Blog 9 Participation in Electronic Discourse in a "Feminist" Field

The article written by Susan C. Herrings focuses on a study which tries to equalize the amount of time in which men and women speak, by using E-mails to communicate thoughts without being interrupted by one another. According to the article men talk more frequently than women in public settings and using the Internet to communicate makes it easier for women to communicate their disagreements or agreements to topics they would not publicly speak about. so the Internet would give them a greater opportunity to do so. In fact online communication did not allow people to participate equally in discussions. the discussions were shown to be dominated by male participants, women would participate in male discussions but male participants would not do the same when women would post making it an unbalanced situation for the women. Men even in online communication groups were dominating by posting topics and only answering to those they feel are important mainly the male posts. so regardless weather it is a face to face discussion or an online the women are more often excluded and ignored in persons and online. This reminds me of one of the articles read where women pose questions or their thoughts but the men decide whether it is important to address shaping how the conversation will go on. it is unfortunate but in the article when women excluded the men by selecting to speak about something that men could not support they too were excluded and used powerless language which is commonly seen used by women. so in certain situations men can also feel what a women goes through on a daily basis when put in a situation where men are deliberately trying to exclude women. The article was very interesting and informative it proves that even on an online communications board a male will dominate in and out in society.

Blog #8

In the movie called "Stale Roles and Tight Buns" it talked about how through a constant view of advertisements a male human being is being programed to think, act, look, and feel like a man should in today's society in the eyes of the advertisers. It focused on different aspects of the male image and applied it to segments of the movie.
With each item that the movie showed there was several images to apply to their thesis of what they think a mans image is perceived as. For example the movie states that advertisers depict men as unemotional, that the advertisements teach males not to show emotion because it will then show weakness. Another image used was that men are dominant over women, by a guy slapping a woman's behind, or men looking down upon woman. There were images of this not only in adult men images, but also can be seen with children. A young boy was placed above a young girl.
The next thing that was interesting to see was the showcase of images in ad's that would depict their definition of success and what success is to them. It would show images of graduation, then the hard work images of a man staying late in his office, then after the series of education, hard work, it would go onto the rewards of the labor. The luxury ad's were a constant reminder to the viewer of what success is in the form of cars, expensive alcohol, watches, etc...
The ad industry does show the world an array of products and like the movie stated they know precisely what they are doing. Every thought of every action in the ad itself, the photograph, the models, the product, the messages, are all carefully planned to target the audience they need to target, but personally I do not think that people from woman to men are so enticed by the ads that it changes their behavior and molds their personality. I admit that the movies messages was that by the use of ad's the way a man should be is a straight line of what they are, in other words the movie says that the ad's are what men follow, and I do not think men follow every type of ad the industry publishes. I think men do follow and behave like some of the ads, such as the image of a perfect body, but just by viewing the images of a man hitting a woman on the butt to state dominance over a man will not go around hitting women on their butts for that sole reason. The movie did make a lot of good points and the advertiser's themselves are the ones that set the standards on what "they, the advertisers" think as the standard model of what a man should be, not the men themselves. The ad industry is a dark place that are sending negative messages, but I think as a society we need to have more trust in our males and females in what they perceive as what it takes to be a man and or woman in our society.