Thursday, October 06, 2005

Girls Rule, Guys Drool?


I am practicing shooting video with my Canon GL2 Digital Camcordertoday which has been sitting dormant since I revised my last video, Six. The filmmakers who helped me make the documentary used a Canon XL1. In the new version, I used the GL2 to shoot some scenes in Kentucky under a bit of duress--I was standing in a field behind a dairy bar with mosquitoes eating my legs and on a very short time schedule. To my surprise, the video I shot of some relatives of a convicted murderer came out precisely the way I had imagined (actually better). The quality of the picture was excellent and I thought, better than the XL1.

My current project is getting together some web video on how boys feel about the current anti-male climate. I do think all this "girls rule, guys drool" (like the poster for a girls' fashion store above) affects guys in a negative way--more than they let on. If anyone has any suggestions for what they would like to see in a short web video--email me or post a comment.

7 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's hard to point to really specific examples of anti-male, pro-female things -- Given the quantity of media this seems to be almost necessarily anecdotal.

In any case, some potentially fruitful examples...

1. Women's Magazines -- I don't read these things, but I imagine that men are frequently lambasted in certain publications with that bent.

2. Television Shows / Advertisements -- This is probably the worst offender as far as media saturation and prevalence of negative male stereotypes goes, particularly advertisements. I'd probably start with commercials about childrearing or childrens products here. As far as television shows themselves, Sex and the City might be a good place to start.

3. Videogames -- I know this is probably not your expertise, but despite the commonly leveraged complaint that videogames are biased towards male characters, I find the opposite is true. For the most drastic example, I'd check out a game like Everquest, where playing a female character gives you dramatic non-tangible advantages over being a male character. Then I'd check out Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance; the female character in this game is by far superior to the other character choices, even though her attractiveness has been claimed to be 'sexist.' Most any game that seems to have an arbitrary female lead character is suspect.

4. Movies -- Kind of building off the third form of media here, I think it'd be worthwhile to check out both Tomb Raider movies with a critical eye. I think what we're starting to see in movies like Tomb Raider, which use CGI to adopt the unrealism of videogames -- videogames, as a fledgeling media form, were unduly affected by charges of sexism amongst its ranks, and since characters in videogames obey only the physical laws of the game, it's easy to just supplant a male character with a female one. In movies this wasn't possible until current levels of SFX made it plausible that the physically weaker female movie stars would be able to physically defeat legions of physically stronger male characters. Tomb Raider 2 is even worse, in many regards, but particularly because it's "inversion" of the classical theme can certainly be read as an attempt to comment on some sort of wisdom/lust for power.

7:01 PM, October 08, 2005  
Blogger Jeff Faria said...

I can't speak about boys, but as a male it's encouraging to start to hear acknowledgement of male-bashing which has been a pervasive element in our culture for all my life, at least. Of course, men don't complain about it - if they did, they wouldn't be 'real' men. In the same way, 'good' girls once did not complain about sexual molestation because molested girls probably had it coming.

9:20 PM, October 11, 2005  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I don't think it's hard at all to find examples of this. You walk into the Exxon and there are stickers and keychains and bracelets with sentiments like those noted in the post above. And don't get me started about stores that sell teenagers' clothes. It seems like the whole teen-girl culture is built around it.

6:38 AM, October 12, 2005  
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