Skip to main content
By

Women Over Time

Even before this unit, the representation of women had been a topic I was interested in. With social media nowadays, the subject comes up even more often, and has sparked many debates and protests. However, when the unit began, I realised that the sexism experienced by women was still a major ongoing problem in our society.

 Women are often portrayed as inferior to men. They are objectified, and pressurised to be physically beautiful, because society has forced them into believing that that is their role. Society has guided them from a young age, through books and movies and toys, to care more about their appearance than their aspirations and goals. Men, on the other hand, had whatever they needed to achieve their dreams from a young age. Wanted to become a police officer? Buy a toy gun. Wanted to be an explorer? Grab a pair of binoculars. And if a girl wanted to become any of those things, buying anything from the boys' section was frowned upon by society. Unless, of course, you bought those products, but made specifically for girls.

 In this unit, I hope to learn about why women are represented the way they are, and how they have been represented over different cultures and time periods.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This sounds fun

By
My first thoughts when I read the course name was that this would be a very interesting course for me, since I'm a pretty big feminist ( I mean otherwise I probably wouldn't have picked this course so duh), and that we'd be looking through old texts and artworks, slowly building our way up to the present. However, from what you've showed us so far, we'll be looking at much more than that, and I'm excited to see what it teaches me about the representation of women in more than just modern day times. So far in my life, girls and women have been portrayed as (usually; there are some exceptions) two dimensional beings who are there either there only as the main character's love interest, as some faux attempt at equal representation (in which they don't speak a word), or as a villain. It has been getting much better but there are still many cases where the roles of females was severely lacking or two-dimensional, eg. the majority of women in media repre...
1 comment
Read more

Girl With A Pearl Earring

By
Girl With A Pearl Earring Johanne Vermeers' Girl with a Pearl Earring Painting In the novel "Girl with a Pearl Earring" the story rotates around the character "Griet" and her life as a maid for the painter Johannes Vermeers' family, and all the ups and downs of her life working for them, including when Vermeer paints her for his, now world famous, painting "Girl with a Pearl Earring." Griet comes from a protestant family with three children (Griet (15/16), her younger brother Frans (~14-15) and her younger sister Agnes (~12)) living in the dutch town of Deflt which is shown as a relatively small town. Griets' family falls to poverty after her father is blinded in an accident with a kiln explosion, taking his craft of tile-painting when he is blinded. This means Griet has to go and work for the Vermeers' where the painter needs a maid who can clean without moving anything and Griets parents volunteer her. There are a lot of small...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ideal Women

By
Representations of women have varied enormously throughout history and across cultures, but one thing remains constant, and that is usually a prominent representation of women are those of the ‘ideal woman’.   This is a representation of women that I find interesting as you can find almost anywhere as it can be found in nearly all media we consume today, such as social media platforms, television, websites and advertising from the fashion and cosmetic industry.  An idea of a ‘perfect’ female has been, and will continue to be a constant representation of women due to the fact that many societies function by having high-status figures that act as an ideal way of being, physically, socially and economically. ‘Ideal women’ can be found in many differing forms throughout many different eras and across a diverse range of cultures. These individuals are looked up to by societies usually due to possessing features, traits or characteristics that, in their context, are deemed d...
1 comment
Read more