Gender & Emotion

In class, we talked about emotion in genders and how females are over emotional while men actively hide their emotions. Immediately, I thought of  how I did not fit that “mold.”

I am typically an extremely happy person. When I get mad or sad, I am still laughing and always down-grade the severity of whatever issue I have going on. For the longest time, I would joke and say, “Oh I’m a girl, I don’t want to let people know that I’m upset and burden them because I’m just supposed to be happy.” It recently dawned on me that this is a crazy statement and that I should be able to open up to my friends/family about what is going on in my life, even if it is negative. I am always open to take on the burden of others and their problems, yet I cannot stand when I do it to them.

One thing that Dr. Crafton said in class today that really struck me was, “You can’t always be tough; you don’t want to always be tough.” I really felt this because that’s exactly how I am. During class, I kept thinking, “oh my gosh, my mind is like a man’s because I never get emotional. But honestly, I think that these days, women are being raised to not show emotion now too because we are expected to be happy, put together, and ready to take on the task of caring for others. When I do encounter a problem, such as recently when I had an extreme falling-out with my older sister, I hold in my anger, sadness, and other negative emotions and always tell people, “it’s whatever I’m fine” or “I’m over it, they’re not worth my sadness.” When a few friends told me that I need to stop and that being sad is ok, some of my guy friends would say, “come on you’re a girl it should be programmed in you to be able to be upset and deal with it—it’s normal.”  

My questions would be: do any of you ladies feel the pressure to not burden people with your problems too, or do you find that you feel guilt for confiding in people rather than just being happy? Do you think that this is a problem of gender, or do you feel that this is just a humans-in-general thing?

Music Videos...who's to blame?

This week I got in a mini-debate with a friend of mine. She was talking about music videos these days and how the males in them objectify women. She went on to say that it’s disgusting that these men (specifically talking about rap and hip hop artists) allow women to dance around half naked while the male just watches as if he’s used to it. I made the comment that the girls in the videos are willingly in them--they are making the choice to be half naked, dancing around, and doing those risqué things. Needless to say, she didn’t like that comment.

By saying this, I didn’t mean that women are “asking” to be objectified; I was just simply trying to make her realize that men are not forcing these females in the videos to do anything, in fact in most music videos, girls will audition to be in it and know exactly what the music video entails. Yes, the male artists may have a lot to do with creating the concept of the videos and their songs, but I feel that women should not agree to be in videos that are super raunchy—basically I was just annoyed that males are always getting the blame for when a female is portrayed as a sex object when it’s not completely their fault.

I watched a video a few years back in another Gender-based class I took; it’s very explicit and shows a lot of sexual objectification of women. It’s called Tip Drill by Nelly (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFBga8WP7EY) Afterwards we had a discussion about the video. Most peers only talked about how disgusting the males were in the video for “allowing this” and wanting to have a music video with this in it. A few others said that the women in the video are “insecure” and/or “uneducated,” so they wanted to make money and get attention. Nelly’s music video for Tip Drill is definitely explicit—there’s a lot of sexual stuff going on and nudity, although a lot of it is blurred out (nipples, mostly). However, a much newer video that I stumbled upon is definitely worse. The music video for Make It Nasty by Tyga (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pvpAf5veyw) has no blurring of nudity at all (not even nipples), and far more sexual chaos happening than I’ve ever seen in a music video before. My boss saw it and argued that it’s basically soft porn. Once again though, all I heard about was that Tyga was a skeezy person for wanting these women to be engaging in these activities.

I think that the real issue of gender in the media has nothing to do with men being pigs and women being victims of sexual objectification. The real issue, at least in my opinion, is that we’ve been exposed to these types of images/messages for so long that we forget that they aren’t appropriate; they’ve become a norm to our society. To me, the most disgusting part about these videos is that they are too common. I think that women should know better than to be in a video that does this, but it’s so common and less frowned-upon that they actually (in my opinion) enjoy doing it, no matter what their motivation is. Since this is the case, it allows the cycle to continue—explicit songs are created, an explicit video needs to accompany the song, tons of females apply to be in the video, the song and video is a huge success, another artist thinks up an explicit song, etc… Now, by no means am I saying its females’ faults either. I’m just saying that as a whole, our society has become desensitized to these things and it’s harder for us to realize that they’re not ok and shouldn’t be “normal.”

My questions are: Why is it that the men are the first people to get the blame for female objectification in music videos? What are your opinions about this topic? Do you think that videos such as these 2 should be allowed to be created and marketed to the general public on places such as YouTube?