming Kids – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uUU7cjfcdM
Cover Girl Culture expressed so many of the concerns of women of all ages, but particularly adolescent girls today. From the time girls are very young, they are fed images of an ideal figure and are presented with the characteristics of an ideal woman. The documentary was thorough in its analyses of several fashion magazines. It also provided great insight into the world of fashion, and its impact on the current ideal image of a woman. The interviews with the magazine contributors and editors were perfect examples of how the industry presents severely distorted images. Though what these interviewees said may not reflect what they personally believe, they had to remain loyal to the company that employed them, which helps to further illustrate the fact that the women portrayed are simply used to sell products.
These businesses are based on training women to believe that they need a certain product to look beautiful. A model, by definition, is a representation of a proposed structure. Magazine advertisements use these human models to give women something to aspire to. They soon believe that the model is what they are supposed to look like and will become more likely to buy any product that can bring them a little bit closer to this “model” status.
Cover Girl Culture seems to go hand-in-hand with Stephanie Coontz’s article, “The Evolution of American Families,” as they discuss the exploitation of families by advertisers. In both the documentary and the article, an image of perfection is adopted by families and they believe that they are expected to emulate certain standards. In the article, Coontz references the “Ozzie and Harriet images,” (Coontz 45). “Ozzie and Harriet” was a radio show that developed into a television sitcom in the 50s and 60s that seemed to portray the ideal family lifestyle. This lifestyle included a loving husband and wife and their relationship with their two sons. It depicted the strong idea of the nuclear family being the strongest unit of relationships. Cover Girl Culture and “The Evolution of American Families” demonstrate the damaging effect that advertisements and the media can have on expectations.
In both Cover Girl Culture, and “The Evolution of American Families,” women are expected to be the weaker gender of the species that can contribute little more than their looks or their nurturing nature to society. Though it is widely more accepted now for women to go to work and school, many believe that true success comes from fame and beauty.
It is upsetting to me that people feel as though they need to make comparisons between themselves and others. Those individuals without enough self-esteem may begin to believe that they are less-than-perfect if they don’t have a perfectly slim figure, or don’t live in a two-parent household. This is obviously not true, though, and these people need to understand that diversity is the real norm. No two people are exactly alike, just as no two families are exactly alike. People believe that they need to achieve a certain standard and conform to everyone around them. I agree with Coontz when she wrote that we should not try to “recreate some (largely mythical) ‘traditional’ family of the past,” (Coontz 47). I would like to live in a world where people can be proud of themselves and their background because it is unique, rather than be embarrassed because it doesn’t match the majority.
This link is to a commercial for the TV show, “Modern Family.” It is a TV show that challenges the common stereotypes found within sitcom families. It is a slightly more accurate representation of today’s families, as they account for divorce, remarriage, adoption, gay marriage, and arguments.
Cover Girl Culture. Dir. Nicole Clark. Zen Pen Films. Internet.
Coontz, Stephanie. “The Evolution of American Families.” Web.
Thomas Coffey
Group 6
Blog 1
After reading the article “American Childhood as a Social Cultural Construct,” and viewing the documentary Consuming Kids, it is clear to me that the role of children in America is an ever changing idea that is greatly shaped and influenced by society. In today’s world, children have the access to and knowledge of technology such as cell phones and the internet that a child even in my generation did not have. Advances in technology is what I believe to be the social and cultural change for the newest generation of children Steven Mintz talks about in his article. In the article, Mintz claims “Childhood is not an unchanging, biologically determined stage of life, childhood is a social and cultural construct that varies by region, class, and historical era(Mintz 48).” I believe the internet age is a type of historical era that Mintz had in mind when he came up with this idea. Children’s increased knowledge and use of the internet and social media has changed what it means to be a child. Instead of running over to a friend’s house to see if they can come out to play children are now messaging each other on face book about a new YouTube video that just came out. Consuming kids is a great example of Mintz’s idea that childhood is shaped by the environment children are in. Never before have children been the target of so many marketing efforts. Part of this is due to the increased buying power and influence children have in the family. Everything from car purchases to what food to buy is heavily influenced by children today. Car commercials feature popular children characters in order to make children want the mini-van being advertised. The car wasn’t cool to children until they saw Dora the Explorer driving in the car. Marketers also have multiple ways in reaching children which makes appealing to them even more important. Internet games that feature companies such as Oreo or Pepsi can be found on company’s website for the sole purpose of brining children to the site and reinforcing their brand.
In his article, Mintz claims that children in today’s world are growing up faster. Sex is being experienced early by children amongst many other coming of age moments in a person’s life. I believe that technology and the massive amount of media children are exposed to that does highlight sex and other explicit behavior. No matter how hard parents try, in today’s world sheltering children from sex and other inappropriate behavior is nearly impossible. I think a great example of this is in a video I found on YouTube titled Ethical Dilemma: Should Kids be exposed to Media. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0ui7yG63OM- In the video, young girls are asked their favorite T.V. show and favorite actors. The video then shows the show and corresponding actress Miranda Cosgrove’s music video in which kissing and violence are both shown. These girls were 6 or 7 years old being exposed to kissing and violence and view it as acceptable because they see a TV. star doing it. The influx of technology and media children are being exposed to in today’s world is without a doubt the biggest social and cultural force guiding childhood today.
Kara Battaglia
Sociology of the Family
Blog 1/25/12
Group #2
I found the documentary, Consuming Kids, to be very interesting. I had never thought of how much advertisements and the media really do target kids, but it was very apparent after watching the documentary. Not only was I oblivious to the extent at which companies target children in order to sell products, I was also oblivious to how deliberate and manipulative their tactics to do so are. For example, the documentary mentioned how McDonald’s and Coca Cola products are commonly shown in kids movies or television, which causes the child to want those products even if they are unhealthy and parents disapprove. Commercials say things such as “this is the best product ever,” knowing that children, being very impressionable, will take this literally and nag their parents. Companies encourage children to nag, even though it creates discord with their parents, in order to sell things. I believe this is very manipulative and that marketers shouldn’t target children as much. It is a shame that because of advertisements and commercials, kids’ minds are mostly fixated on what their parents will buy them next in order to be “cool.” This documentary really made me aware of how marketing uses children for their own benefit, even if it is not for the child or family’s wellbeing.
The article by Linn, “A Consumer in the Family,” pertains to the documentary. Linn discusses how marketing experts put much thought into how to effectively target children, even if its not ethical. She mentions how marketers research the importance of nagging, and target children in situations where nagging might be most effective, such as having a single or divorced parent who is often influenced by guilt (Linn, 35). Nagging isn’t the only problem; another problem has to do with exposure. Children are constantly exposed to marketing whether it is online, on tv, in magazines, on the radio, etc., which makes it more difficult to set limits, Linn says. Linn mentions how some people suggest that the responsibility of the purchase still lies in the parent and that parents should still say “no”. She thinks, however, that parents have an innate desire for their children to be happy and that the marketing industry takes advantage of this, making it hard for parents to say “no” to their children’s nagging (Linn, 39).
“American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct,” by Steven Mintz also relates to the documentary. It mentions how marketing to kids can be very aggressive, but focuses more on the history of raising children and how the family and society as a whole should have more influence on a child than advertisements. It recognizes that sadly, this is not always the case, and that changes need to be made to restore more stability into the family in order to combat the influence of media and advertisements (Mintz, 58) Mintz thinks that American society is not as child-friendly as it seems and that this is partly responsible for how influenced children are by the media and advertisements. He says that in America, many young people grow up in poverty without health care and that there are few resources for child care (Mintz, 57). Also, many children today grow up in divorced families and are raised by single parents. He thinks America needs to provide better care for the young in order to make an progress and for children to not be so influenced by factors in popular culture (Mintz, 58). I agree with Mintz and do think that some parents need to be more involved with and talk to their children more so that they don’t get so influenced by everything in the media.
I posted a link that is relevant to all three things I previously mentioned. It goes into detail about how companies market to children and talks about how much time and money some companies put into specifically targeting kids. It then discusses the concerns of using children to sell products, and concludes that marketing to children should be carefully restricted, which is also what I think.
http://www.uow.edu.au/~sharonb/children.html
Discussion questions:
What steps do you think parents can take to limit the influence marketing has on their children?
Do you think it is ethical to target children so strongly?
Do you think that these marketing tactics affected you as a child?
group 4
Blog #1
When America’s defines “real man”, they typically give them label such a strong, tough, physical and powerful. These ides of what a real man is have been part of society for millions of years. This ideology has been supported and seen in the family development throughout history. In the documentary, ” tough guys” by Jackson Katz you see with a real man has turned into. He shows America’s new portrayal of a man to be someone who needs control, demand respect and is powerful. He shows that throughout the years violence has become more prevalent for men, in how to gain respect and control. Many boys look to the media for role models. Today the media makes the role models extremely muscular and intimidating. The boys feel that guns will give them the power and respect they desire. But boys also get the same impression from sports. Today’s sports glorify fighting and extremely fit bodies. Sports are evolved from normal looking bodies to extremely toned and extremely muscular forms. Fighting has become a center and draw when it comes to promoting and gaining fans in the world of sports. Many highlight reels and clips of gamers are on the hardest hits, fights or how intimidating and opposing team has.
This has allowed it become something that is glorify and looked to as that needs to be done in pretty much all sports. In some ways this shows that boys no longer need a gun to be tough, but shows that anything going against this image is not tough. The movie explains that many boys feel like they are put in a box and being outside of that box is considered not acceptable. Boys have dealt with having day social norms that allow them not to express emotion. This can lead to many negative impacts and effects of how kids grow up. When you look at the article “The Evolution of American Families” written by Stephanie Coontz. Which show how the role in family has changed over the years. She talks about the role of which men took in the family dynamic and how it influenced their lives. It talks about how marriage used to be considered the correct and only way to raise a family. How Man used to have all the power in the family years ago. Now women can run a family and be every self-efficient. Which can be hard to handle for many men who are used to having the power. Many men still feel that the family should be run the way and weren’t prepared for the change and movement that swept the country. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDPm67rZ2Co
Many men felt that the women’s role was to keep the house and mind the children while they made the money. This changed during WWII when women took a bigger part in the working force.
Both the article and the movie do mention the influence of the ideas such as being the sole breadwinner or the moneymaker. This allows for little room, since many today times are changing and you are seeing more men taking on the stay at home dad role. But the stereotype of putting people in can be seen as a bad thing since when times did change the impact on the family wasn’t great as seen in the article and was more damaging when you see it in the movie. But both do influence and in-courage the idea of keeping the connections with in the family. But show the totally different ways that American has labeled the roles in American society.
1. What can be done in the media to change the way, men and the country view “A Real Man”?
2. When does the image change and who is the one to change it
Elizabeth Hess
Group 5
Blog 1
“The Evolution of American Families” an article written by Stephanie Coontz and “The Way We Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap”, a lecture given by the same woman, focus on how views of families differ around the world, and how the American family has evolved through time. Coontz argues in both the lecture and her article that marriage has been changing and fluctuating for a very long time. Things that we thought are new to our generation have in fact been part of society before and the things that we deem traditional are actually not the way that marriage always was.
