Feminism: How Media Has Shaped My Opinion

“We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage…. Because they have to be… a hard man…And then we do a much greater disservice to girls, because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of males. We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller” This is one of my favorite passages about feminism and how it affects both men and women. I would never have heard this passage spoken if not for the virality of Beyonce’s Flawless.

Feminism first came across my social conscience in High School when I was spending a lot of my time online on Hitrecord.org. At the time, HitRecord (created by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) had just had a big relaunch. The interface went from looking like it hadn’t been updated since 2002 to looking like a fully fledged social media network that someone had sunk a pile of money into.

HitRecord was also really trying to get a lot of projects going for a showcase at Sundance Film Festival. One of the projects was a ‘feminist retelling’ of Little Red Riding Hood. I ended up contributing to this project by animating a few illustrations that others in the community had submitted. Here is a video from HitRecords Youtube account of JGL explaining a part of the project and his inspiration for it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlYTqrMhpQw

(I did the animation in this video with little red spilling flowers – you can watch the Halloween special on hitrecord.org)

This project was the first time I really began thinking my own personal relation to feminism and how my identity as a woman affects my day to day life. As someone who grew up in a household with Fox News on round the clock, this was certainly not a topic that was spoken about frequently. This was also a piece of media framing feminism in a positive light rather than the negative light a conservative media outlet like Fox News may have traditionally shed on it. In addition to this, feminism has played a very important role in today’s female comedians

In addition to this, feminism has played a very important role in today’s female comedians when one looks as the work of Mindy Kaling, Broad City’s Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, or Obvious Child’s Jenny Slate it all tends to skew towards their social beliefs and advocation of feminism. These are also women who I look up to and whose media I consume.

Outside of TV and Movies, one can look at Beyonce’s Flawless  that samples Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s now famous TED Talk We Should All Be Feminists:

My journey to feminism has been almost exclusively through media. Both through the positive and the negative perspectives ‘shared’ with me.