Trifecta

  I've been writing blogs for a few months now and I definitely feel a lot more comfortable expressing myself now than I did when I first started.  I thought I would take this opportunity to revisit some of my older posts to track my progress and please give me some feedback on how I can improve in the future!

Hello World!

   Does the above advertisement bother you?  It sure bothers me. I get that Tom Ford wants to be known for his edgy and provoking elements but did he have the right to exploit female body just to make a point? To me there is very little difference between those pictures and pornography and yet because a marketing team at some big time ad agency designed it, it is acceptable to be plastered across billboards and displayed in magazines.  People might just shrug it off and just say, “Sex Sells, get over it”, but being the forward thinking and modern Americans we are, can we really just sit back and allow the media to misuse human body and sexuality to get what they want?

   Before I go on, let me tell a little bit about myself, I am a female in her mid 20s, working a stable job as a fashion PR in Downtown Los Angeles. Because of my job as a fashion publicist, I am highly exposed to the world of pop culture and fashion. My job entails that I spend hours browsing through magazines and keeping up with the latest TV shows and movies to find new opportunities to promote my clients. In the course of my research, I cannot help but get sidetracked and be shocked at how much the media relies on sex appeal to sell whatever it is they may be trying to sell. And that brings me to introducing the theme of this blog: The Media and Gender.

   Every perfume ad, every popular TV show and just about every corner you turn in our media-clad world, there is a something that indirectly reinforces the gender stereotypes that we Americans have supposedly been fighting to eliminate. Most educated people nowadays knows not the challenge equal rights between men and women because saying men are superior would make them sound extremely ignorant and backward. Yet our pop culture is filled with content that downgrades women indirectly or directly and somehow we are okay with that. We can say we are moving forward in the women’s rights movement and the inequality between genders is getting extremely small from a legal point of view. But every time we turn on the TV or open a magazine, there is an advertisement with a bikini-clad model using her sex appeal to sell something which implicitly sends the message that women needs to take advantage of her sexuality to get what she wants.

   Gender stereotypes are amplified and drilled into our heads by the media and the pop culture every single day. After years and years of exposure, we have been brainwashed to simply look at it without seeing the disturbing message behind it. That is why I am writing this blog: to reveal how media has been trying to teach us stereotypes about men and women and to expose just how politically incorrect our modern society is.

   We all know that equal rights between women and men is the only option in our world today, yet we allow our media to continue objectifying women and using sexuality as a tool of advertisement. Children spend hours in school learning to show respect for the other gender and that is all forgotten as soon as they hear their favorite rappers talking about their “endless supply of women”. I believe that the media and the entertainment business is a huge part of our lives but also think that it can affect us in negative ways. I hope by blogging about it, at least one o reader can become more critical of the ways media entertains us and will share my anger when they walk by that blown up Tom Ford ad on Rodeo drive.

My Blog Mentor 

   When I began blogging, I came into this cyber world thinking that keeping a blog is just a simple task of jotting down anything that comes across my mind but as time passed I realized it’s not that simple. Being a complete newbie in the blogosphere, I spend a lot of my time reading other blogs and hoping to learn from the masters how to be more intriguing and how to stay relevant to my reader. I have learned that a good blog needs consistency in uploading new posts, coherency in tone and content and actually takes a lot of time and effort. One of my favorite blogs +Q Perfume Blog features all these qualities and more.  +Q Perfume Blog is a blog completely dedicated to fragrances and the author Simone Shitrit explores every aspect of the perfume industry from reviews of products to how perfume ads may aid in exploiting females.  Simone is very active in the perfume industry, as she is actually a Brazil based fragrance designer, a fragrance evaluator, an exclusive fragrance consultant for one of Brazil’s largest news Broadcasters and she even gives lectures and promote events for large perfume brands.  And on top of all that she is also the author and editor for the +Q Perfume Blog and the +Q Perfume Trends & Blends Blog. With that many roles to fill I would imagine Simone to be an extremely busy woman but she has somehow found time to post new blogs regularly. She began this blog in July 2008 and has written anywhere from 3 up to 36 new blogs a month ever since.  All her blog posts are very rich in content and are all very text heavy.  She does not simply tell her readers her opinion but describes each fragrance she reviews in great detail and even comments on all the perfume ads for things she liked and didn't like.  Her audiences are usually consumers wanting an experts voice on a certain product and wanting to know the next big trend before making blind purchases.