The “traditional family” wasn’t always what we think it is today. When America was first settled, women weren’t seen as the nurturer and stay at home mother and the man wasn’t seen as the provider and protector. “Men often married women because they needed someone to help them on the farm or in their business.” (Coontz, 35). Women were originally a major part of providing for the family just like men were. It’s not until recently that the idea of the “homemaker” and the “provider” came around. Today, a lot of families are back to that original family where both men and women work.
The definition of what a family is, is always evolving. In Coontz’s lecture she explained that there have been many changes in the family over the last thirty year. More changes than has ever taken place before. The has been a rise in the marriage age, marriage is not the only place where people first have sex, single parents and gay couples with children are much more prevalent in our society than ever before and it is much more accepted now. Some marriages are childless and while that used to be unheard of it is greatly accepted now. Divorce is more readily available to anyone who is unhappy which often leads to remarriage and stepfamilies being brought together. Finally, women now have the right to say no to shotgun weddings as a result of pregnancy.
This video show the changing views of people in the USA. In even a few people have changed their definition of what a family is and who is included in the family.
One last thing that I found interesting that Coontz discussed was that people never used to marry for love. They married for social and economic stability and in order to have ties with other families. Parents used to arrange marriages for their children in ways that would best benefit them. However, “during the second half of the 18th century… the power of elders to dictate to the young and of the elites to control the daily life of the lower classes weakened.” (Coontz, 37) People were horrified that the young started wanting to date for love instead of for power and advantage.
I agree with Coontz that the views of marriage have been changing greatly over the past years and in my opinion it is a good thing. People in society today would never accept the way things used to be and I think it is for the better. While there are still some difficulties in marriages people are happier because they get to decide for themselves who they love and who they want to spend their lives with and when they become unhappy they can choose to leave. I think this is for the best.
Discussion Question:
• In Colonial society, people got married for social and economic reasons and hoped that love would develop. In our society, do you think marriage is more about love or social status? How would you feel about marrying someone for their wealth instead of for love?
Eileen Connolly
Sociology of the Family
Group 3
Blog Post #1
In the film, “Killing Us Softly 4,” Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D. (2011), uses an impressive collection of print and film advertisements that she has gathered over a long period of time to show how advertising is used to sexualize and sell products, and to further spread the modern societal expectations of women. Often, we find publication authors and editors espousing their concerns for the frighteningly body conscious American youth, and telling the public how they are making changes to ensure that more realistic and healthy images of men and women will be placed in the content of their advertisements. Jean Kilbourne shows with decades of advertisements, that if anything, advertisements have become more provocative and sexualized. The images she provides also show that though these images are generally geared toward women, these images have a profound effect on the psyche of modern men as well. Both women and men are judging their bodies more harshly as a result of these ever-pervasive, unrealistic images.
In the article, “The Evolution of American Families,” by Stephanie Coontz (2010), Ms. Coontz discusses how family is defined differently in different areas/cultures, and how it has evolved over time. It was stunning to see that the very domestic image of the family, as most we are taught to assume was the standard, only developed in the past 200 years or so. Previously, women did half of the labor around the homestead and were seen as important in keeping the family afloat. After World War II and in the 1950’s, this changed when women were seen more and more as one who “had dinner on the table every night and raised healthy children who never talked back or got into any trouble that couldn’t be solved by a fatherly lecture” (Coontz, p. 44). Even today, you will often hear the threat of “wait until your father gets home!” in television, movies, and books. This standard continues to place women in the position of subservience, as though they cannot handle familial conflict without the help of their strong, male spouse.
In both the film and the article, the socialization of women is discussed. The family is a very important medium in the socialization of young boys and girls, but in the modern age, so is the media. All of the advertisements that were discussed by Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D. were shockingly heterosexist and Caucasian-focused. The images that are seen by children from a very young age have an incredible impact on the formation of their self-image and on what they view as important in life. It seems to me that no matter how far women have come in earning rights and carving out a place in the workforce, females are still taught to base their worth on their looks. Even though Stephanie Coontz discusses the progression of women into the workforce and their new roles in a developing modern family, it is amazing how very little the media perception of women has changed with the evolution of the family. There are images for every age group showing females that their worth is based on their appearance and sexuality. Disney movies, as entertaining and innocent as they seem, are the perfect way for girls to learn what society says is important.
Below is a satirical, but striking image, depicting the underlying message of what popular Disney “princesses” teach young girls:
http://www.google.com/imgres?q=disney+princess+spoof&num=10&um=1&hl=en&biw=1174&bih=630&tbm=isch&tbnid=mkz_94Z_X6S9YM:&imgrefurl=http://www.coolorama.com/geektyrant-com/life-lessons-to-be-learned-from-the-disney-princesses/&docid=Wd3Th9sJNOVktM&imgurl=http://geektyrant.com/storage/post-images/Disney%252520Princess%2527.jpg%253F__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION%253D1274830481508&w=651&h=538&ei=TAsjT6WOCuzq0QHB5ejxCA&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=461&vpy=323&dur=571&hovh=188&hovw=228&tx=77&ty=124&sig=100833362568455413153&sqi=2&page=1&tbnh=131&tbnw=159&start=0&ndsp=18&ved=1t:429,r:14,s:0
As females age and transition into their teenage and adult years, there are print and television ads that further reinforce beauty as the standard of worth. Females, and males alike, are bombarded by images everyday that show an unattainable standard of beauty. Many of the models and celebrities featured in these images are beautiful by genetics, but many get extra help from airbrushing. The industry of photoshopping and airbrushing images to be more “perfect” has gotten so out of hand, that in Europe laws on the subject are being considered in an attempt to correct the problem. These laws would require all photoshopped pictures to be labeled. This would be extremely beneficial because it would let women and men know that the image that they may be tempted to compare themselves to is actually not a real image at all, but a computer generated composite that creates an impossible standard.
Below is an article from BBC News discussing the push for photoshopping laws:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10856055
Further, it is important to realize what the effect that a very Caucasian-centered ideal of beauty has on men and women of other races and cultures. It is spreading the message that in order to be beautiful and worthy in modern times, you must be thin, sexy yet still innocent, and have the features of a light-skinned White person. Often, this isn’t something that we think about, but it can have a very damaging effect on how young men and women of other races and cultures feel about themselves, and what is considered normal.
Below is a video made by a young African American girl portraying how young African American girls see themselves and the stereotypes of their own race:
All of this in mind, it is important to realize the effect that family and media can have together on the socialization of children into gender roles. Family, no matter the gender of the parents or the blending of blood and non-blood relatives, has as profound an impact on the socialization of a child as media and peer groups do. Despite the strides that women have made with rights and in the workplace, women are often seen for their appearance first and foremost. It is important for families to realize what their children are seeing and to make sure that male and female children realize that there is more to life than being good looking or famous. It is up to the family to be a source of support, no matter how we define “family,” and to teach that women and men can aspire to be more than sex objects or a cog in the wheel of consumerism. Further, it is important for the family to teach young men and women that the media images that they are seeing are often photoshopped and airbrushed, and are not an accurate standard to compare themselves against. As the family evolves, it is important for the family to continue to be a source of empowerment and support for young people and encouraging them to be their best selves, not to conform to a rigid and impossible standard of worth. Finally, for the families themselves, it is important to be aware of the 3rd party effect. Because we are aware of advertisers trying to influence us, we then believe that those advertisers no longer have power over us. Being a strong person and part of a strong and supportive family requires us to remember that the media will effect us no matter what, and to constantly work to maintain a healthy self image and to be a healthy part of the lives of those around us.
Coontz, Stephanie. “The Evolution of American Families.” Families As They Really Are. Ed. Barbara J. Risman. W.W.Norton & Co., 2010. 30-47. Print.
Kilbourne, Jean. “Killing Us Softly 4.” Lecture. 27 Jan. 2012. Youtube.com. 14 Aug. 2011. Web. 27 Jan. 2012. .
Marie Hollister
Sociology of The Family
Group 6
Week 1
Both Steven Minz’s article “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct” and the documentary Consuming Kids portray childhood in this country as something socially constructed, for better or worse. The article charts the history of the experience of kids throughout history and how it has changed. It used to be that being a kid was seen as something vulnerable, useless, and negative, such as in colonial America. However, as we have progressed into the twentieth century, childhood began to be viewed as an important time of development and it is even viewed nostalgically (Mintz 49-50). From the documentary, it is shown that today there are two main contradictory views of kids. One is that childhood is to be used as a marketing tool, appealing to their sensibilities and creating a whole world separate from that of adults. Parents may not even be completely aware of this “other world” – as much of it takes place on the internet (as in chat rooms and gaming sites) as well as movies, TV shows, video games, and in school. On the other hand, kids (especially girls) are being forced to grow up even quicker, though not necessarily into responsible adults. Instead, girls are being marketed highly sexualized images such as dolls and clothing.
They are also encouraged to be materialistic and focus on their outer image rather than inner growth (Consuming Kids). This concept of the “tween” is a main marketing niche for advertisers. The article also points out that the idea of adolescence did not emerge into the end of the nineteenth century with the Child Study movement. However, this latter concept was not created in order to exploit children, but rather to aid them in the “emotional and psychological turmoil” that was occurring in their body (Mintz 52). All of this has contributed to a confused idea of what childhood is and what it is meant to be.
Both the article and documentary bring up an important (and negative) aspect of American society, that being the exploitation of childhood. Mintz explains how child labor was not outlawed until the 1930’s and mandatory high school education until the 50’s (52). Consuming Kids discusses the prevalence of deceptive ads that gets by the critical thinking abilities of children. Basically, they do not know that they are being manipulated by advertisers and thus are not able to distinguish between what they really want and what they are told to want.
Social and economic class is discussed in both regarding the high impact that this classification has on children’s welfare. Though race and gender are no doubt important, it is actually not the main predictor of their developmental success. This includes parental interaction; many “working-class and poor mothers and fathers are much more likely to believe that child development occurs naturally and spontaneously,” as opposed to middle-class parents who take more an active role in the stimulation of this growth, such as organizing their activities and being involved in sports and homework, the latter being the more healthy and holistic approach (Mintz 54). The documentary shows a similar portrayal of economics, in that class difference can affect children negatively. One example is the branding of the majority of children’s products, such as clothing, food, and toys. Stores that lower classes can afford, such as Wal-Mart, have much more of this, almost to the point where everything is branded with TV and movie characters. In order to find alternative options without branding, one usually has to shop at “upper class stores” that have plain products (Consuming Kids).
