Quotes and Questions

I only had these written down and not typed.

Where the Girls Are ..

Our collective history of interacting with and being shaped by the mass media has engendered in many women a kind of cultural identity crisis.  We are ambivalent toward feminity on the other.  Pulled in opposite directions - told we were equal, yet told we were subordinate; told we could change history, yet told we were trapped by history - we got the bends at an early age, and we've never gotten rid of them.

The news, sitcoms or ads are not reflections of the world; they are very careful deliberative constructions.

What difference would this article make if the author was a financially struggling black woman?

Douglas uses a lot of past popular culture trends, what would be some modern examples of these traditions and now currently do you think the media reached a wider age range of woman?


bell hooks 

As one black woman put, "I could always get pleasure from movies as long as I did not look too deep." For black female spectators who have "looked too deep" the encounter with the screen hurt.

Looking at films with an oppositional gaze, black women were able to critically assess the cinema's construction of white womanhood as object of phallocentric gaze and chose not to identity with either the victim or the perpetrator.

After reading bell hooks, can we site film examples of the portrayal of black women being explicit and untrue? Do you think this has changed?

There are very few if any black female directors, would a film by a black female director be successful?  get time in theaters? and have an accurate portrayal?

Berger Ways of Seeing

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting vanity, thus amorally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.

This nakedness is not, however an expression of her own feelings, it is a sign of her submission to the owner's feelings or demands

When we see a woman using a mirror we usually think she is high maintenance; what other stereotypes are associated with mirrors?

Berger talks a lot about nakedness, what do you feel was the use of nakedness and what does it represent?