   Her latest blog post was posted on April 2nd, titled Perfume Trends –Spring & Summer2013& 2014, where she predicts the next big thing in the perfume industry.  She talked about how fragrances are seasonal just like fashion items and that there is a move towards more tropical scents in the upcoming seasons. She also talked about how there is a trend called “Nomadism” where manufacturers are going to start making more on-the-go products to match modern people’s nomadic life style.

   My favorite thing about her blog is that even though she works in the industry she isn’t afraid to voice her opinions about the negative aspects of the fragrance industry.  Besides teaching her readers about the newest fragrance trend, she is also educating them on not falling for advertisers gender stereotypical traps, much like I hope to do on my blogs. In her blog post Sexual Degradation, Stereotypes and Perfume Advertising, she says “ sexism and treating people, especially women, like meat became the newest way to shock and promote a fragrance”. She points out that a lot of perfume ads put women in a position of submission and suggests that she needs to use her sexuality in order to get what she wants. In the blog post, she backs herself up with many ads of name brand perfumes such as Dolce & Gabbana and Sean John and all these ads featured very sexually appealing women and showed them being dominated by a man.

   Her views about how media and advertisement contribute to the spread of gender stereotypes match mine very closely and they back up what I have said in the past about media objectifying women. But despite all the similarities, our blogs are still quite different in that Simone mostly talks about fragrance trends and her opinions whereas my blog focuses mainly on gender stereotypes. I admire Simone for speaking out about what the Fragrance Industry is doing wrong even though her job depends completely on it. And because she is someone on the inside, maybe one day her voice can bring about real changes to the industry. Most importantly I learned a valuable lesson from Simone that being a great blogger really takes passion and effort, and if someone as busy as Simone can find time to post regularly for her readers, I definitely do not have an excuse to be slacking.  

Having a Voice

   Miss Simone from +QPerfume Blog taught me that blog writing is serious business and readers will only be intrigued if they can feel your passion. Adrian/Amnesia from GenderFun taught me the importance of having a voice in your blogs.  A voice is when the author uses a combination of word choice, phrasing etc. to create a distinct personality for the blog.  Adrian/Amnesia taught me the importance of utilizing the voice and how having unique voice makes a blog more fun and engaging for readers as it develops a sense of personal connection between the readers and the authors.

   GenderFun is a blog that deals with gender issues especially regarding transgender individuals. What is particularly unique about this blog is that the author himself is transgender and he doesn’t only have one voice in the blogs, but three:  one for himself Adrian, and one for his alter ego female-self Amnesia and one more called “We” that speaks on behalf of Adrian and Amnesia as a whole.

     “Together we created this blog in hopes it would bridge the gap between gays and straights, boys and girls, butch and fems, young and old, fat and skinny, the smart and Amnesia, etc. Here at GenderFun.com it doesn't matter what your sexual orientation is, or what gender you identify with, the important thing is that you can find humor in the idiosyncrasies of all genders whether you were born a boy, a girl, or somewhere in-between. It's not about what's between your legs...although you are welcome to email us a photo of what's between your legs, we don't mind, heck, we encourage it ;)”

  That was a little excerpt from their About GenderFun section and is written from the “We” voice. “We” has mostly a gender-neutral voice and takes on a passionate and serious, yet humorous tone. It was said that this blog aims to “bridge the gap” between gays and straights etc. For me the word bridge here acts as a metaphor for creating a passage for ideas to flow, which shows their desire for creating acceptance between the two polar. Also it creates an image that, as of now, the gay and straight, boys and girls are on separate islands and are completely isolated from and unaccepting of each other and this shows the author’s frustration at people’s close-mindedness. However, the humorous side shows through at the end with the very suggestive joke. By saying “we don't mind, heck, we encourage it”, it communicates to readers that the author, while wanting to isolate his feminine and masculine sides to two different characters, is still very bold and open about his sexuality. 