Finally, both the article and documentary emphasize the fact that we need to decide as a society how we want to value our children. Do we want them to be objects of corporate greed and marketing, and grow to be individuals that think that their worth is based upon appearance and having things? We should instead foster a community in which they are accepted for who they are and where they can be free to develop at a rate which is best for them. Parents should not feel like their role is being undermined by media, and kids in poverty should be given the same nurturing and opportunities as their middle and upper class counterparts.
This is a clip from YouTube that shows that commercialization is not just prevalent in the United States. It shows the opening to the annual “Late Late Toy Show” that is a nationally televised event in Ireland every Christmas. It introduces all of the “coolest” new toys that are out each year, and the interesting part is that each toy is introduced by a kid. Getting to be on the show is the dream of many young Irish children, as I learned when I studied abroad there. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xGl4Qc0VZE
Mintz, Steven. “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct.” Families as They Really
Are. Ed. B. Risman. WW Norton, 2010. 48-58. Print.
Barbaro, Adriana and Jeremy Earp. “Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood.”
Media Education Foundation. 2008. Web. 27 January 2012.
Both, the article “American Childhood as a Social Construct” and the documentary “Consuming Kids” involve discussion of how the lives of children are ever changing. “American Childhood as a Social Construct” compares and contrasts children from colonial times to children in the 1900s to children of today. Childhood used to be seen as a deficiency and children were made to grow up as fast as they could to become adults and work and provide for their families. During the colonial times there were far fewer categories of life stages. Infant, youth, and adult were used to specify what stage of life someone was in. It was the parents responsibility to grow the child into an adult as quickly as possible. As time went on these stages developed and parents started to care for and nurture their children. Childhood was then seen as a carefree time to enjoy and have fun. Now there may be this idea that childhood is supposed to be carefree and enjoyable but children of today are in very high-stress society. Children of today have “highly pressured, hyperorganized, fast-track childhoods” (Mintz, p.55) that are not carefree and enjoyable. A portion of this has to do with the fact that the media is consuming children.
The documentary “Consuming Kids” opened my eyes to see exactly how much children are bombarded with the forces of the media. Children of today see all this marketing and think that they have to be something that they are not. They feel as if they need these products to live a normal life and be accepted by everyone around them. I believe the overall society has matured over time and children of today know more, are aware of more, and experience more than children of earlier times. Children used to be sheltered, they were not exposed to the “real world” until youth or adulthood. Children of today, as we see in the documentary “Consuming Kids”, are constantly being influenced by these outside factors, constantly exposing them to the real world. This is documentary focusing on children from about the 1960’s until today, where as the article focuses on a longer time frame.
The two are similar in the way that they describe how lives of children are changing and have changed in the past. We also see similarities in the way that society influences childhood. The overall population think they know what is right for their children, and how they should handle the situation and everyone follows that direction, but it is not always necessarily the right decision.
It disgusts me how much children are being influenced and they don’t even know it. Children are being constantly influenced and this has a negative affect on their life. More and more children are being diagnosed with ADHD, obesity and mental health problems. I believe this has to do with the way that children live their lives today. It amazes me how the media affects children compared to 50 years ago. The world has come so far, but not necessarily in a good way, seeing the affects of the changes in the long run.
http://www.childrennow.org/index.php/learn/medias_impact/
This is a website I found discussing childrens health relating to the media. There are different links to click on to read about different information, I thought it was intersting to read about.
Mintz, Steven. “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct.” Families as They Really Are. (2010): 48-58. Print
Jhally, Sut, Jean Kilbourne, and Jackson Katz. “Consuming Kids.” Media Education Foundation | Educational Videos for Teaching Media Literacy and Media Studies. Web. 29 Jan. 2012. .
“Children Now—Media’s Impact.” Children Now. Web. 29 Jan. 2012. .
Robert Feldman
Group 5
Week 1
The video lecture presented by Stephanie Coontz and the article “The Evolution of American Families” was very insightful and eye-opening. Stephanie began by pointing out that the ideal of a male bread winner didn’t come around until the nineteenth century and it didn’t actually happen until about the 1920’s and was short lived. Most of history had duel earning families. She then mentioned something very surprising fact, which was that step families were the most traditional form around due to divorces. Stephanie also talked about the many ways in which different cultures handle divorces. Something I found shocking was that there was more adultery in the past than there is today. Also in the lecture she pointed out that marriage wasn’t invented because of love, it was done to make connections and strengthen ties. Along those lines, in the past marriages were arranged and the reason for marrying someone was to become economically stable. In the article Stephanie says that “the European nobility generally used the term “family” not to refer to married parents and their children but rather to the larger kinship group from which they derived their claims to privilege and property.” (Coontz30) This statement just reinforces what she was saying from her presentation. The main points that both the presentation and the article is trying to get across is that “family” and the norms of family are forever changing and ideals, theories, and roles are forever changing as well. An example of this would be from the article she said “For the first time in sixty years, the age of marriage and parenthood fell, the proportion of marriages ending in divorce dropped, and the birthrate soared. The percentage of women remaining single reached a hundred year low. The proportion of children who were raised by a breadwinner father and a homemaker mother and who stayed in school until graduation from high school reached an all-time high.”(Coontz44) This statement just reassures my previous theory of family ideals and roles are forever changing.
I felt that both the presentation and article by Stephanie Coontz was extremely informational and has given me a lot to think about when looking at family roles. It is very amazing to me that the roles and ideals of a family can change all the time. But on the other hand I see a lot of things that remain the same. For example how in the past people would marry to have economic stability, there is still a lot of people doing that today and not for “love”. What I learned most is that each culture and generation have very complicated family roles and structure.
This link gives a lot of background and information of family ideology throughout the centuries. It also shows many examples of the changing types of family’s throughout time.
http://clc2.uniservity.com/GroupHomepage.asp?GroupId=10000549
Another link listed below relates a lot to this topic. This article talks a lot about how the traditional family is a little outdated. Meaning that the father doesn’t always have to be the bread winner and the mother doesn’t have to stay home and take care of the house and kids.
Work Cited: Coontz, Stephanie. Families as They Really Are. WW Norton, 2010. 30-47. Print.
Pat Del Santo
Blog 1 (Monday Night)
Group 1
The unrealistic goal of perfection as forced onto young girls and women of our generation forms the basis of the documentaries “Cover Girl Culture” and “The Purity Myth”. However, “The purity Myth” is more focused on the sexual roles of women, whereas “Cover Girl Culture” highlights the effect of the fashion marketing industry on young girls. “The Purity Myth” begins by describing the double standard that women are held to of abstaining from sex until marriage. The documentary refers to this idea as purity. For example, sex is viewed as a good or humorous act for men, whereas sex for women makes them dirty or slutty. The documentary cuts to a clip of the movie “The Forty-Year Old Virgin” and contrasts the way men are viewed in relation to sex with a clip from another popular movie depicting a woman as a slut for her acts (Valenti). For men, this popular culture reference appears to be a joke, but for the woman it appears much more shameful. This was an effective way at getting the viewer to see the blatant double standard that is readily apparent in American society today. However, it is also possible that this difference in treatment may be attributed to differences in the biology of men and women. Since there are real biological differences in thinking processes as caused by hormones, brain development and millions of years of evolution, certain differences between men and women are here to stay. Although, that is not to say that poor treatment of women by subjecting them to the pressure of perfection should be one of them. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoCPDvQBG5Y) This clip provides some insight into the differences between men and women at the brains structural level. It helps to explain why men and women tend to react differently to similar situations.
Another important issue addressed in the documentary are the current attempts at preventing young people from being sexually active. Valenti exposes the role of government, celebrities and various religious groups as a main source for this problem. For example, we are told that over fifty million dollars a year in tax payer money is spent on abstinence only education. Yet, countless studies have shown this method to be ineffective. Even still it remains the major approach to the issue as is shown by this video clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5Xy-RQgLFI). This concept left me wondering why newer and more effective methods are not being developed. Also interesting was a clip that shows Jessica Simpson portrayed as a role model by today’s media, which is based only on her conventional beauty as well as her abstinence from sex until marriage. This is despite her sexy music videos and public persona as an “air-head” (Valenti). I thought Valenti’s use of well researched studies combined with specific celebrity references was a good way of portraying the problem.
While “The Purity Myth” touches on the medias portrayal of conventional beauty and its effect on young girls,”Cover Girl Culture” provides a much more in depth analysis of it. For instance, it shows how marketing organizations focus on the shortcomings of the average girl. Specific examples of this occur when advertisements were shown asking girls if they wanted a better butt, or bigger boobs (Clark). Other examples include clips of young girls explaining that if they could change one thing about themselves, it would be their face (Clark). These girls should not be faced with such stressful pressures over their image at such a young age. As a result I believe it is important to find a way to limit these messages to young girls. This can be partially accomplished by parenting methods that limit exposure to images of the superficial life that celebrities are portrayed living. While this documentary did a good job exposing the way that marketing perfection hurts young girls, I think it focused too much of its attention on overly skinny models. It is difficult to see how a girl who is unhealthily skinny would be a role model to anyone. It seems that reality television shows such as “Keeping up With the Kardashian’s” are larger cause for the unrealistic desire of perfect looks and a glamorized lifestyle.
Alex Grandjacquet
Group 5 Blog #1
In the video lecture “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap” and corresponding written article “The Evolution of American Families” by Stephanie Coontz, I learned a lot of eye opening facts about marriages and their changes over the past century in the United States. Coontz is well knowledged in this field and is a good speaker; she gets her message across pretty easily. Many of the changes discussed were positive things that are expected as we grow as a society, but there was also a few things touched upon that weren’t so great.
I was very surprised to hear that adultery was much more common in the past and sometimes it wasn’t even frowned upon by society. Coontz said that it was “perfectly acceptable” and the wife would be looked at as wrong if they were to complain to their husband about cheating. Back then people married for a many different number of reasons, and more often than not the reason was not because of love. People would get married because the man had gotten the woman pregnant, financial reasons, for social status, and other material reasons. Nowadays people have much more freedom to choose who they want to marry and actually marry somebody solely on the principle of love, which is how marriage is meant to be.
To me the main point brought out in the video and lecture were that “the good old days” really weren’t the good old days, and some people were just as corrupt as people view the world today. The progressive movement of marriage is a testament to the progress of human rights as a whole in the United States. It is crazy to think that as short as 40-50 years ago in this country a man was allowed to beat his wife, cheat on his wife, and leave here whenever he pleased without any problems. Nowadays we see people marrying solely on love with each of them having equal rights within that marriage.
Coontz comments that this is a “historical paradox”. She argues that the things that have made marriage more wonderful has at the same time made marriage a weak institution and vice-versa. When their was a strict insitution of firm rules saying things like your stuck with the first person you marry etc., it can make the 2 people in the marriage really loathe each other and not put in any effort into having a healthy relationship. This can be related to many things in the world, for example, how people argue that with no drinking age young people will drink in moderation instead of going out with a binge drinking mentality because technically it is against the law for the them to do it, so they feel the need to go crazy.
