Response: Douglas Chapters 4 and 5

I thought the most interesting part of the first chapter was the trend of TV shows with female voice overs. It started as a way to empower women by getting inside their minds and showing their true thoughts. However, this tactic backfired in many ways because instead of showing what women were genuinely thinking, movies only showed shallow musings. I loved the movies Clueless and What Women Want and it never struck me before that those weren't the things that I would be think and feeling on a daily basis. I think the media culture so often portrays women as being obsessed with diets, shopping, men and having babies that it has been engrained into people that those would naturally be the only things for women to be thinking about. Bridget Jones was another example of a movie I thought was really entertaining and funny. However, one woman deemed it "retrograde (115)," claiming that it "made caricatures out of all women." In a way, I think that it's true. Women shouldn't be portrayed as only thinking about their hot bosses and eating ice cream for days when they've been broken up with. However, to be fair, equally deprecating movies have been made about men. I think Superbad is a good example of this. It claims that all men are interested in is getting laid and losing their virginity. I think sometimes movies are made to be purely entertainment and we have to remember that there might not always be an ulterior motive.

The other thing I found myself nodding my head at was how Douglas explained how much white women love hearing sassy black women speak. Miranda Bailey is, by far, my favorite character on Grey's Anatomy and it is partly because she says all these sassy things that I would often love to say myself. However, it's interesting to me that Grey's also showed that women couldn't possibly have it all, not even sassy black women. In one of the seasons Bailey is accused of being a bad mother after her sons accident and her husband says she doesn't spend enough time at home. Even successful, powerful female surgeons have issues. I think that's one of the main complaints about the media, they portray it as an either, or for women. It's impossible to make it all work together.