  Amnesia takes on a life of her own and is a celebrity in her own rights.  She has appeared on the first season of American Idol, won many drag queen beauty pageants, and she has received more than 2 million videos views on YouTube as well. There is less of Amnesia’s voice in the blogs than on GenderFun’s YouTube videos where her presence is very strong.  On videos, Amnesia’s personality comes across as very much your stereotypical drag queen with over exaggerated ditziness.  In writing the ditziness is less apparent but she definitely is very flamboyant and over-the-top. In the About Amnesia part of the blog she introduces herself by saying "My Name's Amnesia...Don't Forget it! *wink*" This immediately establishes a very different voice from the “We” as it sounds more playful and much more feminine.  The author communicated the femininity of Amnesia with the clever use of punctuations.  The exclamation mark emphasized that she wants to be remembered and expresses her strong urge to be noticed and visible to the world. To me it didn't sound like a demand but more like a little girl’s plead for attention. While both the “About Me” for We and for Amnesia featured a wink, the two of them communicated completely different emotions. The ;) “We” used was very visual and direct and came across as playful and mischievous. But the *wink* Amnesia used, written out in words with the asterisks, left the facial expression up to the reader’s imagination and invited us to picture her winking which was definitely more flirty and suggestive.

  And finally, there’s Adrian: The mastermind behind GenderFun, and the creator of all these different voices.  Adrian is completely different from “We” and from Amnesia as his voice is the most natural and from the heart.  The character “We” is a combination of Adrian’s deep thoughts and Amnesia’s happiness. The character Amnesia is a blown up portrayal of the stereotypical cross dresser we see on TV. But Adrian is not just a made up character. He is the transgender person caught in an ignorant society and struggling to find acceptance.  His voice is the most genuine out of the three and he deals with most of the sensitive and serious issues in the blogs.  In Masculine and Feminine Scale (LINK), Adrian says

      "I've been crossdressing for over 15 years.  I get comments from people saying how they like my femme self, Amnesia Sparkles.

I enjoy exploring masculinity as well as femininity.

I'm never really certain how people in real life outside the internet perceive me to be.  Where do they rank me in the Masc-Femme Scale (when I'm not dressed as Amnesia Sparkles). To be honest I'm not sure that I care how Masc-Femme I'm ranked by others. That's why I have no shame in going out of the house dressed as a woman or in this case snapping a pic in my new jockstrap. "

This simple short passage established his voice, his views and even showed his emotions. He uses the word “I” very often and to me it communicates a strong sense of confidence and makes everything he says sound like facts that do not need room for argument.  “I enjoy exploring masculinity as well as femininity”, that is a fact and he is sure of it despite what anyone might say.  He uses the word “perceive” to state that after all, what other people says about him is just their perception and does not interfere with what his reality is. He then says, “To be honest I’m not sure that I care”, this sentence sounds almost apologetic but in a sarcastic way that mocks society for expecting him to care. His voice comes across as more masculine and strong than the other two and his word choice establishes that he is confident about himself and is very content being transgender no matter what society may think.

  GenderFun is a very interesting blog that features three distinct voices that alternates doing the talk depending on the topic. It is structured in a way that makes readers feel like they know all three of them as separate individuals. We, Amnesia and Adrian carry very different voices and play very different roles but all three of them convey a sense of confidence in being a transgender person and a passion for correcting people’s ignorant view regarding this third gender.

  The unique three-voice structure makes the blog very entertaining for readers as it ads an element of surprise but at the same time it also communicates a deeper frustration with the stereotypical world.  To me, the fact that Adrian felt a need to create three characters to portray his separate identities shows that, in our society, one person still cannot encompass all gender. Also the way he developed each of these voices shows that there is still as stereotypical way a certain gender is expected to sound. By sounding flirty, we associate it with being feminine. And by sounding confident, we associate it with being masculine.  It terrifies me that I think I can tell a person’s gender through the way they speak because that implies, deep down inside, I still have many stereotypical views of different genders too.