To conclude I would say that Coontz does a good job in her lecture and article conveying the message that marriage has changed for the better in the last century. It has changed from being no more than 2 people who live together who are technically “married” to something based off of love where 2 people work together to maintain a good relationship.
Work Cited: Coontz, Stephanie. Families as They Really Are. WW Norton, 2010. 30-47. Print.
Jessica Zikaras
Professor Thompson
Sociology 140
30 January 2012
Week 1 Blog Response – Group 2
The documentary “Consuming Kids” showed many different opinions on the influence of media in the lives of children. It explained how children have become a market and are targeted by businesses. Most businesses shown in the film do not see this as exploitation, but rather as respectable marketing skills. They say the responsibility is up to the parents to protect their children. My question is – are parents who try to avoid marketing towards children actually trying to avoid the inevitable?
In the documentary, the amount of advertisements that were shown in movies, on children’s clothing, and even in school field trips to places like Petco and Sport’s Authority was absolutely crazy to me. It is said that children are exposed to over 3,000 commercial messages per day. I do agree that a parent can try and “protect” their child by only allowing a certain number of hours a day to be spent watching television, for example. The problem is that the marketers are smart enough to get to these parents’ children whether or not the parent has such rules. The companies are literally studying children, in what I feel is a sickening and deceitful way. They know what kids want and how to get to them. The documentary portrayed this idea in a very provoking way, even comparing these marketers to pedophiles.
“A Consumer in the Family” is an article that reiterated how influential children are in the economy today. Author Linn described children as “naggers” and said this is a skill children are learning in order to get whatever they want. Whether parents give in because they are sick of hearing their child whine or some other reason does not matter. I feel that children these days are hardly ever told no. In a study of 750 kids ages 12 to 17, it was shown that a child may ask their parents for something nine times before giving in. Again, parents do have an influence on how much their child “nags”, but it is truly unfortunate how children as consumers have become the culture.
In the article “American Childhood as a Social Cultural Construct”, Steven Mintz describes the changes children, and their roles, have gone through over the years. It was interesting to me the things he noted were more likely for children to experience today. Examples of these difference circumstances include experiencing parent’s divorce, a working mother, more time unsupervised, etc. With all of these new variables to consider, this article reminded me that we cannot exactly blame media and the marketers on the new “nagging” generation. As American adults, it is common to feel “worried that children are growing ever more disobedient and disrespectful” as generations continue. Although there is no proof that this is due to the media and such marketing skills as shown in “Consuming Kids”, I do think this has a huge impact on the lives, attitudes, and beliefs of children today.
The question then becomes, how will this influence their life in the future? The other video that I chose to watch was called “The Age of the Millenials”. This 60 Minutes broadcast described a new generation of people in the workforce. These are the people born in the 80’s/early 90’s that were brought up never hearing the word no, as the other articles have also mentioned. The video describes a group of people that stroll in to work around noon, carrying their iPods, and wearing their flip flops and expect this to just be accepted. They have a lack of work ethic and still count on their mothers to call in to work for them when they are sick. The fact that this new generation is arising now, as we see an increase in children being targeted by marketers, is no coincidence, I believe. Children are growing up being given what they want, and they are turning in to adults that do not know how to work for it.
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4126233n%3fsource=search_video
Discussion Questions:
Do businesses have a responsibility to be ethical and not focus on exploiting children? Or are they solely businesses?
Is the only solution to this branding problem government regulation? Or can parents stop the madness on their own?
Works Cited
CBS News. 60 Minutes: “The Age of the Millenials”. 25 May 2008. http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4126233n%3fsource=search_video
Linn. “A Consumer in the Family”
Mintz, Steven. “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct.” Families as They Really Are. (2010): 48-58.
Jhally, Sut, Jean Kilbourne, and Jackson Katz. “Consuming Kids.” Media Education Foundation | Educational Videos for Teaching Media Literacy and Media Studies. 29 Jan. 2012.
For decades, body image has been a vital topic of interest in the realms of sociology and psychology. Body image is described as “a subjective picture of one’s own physical appearance established both by self-observation and by noting the reactions of others” (Ferguson11-28). Self -observation and peer influence are of the utmost importance when it comes to body image, because it is exactly these factors that cause women (as well as males) to perceive themselves in such a negative manner. Having this body dissatisfaction can lead to many psychological problems such as eating disorders and depression that are pervasive diseases. Our western culture holds such high standards for an ideal body image for women, and these unattainable standards lead to body dissatisfaction through two main routes. Actively through communication of ideal body types, statements made by peers, comparing personal value based solely on body image, and passively, which include indirect unconscious provocation of body comparisons (Ferguson 15). The documentary “Cover Girl Culture” we watched in class describes the above influences perfectly. In the documentary we see how impressionable young girls view their own body image, and how different media mold their views. The media includes television, music, movies and magazines and all these venues are selling messages to young girls about how they should look, what they should wear, and what they should attain to be. If girls follow these standards then they are considered to be “perfect “and are doing what’s told is “normal”. What is encouraging to see however, is that the girls in the documentary understand that what is exposed to them isn’t a true ideal for body image, and it is not what they should strive to be. This YouTube commercial gives a good idea of what young girls are exposed to in the media and what it says about body image. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnJQJFlyDGY&feature=related. In the documentary “Beauty Mark” a present day Psychotherapist Diane Israel describes her struggle with exercise bulimia and her fear of becoming fat since she was a child. Growing up in a controlled and torn family, Israel focused her time on running and training for races, triathlons, and was very successful before having to stop because her body was physically deteriorating because she stopped eating. Israel and other athletes that suffered from the same problem realized that there were so many opportunities ahead for them before they fell on the wrong path. In the documentary, Israel went around the country to find out how our body image ideals are shaped. She interviewed countless people that have the same thought processes and conclusions regarding the topic. It is simply the fact that somebody is dictating what a body image should be, and we cannot all fit into that mold. As described in the video, it’s the parent’s job to help create the child’s image, until their peer groups (around middle school age) become prevalent. When talking to a manikin producer, he admitted that the body types they produce for men and women probably represents less than 1% of the population; that is chiseled bodies, toned and sculpted arms etc. Why do we create such an ideal? Because it sells. Medical, cosmetic, and entertainment industries benefit largely because of the biased body image ideal. Consumers want to reach that ideal of perfection, and think by buying into these products and ideas they will remain as they are forever when in actuality they are engaging negative actions to reach a goal that is insane and unattainable. Another interesting fact in “Beauty Mark” was when Israel interviewed a spokesperson for the Dove Real Beauty Campaign. When asking women to pick one word to describe themselves, about 2% chose “beautiful”. There is so much pressure to look perfect, skinny, and model-esque that it diminishes the idea of what it means to be human and to be comfortable within your own body. Both documentaries make valid points and bring to light body image ideals, eating disorders, and other topics that today’s youth are being exposed to. It is important to make clear to young boys and girls that the ideals that they are surround by are not positive messages. As Israel made clear, it is one’s upbringing that makes or breaks their self-confidence.
Discussion Questions:
1) If there are such negative connotations associated with the way body image is expressed in the media, why aren’t steps being taken to change them?
2) Do you think that upbringing is correlated with high or low self confidence?
Ferguson, Christopher J. “Who Is the Fairest One of All? How Evolution Guides Peer and Media Influences on Female Body Dissatisfaction.” Review of General Psychology. 15.1 (2011): 11-28. Print.
Laura Pratico
Group 4
Blog 1
The documentary Tough Guise, by Jackson Katz, provides a powerful look at the ideas of masculinity of men and how men are perceived as violent throughout the media. In the beginning of this documentary, Katz asks men what they think it means to be a “real man.” Their responses were along the lines of being strong, muscular, tough, independent, powerful, physical, athletic, and respected. If you didn’t measure up to this notion of being a “real man” you will get called names such as a wimp, weak, girly, sissy, a fag, etc. One important thing that Katz said that describes “real men” is that “being a so-called real man, means you have to take on this tough guise. In other words, you have to show the world only certain parts of yourself that the dominant culture has defined as manly” (Katz Tough Guise). I think this is a very important idea Katz’s has because this is where the whole tough guise notion of masculinity started because men have to put up a front in order to look tough around each other. I agree with Katz when he says that the main source boys learn this is through the media because violent masculinity is a cultural norm and it is an accepted part of masculinity. There is a connection between being a man and being violent and the media portrays this through movies, video games, music videos, sports and others.
Violence is not talked about as a gender issue, but men are responsible for 90% of violent crimes. The media continues to make movies that involve violence against women. Throughout the world, violence has been gender masculine and it is unusual when women are violent towards men and when men do it, it is so normal its masculine character is invisible which is one of the things we have to try to make it visible. Katz says, “making masculinity visible is the first step to understanding how it operates in the culture and how definitions of manhood have been linked to dominance and control” (Katz Tough Guise). This is a vital point in trying to understand the American notion of masculinity and how it is perceived.
Katz did a good job talking about how over the last 50 years the man’s body is becoming bigger, stronger, more muscular and more violent, while the opposite is happening to women’s bodies, which are becoming slimmer and less threatening. The outcome of this is that big beefy men have taken up more symbolic space. Katz says, “the changes of masculinity are a response of a perceived threat to the traditional and dominant idea of masculinity” (Katz Tough Guise). A lot of men react poorly to these changes of men experimenting with new attitudes towards women and relationships, work, parenting etc. This is an important topic because it deals with the different gender roles of a family and some men don’t want women to become equals with them because the men think they will lose control. I think that if men and women can become equals, there will be less violence in the world.
An important topic the documentary addressed is the social and cultural pressures to be masculine. The rise in anti gay violence is one of the clearest indications that a lot of young men are insecure and anxious about their sexual identities. Why do men have to act violently towards other men to prove that they are “real men”? The social and cultural pressures are the reason why men perform this notion of masculinity and why masculinity is not natural and why they are not just born masculine. The culture tells boys that you become real men through power and control and that respect is linked to physical strength and the threat of violence. Katz asks a really important question; what does this do to our society of training boys to act this way? One way to answer this question is to look at all of the school shootings done by young boys. One reason boys act this way is because violence is portrayed as a normal and natural part of being male through the media. Guns and manhood are made clear to young boys early on, which is why boys are more likely to lash out violently. The technology of video games doesn’t help because there are many violent video games that young boys play for hours at a time, which may be one of the effects of why young boys act out violently. Sports are also a big part of a man/boy’s life and wrestling is one of the most violent male sports, which shows boys that real manhood is linked to the size and strength you have. I think Katz did an excellent job presenting an honest portrayal of the vulnerability side of masculinity by showing Mark McGuire crying during one of his press conferences. This shows that a big shot like Mark McGuire, who is looked up to as someone who is very masculine and tough, has real emotions and he isn’t afraid to express them to the world. I think this documentary takes a good look at what men think masculinity is and how the media perceives it. It shows how the media has shaped boys lives by showing male violence and linking it to control and domination over women and other men
The article, “The Evolution of American Families”, by Stephanie Coontz, compares to the documentary, Tough Guise, in several ways. One point about the evolution of American families that Coontz made in the article was that “the divorce rate more than tripled in the 1920s” (Coontz 42). This shows that families started to have problems, which could be linked to violence, and the families were not happy. Coontz goes on to say that “during the Depression, divorce rates fell, but so did marriage rates. Desertion and domestic violence rose sharply” (Coontz 42). This represents the comparison between the Evolution of the American family and the Tough Guise documentary because it shows that domestic violence started early on and it continues to be a problem in the present day. Coontz also talked about how “politicians rewrote the tax code to favor male breadwinner families over dual-earner families, explicitly to discourage wives from working” (Coontz 43). This demonstrates how males were supposed to be the dominant gender and supposed to be in charge of important matters of the family, while women were just supposed to do domestic chores.
