DAB response 3 - readings 1 and 8:

The quote,  “The tyranny of media messages limiting lives to hearth and home (26) makes me think that this idea has not changed. Possibly the idea of which part of the home may be in question since there is so much fuss about beauty and body. It is the mirror image that I am alluding to. Where is the mirror? In the home. The stereotype of ‘Superwoman’ (27) also bothers me. The comment from Thomas's post reminded me of the offensive movie “Fatal Attraction” and the psychopathic label put on women who dared to be independent, aggressive,  unmarried, and marks a time when cultural wars seemed to heighten the “surrender” for those women who could not be superwomen. Thus, they ‘opted out’ using the myth of ‘it was my choice.’ I believe this was media subterfuge.  What did the media and this ideology spin? As stated by Gil (140), “[t]he notion that all our practices are freely chosen is central to postfeminist discourses, which present women as autonomous agents …” Autonomy is key but I am not sure it has arrived.          Radical feminism does hit it on the nail that patriarchal ideas dominate and will persevere unless there is a paradigm shift that departs from any identity with male dominance, not necessarily men. Women are creating their own means of communication and this does include aspects of pornography and sex work, and the economic rewards go to the women; however, there is a power hierarchy so the dominant ideology of capitalism has not vanished.

In terms of socialist feminism, it seems to be that this is slowly occurring because of the external social forces that are creating the shift from male dominance in the work force. More women at one time, (around 2010) did work outside the home, until teachers were laid off. How is this depicted in the media?

Patriarchy still wins. There are no advertisements that show men continuously cleaning the house or using household supplies or nurturing children. We still fight the battle of the “naughty librarian” vs Mr. Responsible to sell a pair of glasses. As Stuart Hall’s theory of encoding and decoding, advertisers are still encoding messages to maintain the status quo. We decode them based on our long historical and cultural codes of male dominance, but now we are decoding from the historical view of women’s fight for equality. Embracing sexuality is good in one sense, as long as it is not disguised as a way for the status quo to covertly maintain the idea of male dominance. Can media dictate our lives by representing false consciousness?  Or do media decode audience perceptions to encode their advertisements as portraying what reality is? Which comes first, the egg?