Online Source:
“More women becoming sole breadwinners” by Mara Schiavocampo, NBC Nightly News digital correspondent.
Website: http://dailynightly.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2009/03/06/4373182-more-women-becoming-sole-breadwinners
This article talks about women becoming the sole breadwinner of the family. One reason they are becoming the sole breadwinners are because the men are getting laid off, while the women continue to work in more stable industries like healthcare and education.
Discussion Questions:
1. Why is violent masculinity a cultural norm and why is violence accepted as a part of masculinity?
2. Do you think the media is the main reason why men think they have to put up a front in order to look tough around each other?
Lindsey Guidarelli
Dr. Thompson
Sociology of the Family
Group 1 Week 1 Blog Response
The documentary “Beauty Mark” by Diane Israel follows her struggle through Anorexia and Exercise Bulimia from a young age (2008). When she was only 12 years old she felt that the only way she could control her downward spiraling family dynamic. She describes her father as controlling, and her mother as an unstable woman who’s obsession with appearance kept her in and out of hospitals Diane’s entire life. Diane felt that by throwing herself into marathons and triathlons she could escape this family drama and finally have control over something in her life. This eventually led to her running her body down, and becoming incredibly weak and burnt out. As the documentary goes on, she interviews other females who have struggled with their body images and went to extreme lengths to try and become what they thought was “beautiful”, and could then become confident in themselves. Many females today struggle with the way they look, and strive so hard to become what society tells them is beautiful.
In Diane Israel’s situation, many girls will turn to perfecting their appearance in order to hide deeper issues in their lives. Israel internally struggled with the idea that her father always wanted her to be a boy, and she only received positive attention from him when she excelled as an athlete. Because she wanted her father’s approval so desperately, she would stop at nothing until she was the best, even though this eventually led to her ruining her body. In addition, Israel was also forced to have the horrible memory of being raped when she was a young girl, along with the fact that her mother was constantly struggling with depression. From a young age she remembered her grandma speaking of her mother’s struggles and commenting, “at least she’s beautiful.” Hearing this imprinted the idea in Israel, that no matter how much a woman hurts or struggles, beauty will solve these problems. This is the backward message that is often present in society. Henderson-King and Brooks conducted a study of the image of beauty in society and found that what the majority of the population considers “beautiful” directly correlates with success (2009). They also found that because of this same idea, young women see their bodies as “projects” that constantly need to be bettered rather than “objects”. This then leads to eating disorders, body dysmorphic disorder, and cosmetic surgeries.
Young girls are very impressionable and when these images of stick-thin models, actresses, and celebrities are constantly being thrown in their faces by the media. This then causes these girls to believe that these impossible bodies are what they should look like. In addition, young girls with body image problems will turn to harming their bodies in order to attain this impossible image. This idea is reinforced in the movie “Cover Girl Culture” by Women Make Movies. Young girls are interviewed about what they like about their bodies, and what they do not like. It is heart-wrenching to see young adolescent girls admitting that they do not think they are pretty because of the images they see in the media everyday. The image that our society has of “beautiful” is very distorted, and because this image does not change to what reality is, it gets passed down from generation to generation and never changes.
Clark, Nicole (Director). 2009. Cover Girl Culture [Motion Picture]. United States: Zen Pen Pictures.
Henderson-King, D., & Brooks, K. 2009. Materialism, Sociocultural Appearance Messages, and Paternal Attitudes Predict College Women’s Attitudes about Cosmetic Surgery. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 33, 1.
Israel, Diane (Filmmaker). 2008. Beauty Mark [Motion Picture]. United States: Salmon Pictures.
Nicole Maniaci
Blog #1
Group 5
In the article, “The Evolution of the American Families”, you learn the different definitions of family in certain cultures. All the different types of families show you there is no universal definition of family that fits reality (Riseman 33). You also see how the family has evolved through centuries. In the video, ‘The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap”, Stephanie Coontz talks more about the misconceptions of families, and how marriage has changed. One misunderstanding we have is that one-parent households are new. However, one-parent households were common due to the high death rates. Now there are one-parent households not because of high death rates but because of divorce (Coontz, online video). I also believe that since it is not socially unacceptable to raise a child out of wedlock, women do not feel pressure to get married.
Coontz discussed how marriage was not for love, but more for making connections and being practical. The article also mentions how marriage was much less sentimentalized in the 19th century (Riseman 35). Not only has marriage changed but also family has changed in a major way due to the way children are raised. The parents no longer choose whom their children will marry. Instead of saving up for a dowry, parents save money for their children’s education (Coontz, online video). Parents are having fewer children and they are making them work at a young age. Just from my parent’s generation I believe raising your kids has changed tremendously. My grandparents did not encourage my parents to go to college, and if they wanted to go, they had to pay their own way. I believe most parents want a better life for their children, and that is why they encourage education, and provide financial support if possible.
In the article, it was discussed how television broadcasted pictures of suburban families portrayed to be “perfect”. The wife was shown at home, cooking, cleaning, and raising the kids while the husband was the breadwinner (Riseman 45). The video I found, titled ‘The Evolution of the Family Structure and Values through Television”, talks about how the family has transformed on television. In the 1950’s, you saw the typical white, middle class family in suburban communities. Women were seen as the passive housewife, and the men made the money. Television has shifted to show diversity. There are shows such as Gilmore Girls, which shows a young single mother raising her daughter without a husband. Also, Modern Family reveals a different type of family, in which there is homosexual parents.
I think the evolution of television is beneficial to children growing up. Kids may believe there family is different from what society deems normal, however, with these television shows, kids may realize there is no standard family structure. In real life, we benefit from the changes in families and marriage. For example, it is socially acceptable for women to get pregnant out of wedlock. Also, gay and lesbian couples can get married.
Discussion Questions:
Have you ever felt your family was not normal?
Do you believe love is the most important thing for a marriage?
Do you think children of this generation are babied?
Works Cited
The Evolution of Family Structure and Values through Television. Prod. Amelie Lemieux. Dir. Meghan Turnbull and Joanna Szypulski. YouTube. 23 Mar. 2010. Web. 29 Jan. 2012. .
Cover Girl Culture is an eye-opening documentary that reveals the truth about how Teen Vogue sells their magazines to women and young girls depicting an unrealistic image of women. As a result, young girls look at these pictures of “beautiful” women and then feel bad about themselves. In the video, young girls were asked if they could change something about themselves, what would it be? Most girls want to change their face because they are not pretty enough. These young girls are looking at magazines like Teen Vogue and Seventeen Magazine and are developing a poor self-image because no matter how hard they try, they cannot look like the perfect model in the picture. What magazines do not say under the pictures of these models is that the photos are airbrushed. When was the last time you took a picture of yourself and your skin was actually glowing like a picture in a magazine? Unless you airbrushed your picture, or drew all over yourself with a highlighter then put a black light up to yourself, the answer is never.
Although the documentary did not sample a wide age range of girls, I believe that most girls look at magazines and only feel worse about themselves. Teen Vogue is not encouraging women and girls to embrace their curves and crooked teeth. Instead they are offering ways to shed the weight and to straighten those teeth for the perfect smile. The documentary shined a bright light on the reality of the media and its impact on girls.
It was interesting to see how the Teen Vogue employees are in total denial that their product is causing a problem for young girls. They are ignorant to the fact that the media tells girls and women everyday that they can improve their body to be perfect, when perfect is intangible. Although Teen Vogue is to blame for printing advertisements of only young, skinny, flawless models in their magazines, consumers are also to blame for buying such “literature.” Teen Vogue would not be making magazines if there were no audience to sell them to. Magazine companies are not at fault on their own. Everyone is to blame here. Americans are constantly dreaming about bigger and better things. Magazines depicting beautiful, perfect women feed that hunger. The question then is when has it gone too far? And at what point should a higher authority take over and end such companies?
“The Evolution of the American Family” explains how there is “no universal definition of family that fits the reality of all cultural groups and historical periods” (Coontz 33). It is also true that there is no universal definition of beauty that can hold true for all cultural groups and historical periods. Beauty is not just a pretty, skinny girl as most magazines and media sources depict. Its definition depends on who you ask. I believe that beauty is the whole package that encompasses not only looks but personality, sense of humor, confidence, and self-esteem to name a few.
Just like the definition of the family and gender roles have changed over time, so too will beauty and what the perfect woman looks like. Women used to be considered beautiful when they were very curvy. Now beauty has evolved into being stick thin without any curves. With time the definition of beauty will change. Until then, the media will continue to bombard our everyday lives with images of perfection since we Americans continue to demand those images.
Coontz, Stephanie. “The Evolution of American Families.” Ed. Barbara J. Risman. Families As They Really Are. W.W. Norton, 2010.
Cover Girl Culture.
1. Dove Video Clip
2. Media’s Influence on Body Image
Katelyn Aziz
Sociology of The Family
Group 6
Blog 1
Looking at childhood throughout the past four centuries, Steven Mintz discusses how childhood has changed because of the culture and society we live in in his article “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct”. As time has progressed, children in the middle class have had multiple opportunities to live an innocent childhood, where as in older years children had to milk cows or harvest crops in order to contribute to their families (Mintz 51). The change in views of how children should be raised stemmed from the ideas that children have different mindsets than adults (Mintz 49). Branching off of this idea, marketers are now directing advertisements to younger children because they are more impressionable. This sparked the Adriana Barbaro and Jeremy Earp to look into why advertisers are directing their ads at children and create a documentary “Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood”. Since children are more impressionable, advertisers are marketing products to younger and younger children in order to spark their interest in certain products (Consuming Kids). The younger children are exposed to these products, they will then be lifetime users of the product (or so it is thought). Although this may or may not be true, it is looked at that this is causing children to grow up faster (Consuming Kids). Mintz also comments in his article that middle class families allow their children to have computers and televisions in their room. In having these products in their room, it is allowing advertisements to be directed at and viewed by children.
It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that childhood was looked at as a distinct part of life (Mintz 51). Since the division of age groups, it has made it easier for advertisers to target different age groups for specific products. In present day, it is allowing marketers to target different make-ups and clothes styles to the “tween” age group (Consuming Kids). In seeing actors/actresses wearing particular clothes, that makes those clothes look cool. Then the children want to buy those clothes because they think that they will then be cool. Since children don’t understand that these advertisement companies are targeting them, they automatically want the clothes and make-up and accessories that these people are wearing and will bug their parents until they get it. In “Consuming Kids”, a clip from The Simpson’s where the kids are bugging the dad all day and night to go to a specific theme park. Providing that clip in the movie helps prove the point that children are very easily persuaded to want things that they have seen on the TV in advertisements. There has been great debate about how children are supposed to be viewed; targets for advertisements or innocent young adults? Although this debate is continuing on, advertisement companies are using their freedoms to target children into making children want to buy their products (Consuming Kids).
In order to allow children to grow up and have ideas of their own, having advertising companies targeting them will not allow them to feel as though they will have any freedoms. There are so many pressures in today’s society and with the increasing number of advertisements on the television and the computer as well as social pressure, it will only force children to try to fit in and conform instead of trying to find out who they are as a person. Social pressures are being a big stressor in today’s teens and they need to find a way to express themselves instead of trying to conform.
The following link looks further into how advertisements will affect a child. In this particular study, the researcher decided to produce a longitudinal study to examine the effect of TV and adds on a child’s weight, as they grow older. It is interesting to learn that if a child spends more time watching TV and playing on the computer that their chances of being overweight later in life increase.
References
Mintz, Steven. “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct.” Families as They Really Are. Ed. B. Risman. WW Norton, 2010. 48-58. Print.
Barbaro, Adriana and Earp, Jeremy. “Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood.” Media Education Foundation. 2008. Web. 27 January 2012.
Chris Black
group 4
blog 1
In the documentary Tough Guise, the narrator talks about how men and boys feel the need to put on a front of toughness. He talks about how this has come from different places, including the media, movies, and even the news. I think that it is true that these mainstream sources support the idea of men and boys needing to be tough. Our culture tells us that masculinity is not something we are born with but rather something that we have to strive for by imitating others who we are told are tough. However, this imitation is what really leads to all of the violence. People should be taught to be themselves, not to act like other people. especially not the other people that we are currently told to be like. However, if in the movies they showed real people doing normal everyday things, people wouldn’t go to see them. So really, everyone is responsible for this influx in violence that we see in the movies. No one wants to watch a boring movie, they want some kind of action and conflict. They want to see something that lets them forget about their own lives and live vicariously through the characters in the movie. This leads some people to act like the characters in the movies because the lives of the people in the movies seem so much more exciting then the lives of the people watching the movie. It is really up to the individual to realize that movies aren’t reality. You can’t go around acting like an action hero or you will get hurt or hurt someone else.
The movie also talks about violence rising in younger boys. Int he cases of shootings in schools, the narrator only talks briefly about the main issue behind the shootings; the bullying that caused the kids to bring guns into school. I’m not saying that shooting people is an acceptable way of dealing with bullies, however society needs to find a way to stop people form being bullied because it does lead to violence, either by the bully or the ones being bullied. Parents and teachers need to do a better job watching out for these things, it is really their responsibility to keep track of their kids or students especially since the maturity level of younger kids seems to be decreasing as these problems were much rarer in past years.
These problems could stem from the changing definition of family. Currently a “normal” family in the US consists of a father, mother, and children. This is not how it was in the past where families were larger and relied more on other members of the family such as grandparents, aunts and uncles. Today many families are spread throughout the country and even the world so there is much less interaction between more distant members of a biological family.Maybe it is this lack of interaction with other outside of school has lead to the increase in violence in youths. Today there are a lot more things that kids do alone, whether it is watching t.v. after school or playing video games, there is a lot less extracurricular interactivity between some kids. Those who don’t play sports or do other school sponsored extracurricular activities could be seriously separated form other kids in school, especially if they are only children with working parents. They could have very little interaction with anyone outside of school. The closeness and larger size of families in the past meant that most if not all children would have others to be around outside of school, however now that that is gone, there is a greater chance that kids will be “loners” if they aren’t participating in school activities. This may be the cause of some of the violence we are seeing in younger boys.
Discussion question:
1) Do you think that it is possible that the distance between family members could be leading to a lack of social interaction in some kids?
2) Should movies and other forms of entertainment be forced to change and involve less violence?
Alex Pizzano
The Family
Group 1
Blog 1
The two documentaries that I watched were “Tough Guise” and “The Bro Code”. Both of these documentaries dealt with the issue of how a “manly man” should act in society. They both deal in-depth with how the “manly man” should act towards women.
The documentary “The Bro Code” focuses on the way men are told that they should, and it is okay to control women and view them as sexual objects. All walks of media from music, movies to magazines train men that it is ok to womanize and control women. The documentary points to the MTV show “Jersey Shore” as an example of how media is training young men and even young women the wrong values. According to “The Bro Code”, “Jersey Shore” reinforces the sexist values that “The goal of men is to get sex with as many women as possible, and that the goal for women is to compete with other women for the coveted prize of being the hottest” (Keith 6:00). This is what teenagers are learning when they watch this type of material. It is well known that teenagers are impressionable and mimic what they see. Therefore, these are the values that teenagers are learning and living out.
I found it interesting that “The Bro Code” touched upon the issue of the parental role in all of the media teachings. “The Bro Code” states “there needs to be a parent that says enough is enough” (Keith 8:00). I agree with this notion that there must be a parental influence that makes sure that their kids are not mimicking what they see or hear in the media. Children need to know what is right and wrong behavior and that is taught by the parents. I understand that not every child is blessed with strong parental guidance, which is why media needs to take a hard look at itself and realize the influence they are having on society. Perhaps there should be some censorship or a governing body that makes the media tone down the bad influences.
The documentary “Tough Guise” also deals with the issue of what constitutes as a “manly man”. It mimics the plot of “The Bro Code” in that media has a huge impact on what a “manly man” should be. According to “Tough Guise” media is the reason that men believe they must be physical, strong, tough and respected to be a real man. Media also shows that a real man should assert dominance, power and control over women. This type of thinking is what has lead to such a violent society of man. The documentary goes on to explain that men who put a front of masculinity do so at the expense of their own relationships and their ability to be a good human being. Therefore, if we as a society can stop this front of masculinity, we can not only better the live of women who are being taken advantage of but also help men who have been struggling with be a man.
Discussion Questions.
1. What do you think the role of parents should be in stopping the sexist values that are being portrayed?
2. How should the media or government go about thwarting the sexist stereo types that are being portrayed?
http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=246&template=PDGCommTemplates/HTN/Item_Preview.html
Throughout history, the view of childhood and the role of children have changed. Children were looked upon to do work around the house or even work outside the home in order to make money for the family. As time moved on, children had less and less responsibility because the view of childhood changed and children were looked at as more of a precious group instead of one with responsibility. As times and views on childhood changed, all children had to worry about was school and maybe a small amount of chores. In the documentary “Consuming Kids” and the article “American Childhood as a Social Cultural Construct,” both explain how children act in their respective society and their affects on their families’ economics.
Even though the two sources both talk about children in society, they each touch on different aspects of childhood. In “Consuming Kids,” they talk about how the media directs their attention to the youth, and hooks them on merchandise. Through media advertising, sales sky rocket. The documentary claims that corporations use the youth as their target audience and take advantage of them. Children don’t know much about the tactics of advertising and become easily attached to something. In the article “American Childhood as a Social Cultural Construct” they explain how parents have complete control over the way children act and look at things. As time has passed parents have looked at the role of their children differently. The article pinpoints the parents as the reason children have become the target audience for the media. Both the documentary and article express how the media impacts the way the youth portray things.
In the past century, video games, television programming, and other types of entertainment have become a huge part of children’s lives. Steven Mintz said, “We also forget that the introduction of every new form of entertainment over the past century has been accompanied by the dire warnings of its impact on children.”(Mintz,56) This explains that while entertainment was being created, creators were well aware of the impact entertainment would have on children and went through with it anyway. People should have noticed the impact that media would have on children. Television commercials are the biggest part because all kids watch commercials every day. While watching a show, children are bombarded with multiple commercials, selling and advertising products, every few minutes. Corporations know that the children watch the commercials more then adults do so they use children as their target audience. They do this because if they can attract people to watch their commercials, their sales could go up. In both sources they explain how both the media and parents control their children. Parents want their kids to fit in and to not be an outcast to their age group, so they will listen to what the children want and make sure they can get along with everyone.
I personally believe that the parents should be able to monitor their child and how they act. Setting children in front of a television and giving into their demands is not affective. It is not the media’s fault that parents are not able to control their kids because by letting the child watch television and play games all day long they start to act like the characters on television. If parents don’t do anything to prevent it, all of the blame should fall on them, not the media.
The video I used that can be connected is called, “Consumerism, Media and Youth Culture”. In this video it explains how teenagers listen to the media and they feel the need to be “cool”. This forces teenagers to buy their product. The link to this video is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3gEFwQo_7k
Nicole Hayden
Week 1
Group 6
The video Consuming Kids talked about a lot of key points about marketing to children. Marketers have researched the way children think and they use this knowledge to manipulate children into buying their products, and to have them stay hooked on their brands. One of the speakers in the video mentioned that these marketers want “cradle to grave loyalty.” The amount of marketing to children now is scary comparative to centuries ago, when the childhood was seen as a “state of deficiency” (Mintz, 49). The video stated that children account for about 40 billion dollars in consumer spending every year. The article by Mintz talks about the differences between today’s American children and those of the past. In the past childhood has gone from seen as time to prepare children for adulthood, a rushed time that was wasteful, to a time to be sheltered and innocent, to the latest push of jumping kids into any sort of media that is possible. The video shares a view similar to Mintz because the video talks about how much media is involved for children. They are always around brands from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed they are surrounded by these brands that are shoved into their brains by the media. The article and the video link closely because they both feel that American society in some way is hindering the child by these new forms of media. Mintz discusses a study by Daniel Kline in which he defines three types of psychological violence that are brought upon children today. These types are the violence of expectations, labeling, and representation. These all relate to societal pressures that are put upon children so that they seem “normal”. I agree completely with the last form of psychological abuse that Mintz suggests himself. “Seeing children as objects to be shaped and molded for their own good” (Mintz, 57). Many marketers use this shapeable and moldable time to hook children onto their brands for the rest of their life. One speaker in Consuming Kids said: “the primary value that is being sold to kids over and over again is the value that things or stuff or brands will make us happy”. That is the main problem with the marketing approach. I do not feel that it is necessary terrible to market to children, it is just the way that things are being marketed, it is almost like if you do not have the product they are selling, you life will not be as good as everyone else’s. Marketing aimed at children needs to be altered to help stop the problems it has been causing. This video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab9zbqHJ_p4 shows the marketing done by food companies and how they act like they are trying to help children and care about them, but most people know that is not necessarily true. They are creating brand loyalty and they do not try to help children, because by feeding them their products they are only causing things such as childhood obesity and diabetes. In my opinion our country needs to take a step back and stop worrying about how much money they are making and look at what they are doing to the children, who are the future of this country.
Discussion Questions:
1. We have all been victims of this deceptive marketing generation. Do you remember as a child any brands that you were hooked on or any specific toy or character that everyone in school had to have?
2. How do you think, as Americans, we can make a shift away from being so materialistic and consumeristic, we are the next generation of marketers and researchers, so how do we stop this trend of deceptive marketing?
3. Do you feel that the reason you buy products is only because of the marketing? Or are there other factors that contribute to the decision to buy something?
Stephanie Coontz’s article, “The Evolution of American Families”, and lecture, “The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap”, are extremely similar. Each discusses marriage and families in general and the ways it has gone through changes during history. Each discusses the different forms of families. From what I was able to derive from the two sources of information was that families as well as marriages overall progressed for the better.
I found the video a little more interesting as the changes in her voice tone helped a bit to keep my attention. Coontz explains marriage in particular from the older days and how it differs from other times. She makes references to how much influence the church had on marriage and families. I was very surprised that adultery was actually more common in the past, especially since divorce was harder to do. When I thought back on it, committing adultery was easier to do then to get a divorce, nowadays divorce is much easier so more people would rather just get a divorce instead of committing adultery. The court system she explains made it extremely hard to get out of marriages; she cited one case where there was extreme evidence of the husband being so violent that both the wife and children feared him. The judge wouldn’t grant marriage relief because the wife was said to have thrown something a couple times and because of her record not being completely clean they were forced to stay together. Women have not had many rights until fairly recently she explained, because of that the wife really had very little options to end the marriage. Therefore husbands probably didn’t worry as much as they would now that if they were caught committing adultery that their wife would be able to successfully divorce them. The women’s movement has made it possible for women to make tremendous strides in marriage. Today marriage is much more dependent on love then what it was in the past. Beating your wife in the older days was far easier and is seen now to be very wrong. Parents would have their kids assist with their retirement by having them work for some type of earnings. It was normal to be stuck in a miserable relationship because you did not love the person, today people would never be in a relationship unless they are completely happy, and therefore it would be nowhere near normal for that to happen.
The article discusses many of the same things that are covered in the video lecture by Coontz. The “Good old Days,” Coontz tries to get us to see that they are not as nice as they sound to be. One thing I thought was directly on point and showed me that she really had a deep understanding of the topic, was when she explained we can only lessen the weakness and build on the strengths. I did not see any extreme differences between the article and video lecture; they are about the same topics and cover the same main points. Overall I agree with the way Mrs. Coontz has described the evolution of marriage and the family has occurred.
The most popular advertisements are targeted to children. In the documentary, “Consuming Kids,” they showed a statistic that there is 700 billion dollars in spending on children a year. In the 80s’s until now, spending had increased from 4.2 billion a year to 700 billion a year. The children are bombarded with messages designed not to make their lives better, but to tell them something. (Linn, 32) The marketers have a hold on children to convince them, from the cradle that life is about buying. In maternity wards around the nation, PBS kids celebrated the release of Teletubbies and gave away Teletubbie gift packs which included copies of their videos. The children aren’t even a day old before they come warped into the consumer market. Marketers send messages through TV, commercials, billboards, and food labels. They are extremely catchy with their songs, bright colors, and famous characters endorsing the ads. Society, mixed with the media, is making these material items the most important aspects in a child’s life. Society is taking the playfulness out of children. (Risman, 48)
In a study called the Nagging Factor, researchers explained that marketers stay on top when children nag their parents to buy the products they want. One type of nagging was persistence nagging which repeats itself. The other type of nagging is importance nagging which is when the child puts a reason of importance on the product. The main target of products is children because of their vulnerabilities and that adults won’t usually buy the products their children want if they aren’t there nagging them. The advertising industries have blatant disregard for the plight of parents, and its exploitation of children’s developmental vulnerabilities. Researchers at Western International Media divided parents into different categories. They do this to help marketers’ fine tune their strategies for encouraging nagging. It is very interesting that many parents are the type that gives into nagging. These parents are called indulgers, Kids’ pals, and conflicted. Indulgers give their children anything they want. Kids’ Pals are adults that want to have fun with their children. Conflicted parents are usually divorced or single parents who buy their children items because they have a lot of personal guilt. (Linn, 35)
Another aspect of consuming kids is that is creates havoc on the family life. There are two mainstream views that the parents are to blame, or that society is to blame. The marketing industry purposely comes between children and parents. (Linn, 33) It is hard for me to understand how it is solely the parent’s problem when their children are being influenced from TV, school, and especially other children. The parents are not in control when other children at school talk about, bring in their new toys, or are eating the famous labeled foods that children love. When they are in control, they have the ability in their house to limit the amount of advertising that their children are exposed to by not buying the famous products or allowing their children to watch television. The parents have to pick their battles though and the relationship with a child has a lot of give and take that needs to be factored in.
A related article http://www.economist.com/node/835503 discusses how Companies have discovered that it is often more effective to recruit a child as an in-home marketer than to try to convince a parent to buy their products. It also describes how advertising companies are being defensive saying that parents are responsible for managing their children’s exposure to marketing.
Discussion questions:
What types of advertising were you not allowed to watch or have when you were young?
Have you seen your parents change from how they parented you regarding advertisement and products to how they parent your younger sibling?
Mike Davis
Group 6
Blog 1
The video “Consuming Kids” and the Steven Mintz article “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct” both present ideas on the changing childhood of Americans. Both agreed that the lives of children in America has changed greatly over time. Mintz talked about how childhood was rushed in past centuries since youth labor was prevalent and parents wanted their children to bring in a supplementary income. Later parents began to extend the idea of childhood by supporting the idea of innocence, but today children are growing up more quickly and having sex at younger ages. I think all of these prove Mintz’s theory that “childhood is a social and cultural construct that varies by region, class and historical era (Mintz, 49).” In this day and age I think that this definitely holds true since now children have access to cell phones, the internet and more technology at very young ages. This is similar to the “Consuming Kids” video since the video discusses how technology helps aim advertisements at children. At one point the video said children are often on the computer, with the television on and with an ipod headphone in one ear (“Consuming Kids”). I think this is a good description of what children are like today and this makes it much easier for advertisers to target children since they are always around the technology that is used by marketers. Previous generations of children spent much more time outside and were not as easy to target since they were not around advertisements as much as they are today. The two are different in that Mintz believes that “Americans have failed to adapt” (Mintz, 58) to the changes in how children grow up and how they are subject to media that may not benefit them. On the other hand “Consuming Kids” seems to put the blame on advertisers whose one goal is to make money. In my opinion it is the parents job to ensure there children grow up in a positive environment, if this means that they do not get to watch television or go on the internet for 10 hours each day, then so be it. When trying to sell things why shouldn’t companies try as hard as they can to make money? Parents need to raise there children the way they see fit, not the way that their child wants to be raised based on the commercials they see on TV. If this means making your kid upset that they didn’t get McDonalds or get to see a violent movie its fine because the parent is the one with the final decision to make on how they raise their kids and they shouldn’t let the child determine how they are raised.
The following is a link to a video containing multiple commercials that are aimed at children. The commercials are all for junk food and contain many images that are clearly aimed at kids such as cartoon characters and child actors that the young viewers can relate too. The consuming kids video extensively discussed how advertisements are aimed at children and these ads show that this is true.
Sources:
“Consuming Kids”
Mintz, Steven. “American Childhood As a Social and Cultural Construct”
Nayyab Khan
The Family
Blog #1 (Monday Night)
Group 4
The documentary Tough Guise shed light on a very serious topic that is easily ignored in our society. It began by explaining the “tough guy” or ‘the persona of a real man’ that guides the life of millions of young men all across the globe. The video shows that today there is a social norm according to which a real man is seen as someone muscular, tough, someone in control who shows no signs of weakness or emotion. In some instances if you do not measure up to this ‘social norm’ boys are called names like fag and queer, therefore men are put under a great deal of pressure to put up this act. As seen in an interview, a young girl explains how some of her male friends feel the need to act tough in front of others where as in private the display emotions just as any other normal person. Then this question arises that where does this image of being tough man actually emerge from? This image is often projected to young male adults through media (Katz, Tough Guise). Even in instances of toys, we can see the change that has lead to enhancement of bodies of toy figurines to fit those of a muscular man. The narrator brought up a very interesting subject. He said “media helps construct violent masculinity as a cultural norm” (Katz, Tough Guise) .This is to say that masculinity is now directly proportional to the growing violent crimes committed by men. The documentary provides several statistics where 85 % of the murders are committed by men. Additionally 90 % of the assaults are committed by men whether they assault women or young male adults. Men are also responsible for 95 % of the domestic violence crimes, 95 % sexual abusive crimes and the list continues on. As pointed out by a psychologist and therapist Daniel Linder, often a sociopath criminal who “conjures up a tough guy” image to deceive people which lead to feelings of aggressiveness and other criminal behavior. The narrator talked about how in some instances this has become a part of our daily life where news reporters or other media do not feel the need to mention that a crime was committed by a male, or male adults were shooting their fellow school mates. On the other hand, if a female commits a felony, it is a topic of great debate. The narrator makes it clear, that as a part of this society, we are equally responsible for these crimes because we are in fact the ones that are sources of pressure in young male adults’ lives. Therefore in order to reform our society and decrease the number of crimes that kill hundreds of people across the world, we must take actions. We need to portray image of young adults where it is okay to be a soft-hearted person. A norm where power is not measured by your control over other people but in fact your success or your respect for others. This may not be an easy change but only small steps can lead to a better community where people do not have to put up a front to please others or to fit in with the society.
Links:
http://relationshipvision.com/article/revisiting-the-age-old-case-of-diagnostic-confusion-sociopath-vs-psychopath
Blog 1
Children are consumers too. Smart marketers have their sights on children because they recognize that their young, sponge-like minds are easily susceptible to flashy marketing. The two sources “Consuming Kids” and “A Consumer in the Family” describe how the marketing community steals the attention of America’s youth and successfully plant their messages into children’s brains. According to the article, children are raised to believe that life is about buying and having the best and coolest product that is available. Children’s spending has raised to the level of about 40 billion dollars a year, and adult spending as a result of child marketing is about 700 billion dollars a year (Consuming Kids). Along with the documentary, “Consuming Kids”, this article mentions how important child marketing is to our economy. Not only will kids purchase items by themselves via allowance money, birthday or Christmas money, and money given to them by their grandparents or parents, but they also have a direct impact on which products adults buy as well. Children directly impact which products parents will buy. “Consuming Kids” describes that children can determine which kind of car gets bought, what kind of computer gets bought, and even where the next family vacation will be taken. Children have more power than we think in our economy. According to the documentary, since the deregulation of children’s’ television by Congress during the Regan administration, children’s’ spending has increased by 33%. The documentary explicitly lays out the “Nagging” problem in which kids will constantly beg their parents for a product until that parent is so tired of hearing their child complain, they will give in and buy that product. Not only that, but also many children will cry and/or throw temper tantrums to get what they want. “Indulgers” are parents who give in to their child’s every whim (Linn, 34). The marketing industry even goes as far as to promote that children nag their parents in order to get the desired product. “A Consumer in the Family” stresses that because children are bombarded with marketing from morning until night, it is now become a collective effort to care for and raise children. The next article “American Childhood as a Cultural Construct” recognizes the effect of the marketing industry as well. This article however, focuses on how children are raised, and how this has changed in recent years. It focuses on childrearing, the nature of children’s play, schooling, and the participation of young people in work. This article gives a new perspective on a child’s well being and causes the reader to consider if children are growing up faster in today’s society than they were in the past, and the effects that advertising has had on this change. Kids are bombarded with marketing in this day in age. Their minds are like sponges that absorb all they see on television and what they experience in their daily lives. Life is about getting and buying for these kids, and our community and parents need to work together to advocate that this type of marketing profoundly remaking the psyches of children.
This youtube video shows how marketing is permeating the everyday lives of children.
Possible questions to discuss:
How are advertisers too eager to market to children?
How does the internet effect which products children ask their parents for?
To what level should the government involve itself in the regulation of children marketing?
Since children do not understand the power and control that these advertisements have on their minds, it is up to their parents to help them understand what marketing is and why they are being targeted. It is hard to believe that children in our society could be taken advantage of so ruthlessly, but is that what our society has come to? It is also disturbing to think that the only way to reduce this effect on children is to eliminate television and internet from their lives, which does not seem like a feasible solution.
Olivia Betulia
Sociology of the Family
Group 3
Week 1
The documentary Cover Girl Culture and Stephanie Coontz’s article “The Evolution of the American Family” are topics that are pieces that are difficult to compare. The documentary Cover Girl Culture focused on the issues that young women face due to the media representations and advertisements of how the ideal female should look. The documentary establishes the ways in which popular magazines expose the fashion and celebrity culture to be a dream world that females idolize and make great efforts to attain. Unfortunately, girls are taught from a young age that skinny is pretty and pretty is looking exactly like models who are stick thin, tall, and curve less. The video interviews young girls on how if they could change one thing what would it be. Obviously steaming from insecurities, the girls wish to change attributes that are skin deep such as their face or their weight. The makers of the documentary than interview the creators behind the magazine and most of the women who are involved with their magazines production all think that they are doing a good thing and are helping to promote a healthy lifestyle. During the clip we viewed in class, one woman from Teen Vogue actually explains that the reason models must be so skinny is because the designers make their clothes to fit for only those sizes. So why can’t the designers make bigger test sizes? Why must the bone-thin body be the ideal body? The documentary aimed to demonstrate how warped the media is and to expose the damage it is doing to girls’ self-esteem and mindsets.
Of course, American culture has always had a standard for females that has been representative during every time period. In the late 19th and 20th centuries, females were deemed “homemakers” (Coontz 43). The normal family had a father as a breadwinner and a domesticated mother. According to “The Evolution of the American Family”, “The proportion of children who were raised by a breadwinner father and a homemaker mother…reached an all-time high” (Coontz 44). So in turn, gender roles were determined. Till this day, the domestication of the female is still a standard that even though females may make their own money with a very good job, they are still expected to fulfill the cooking and cleaning of the homemaker female.
Coontz has described, “The powerful new medium of television broadcast nightly pictures of suburban families where homemaker moms had dinner on the table every night and raised healthy children who never talked back or got into any trouble that couldn’t be solved by a fatherly lecture” (44). Media mediums similar to that of television broadcast like the magazines in Cover Girl Culture show how important and influential the media truly is placing the blame on why girls feel pressured to be skinny and have a twisted body image.
Although the documentary was right in providing the evidence for young girls having such a negative body image, I don’t believe the media is all too blame. The way children are brought up by their parents has a lot to do with how girls feel about themself. It is their responsibility to teach their daughters a healthy lifestyle and to create a meaning of “beauty” for them. Although, I do not disagree with the pressures that the media places on young girls, but I do feel that it can be lessened to a great deal if they have parents who make an effort to teach their girls and help them develop their own ideal of beauty.
This clip is useful because it provides an example of the pressure on girls.
Allison Mullings
Blog #1
Group 3
What is beauty and who can become beautiful? Society has taught young adolescents and even adults that beauty CAN be achieved in a quick and “easy” way, through plastic surgery. Anyone can become beautiful if they can cough up the right funds. However, plastic surgery has now become the new drug in this society of trends and fads, and now many people are becoming addicted to it. Beauty was once in the eyes of the beholder but now in the twenty-first century, the makers of Hollywood movies and television shows, as well as fashion magazines now define beauty.
The media has helped boost the popularity of plastic surgery. Shows like “Dr. 90210″ and “Niptuck” have made viewers believe it is alright to change their body through surgery if they are not satisfied with their looks. These television shows make plastic surgery more accessible to viewers when they otherwise would have never thought about it before. Many of these viewers tend to want to change things about their image that do not in fact need changing. The disease Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD), “is a chronic mental illness in which you cannot stop thinking about a flaw in your appearance, a flaw that is usually minor or imagined”(Mayo Staff Clinic). Whether you are an A list celebrity, a house mom, or a maid many people are falling into the devastating grasp of this disease. This youtube clip is a mini documentary: http://youtu.be/QbBem8H6HS4, about different women and their reasons why they decided to go through plastic surgery.
Sometimes many women do not go through the torture of plastic surgery for themselves. Sometimes a spouse or a parent may force either their significant other or child to go through the strenuous labors of plastic surgery because they are not pleased with their loved ones appearance. Many women turn to breast enlargement because their husbands like bigger breast. In some foreign countries some parents force their children to have surgery on their eyes in order to make them appear more open. The media has taught viewers to believe that if you do not like a certain appearance of your loved one you must enforce them to go through surgery and change it.
I believe that parents should block their kids from view movies, television shows, or reading magazines that make kids question their beauty. The way an individual views beauty starts at a young age, it starts within their family. Kids are so easily influenced by media and the popular vote. This video shows how African American children tend to pick the white doll over the black doll because it looks better and when asked why they did not pick the black doll, they would simply state, “because it looks bad” : http://youtu.be/ybDa0gSuAcg. What has society and the media done to these children? They have allowed African American kids to believe that their skin color is bad, its no wonder so many African Americans try to bleach their skin in order to become lighter. This documentary talks about how skin bleaching has become a huge epidemic in Jamaica http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9T9SNi-u6M .
Many individuals have and still are trying to warp their image into something that the media has claimed as beautiful or glamorous. Many people believe that the short ccut to success in life is to find a quick fix to change their identity, whether it be from plastic surgery or skin bleaching. Kids are taught at a young age what beauty is and is not.
Reference:
Staff, Mayo Clinic. “Body Dysmorphic Disorder – MayoClinic.com.” Mayo Clinic. Web. 29 Jan. 2012. .
Lorin Milazzo
Group 2; Blog 1
Successful youth advertising at the expense of modern family values is exposed in the documentary Consuming Kids and Linn’s article “A Consumer in the Family.” Consuming Kids focuses on marketer’s easiest and most successfully target audience, children. Children, nearly at birth, are brainwashed by brand’s advertising in virtually all aspects of their lives. From the cereal they eat for breakfast to the sleeping bag they go to bed in, children are walking billboards to company’s brands. Linn’s article “A Consumer in the Family” focuses on how this affects entire families, specifically parents.
Prior to watching/reading these documentaries, I was generally unaware of youth marketer’s ruthless target advertising, however after; the realization is simply frightening. Their ruthlessness is derived from their freedom as there are no laws regulating children advertisement. Children’s consumption of essential products, like food and soap, and nonessential products, like iPods and cell phones, are branded throughout their entire childhood. There is no arguing that children need to eat, perhaps eat cereal and macaroni and cheese, but today’s children need to eat cereal with toys in the bottom and macaroni and cheese because it is in the shape of Spongebob Square Pants based solely on the persuasion of the brand. Advertising researchers study how many times children blink in accordance to certain colors, shapes and sounds in order to go after children as successfully as possible. In addition, companies are expanding the age of their target audiences. For example, Seventeen magazine no longer targets girls ages sixteen to eighteen; they go after girls as soon as they can read. What use to be rated R is now a PG13. Furthermore, what a featured researcher of Consuming Kids worries most is how children’s values are changing. What brand you wear and how much you paid for it is now considered a value in children’s lives. Also children’s values are sexualized. A child is not a child when they dress as Barbie and Bratz dress. Children are forced to grow up younger and younger as time progresses and as advertising becomes more successfully invasive in their lives. Even more severe than value systems, advertising is affecting children’s health. Why would a child go outside to play cops and robbers when they can play it on a video game on their couch? And why would a child eat fruit while playing the video game when they can eat colorful sugary snacks that have their favorite super hero on it? You may answer this question because their parents let them or because their parents allow this, however, according to Linn, parents are becoming less and less compatible against advertising due to the “The Nag Factor” or “pester power” (Linn 33). Advertisers do not just persuade children into brands, they teach them how to get it too. It’s alarming to think big companies “wreak havoc on families just to make a buck” (Lin 35). The nag factor basically teaches children the more you ask you parents for something, the easier they are to cave. “The prospect of spending a month saying no 2,160 times to a child you love is enough to drive any parent crazy” (Linn 38). Parents are incapable from hiding their children from these theories. Even if children aren’t watching the television at home, children are exposed to the brands at school or virtually anytime they step foot out of their house. Parent’s cannot “pick their battle” when it encompasses nearly all aspects of their children’s lives (Linn 38). Steven Mintz article “American Childhood as a Social and Cultural Construct” states over the past four centuries, the American childhood as a whole has drastically changed “(Mintz 49). I personally think it has changed drastically in the time gap between me and my 18 year old brother and our eight and nine year old step brother and step sister. Children’s values have changed. For example, when my brother and I were young children the products that Gabby and Jack want now simply didn’t exist. Even cell phones were unheard of until high school whereas now, my nine year old step sister has a cell phone and has had one since her eighth birthday. I don’t think it’s what children and parents want for their children as much as what they think they need.
Related Video:
This shows a toddler in time out, with his iPad, in other commercials of the same company he is either surfing the web or talking on a smartphone. While comical, reality isn’t farfetched from this commercial; Kourtney Kardashian’s baby is about this age and has an iPad.
Discussion questions:
1. Compare your childhood to younger siblings/young cousins childhoods now, do you find it has drastically changed just within those 10 years?
2. Can youth targeted advertising be directly blamed for childhood obesity and other health problems?
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