Monthly Archives: January 2014

Pretty Woman

Since my Civic Issues blog is going to be all about feminism and women’s rights (or the lack thereof) in pop culture, I thought I’d start off my first post with a pop culture we all probably know of: the movie Pretty Woman (1990).

If you don’t know what the movie’s about, here’s a quick synopsis: Edward, a businessman, needs a date for some social events for a week while staying in a fancy hotel in Los Angeles. On the street he meets Vivian, a pretty, prostitute with a lot of personality, who agrees to stay with him in the hotel for a week during the events. During the week, Edward brings Vivian to some high-class clothing shops where she’s looked down upon. By the end of the week, Vivian is looking high class, and the two fall head over heels for each other despite their difference in social class, and they live happily ever after. Seems like an uplifting story right? WRONG. Let’s look deeper. Take a look at at least the first 15 seconds of the trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAiQvt1_TsM

The first thing the viewer sees is Julia Roberts (Vivian). There’s a close-up of her tiny waist, her sexy legs, her boots, and her eyes. Through his editing, the director cuts up the female body, showing the most alluring parts of her, and this is meant to capture the viewer. Here, we’re no longer trying to get to know the character, Vivian. Rather, the director pushes us to see her as a beautiful figure, and not a person worth getting to know beyond the surface.

Throughout this montage, Julia Roberts is describing her fairytale daydream of being swept off her feet by a knight in shining armor. That’s all us girls really ever think about right? WRONG.

And that’s all this movie is about, isn’t it? A young woman is struggling to keep her neck above water, so she decides to sell her body for money. Naturally, the only way she can get herself out of this situation is to wait until somebody saves her. Cue Richard Gere, rich, snobby businessman who humbly takes it upon himself to help this devastated, pretty girl. If you finished the trailer, Richard Gere asks Julia, “So what happens next?” and she replies, “She saves him right back”. Sorry kids, but I’m not buying this feeble attempt at making a non-100% misogynistic film and here’s why:

In the beginning of the film, Julia Roberts has a brimming personality; she has an extremely loud mouth that says what it wants to whomever it wants, and she dresses with originality, not caring who she’s going to offend through the amount of skin she flaunts. In this stage of the movie, she’s herself, and I like it.

When Richard Gere comes along, however, he changes what he can of the original Julia. He takes her shopping to fancy stores, thus stripping Julia of her ability to express herself through her clothes. He turns her into this image of a high class woman who is proper and old-lady like and no longer fun, all in the course of one week! In short, he doesn’t accept what she looks like on the outside, so he changes her. Is this what the fairytale is supposed to look like? Since Richard “saved” her, is Julia supposed to compromise by following what he wants her to look like as a way to pay him back?

Even worse is the change in Julia’s personality. In the beginning she’s wild and carefree. In the end, she becomes this very tame, very boring person, mimicking Richard’s businesslike personality in the film. Julia feels like she has to change herself to fit in with this new lifestyle, with this new man. Does she feel like she has to compromise herself to fit in with his world?

According to Wikipedia (if you find it a credible source, which I do for blogging purposes thank you very much), the movie is one of the most financially successful entries in the romantic comedy genre, with an estimated gross income of $463.4 million. It is considered by many critics to be the most successful movie in the genre”. This, frankly, makes me scared. It means that both men and women are buying into this idea that women must change themselves to be with their “fairytale” men. This movie, and Hollywood as a whole, ingrains these dangerous ideas into our heads so that we begin to believe the morals in these movies. Plus, they fall in love in just a single (business) week! Talk about unrealistic to the max right?

Pretty Woman is dangerous movie because it teaches us the wrong kind of morals. In the next post, I’ll analyze a movie that teaches the right kind of morals for both men and women. That movie is, the one and only, dearly beloved, Frozen.

Grease is another example of a movie in which a woman changes herself to be with a man

Grease is another example of a movie in which a woman changes herself to be with a man

 

 

 

Au Lycée

I realized I haven’t made a post about going to high school (“lycée”) in France last year (maybe because I’ve tried to block it out of my memory..?). No it actually wasn’t THAT bad. I guess I’ll describe the French schooling system and you’ll see for yourself…

First of all, even though I had already graduated from high school in the US in 2012, the Rotary program still requires that students go to high school in their host country. We don’t necessarily have to pass the courses, but just do our best (which for some of us meant that staying awake in class was achievement enough).

French high school consists of our 10-12th grades. I was placed in the 12th grade which is the most difficult year (called Terminale). At the end of the year, students have to pass the Baccalauréat (or just le Bac), which is basically a week-long test consisting of everything you’ve ever learned in school (yikes is right). If you pass, you get to go on to college or a job. If not, you take the entire year of Terminale all over again. Pretty intimidating.

I was assigned to a private Catholic school called Lycée Sainte-Marie. Luckily we didn’t have to wear uniforms, but a cross hung in every classroom. I was also assigned to be in the “L” (or literary) track, so I was with the same people in all of my classes. We had classes such as French literature, History and Geography, Philosophy, and lots of Language courses. The two other tracks are “ES” (social sciences and economics), and “S” (sciences).

My days consisted of waking up before 7am, catching the public bus (no school buses unless you live in rural areas), and classes began at 8am almost every day (they use block scheduling so your schedule changes everyday), and finishing at 5pm almost every day with only a 45 minute lunch-break in between. This was probably the worst part of exchange, being stuck in school for 9 hours each day when all I wanted to do was explore and travel and hang out with friends. The plus side? Every 2 months we got a 2 week break. That’s when I did all my traveling!

Since the school day is so long, there are no sports or clubs associated with schools in France. The only club was the drama club, and they met well after the school day ended only once a week. Thus, there is absolutely no school spirit to be found in the typical French school. School is school in France, no assemblies and no pep rallies, and there even weren’t morning announcements. Needless to say, this was incredibly different than the American school system I was used to. I missed being on a sports team where I could hang out with friends and be active everyday after school. Instead, I’d usually walk into the downtown area and meet my exchange friends in a café for a drink after school, and then head home on the bus in time for dinner.

Yet, one of the major differences in French schools that I especially didn’t care for was the strictness of the teachers. Even if a few of the students were silently talking to one of their neighbors, often the teacher would suddenly blow up at the student and yell at them in front of the class. They would sometimes even insult the student in front of their peers. I found this to be way too severe, sometimes verging on the point of cruelty. I guess it’s their way of punishing students, but I definitely prefer the American way of simply sending someone to the office so that the rest of the class can just move on and learn. I didn’t find my school to be an encouraging learning environment, but maybe that’s just my school, not all French schools.

All in all, I’m glad I went through the French high school experience, especially because now I see how great my American high school experience was. Luckily I made some great French friends at school that got me through those long days.

A photo of my class!
A photo of my class with our philosophy teacher on the left.

 

Civic Issues Intro Post

I really wasn’t sure what to write about for this new blog on contemporary civic issues. While I’m interested in politics, I don’t know enough about the logistics and details to write a post about them. So, I’ve decided to stick to the stuff I know, and write about women’s issues in everyday life. Last semester I took a comparative literature class, CMLIT153, that really made me take a closer look at women’s issues that are present today. In this class, we studied  film and literature from different cultures, and were looked at topics such as trauma, the idea of the documentary, and feminism, through these texts. The unit on feminism really stood out to me because while I think of myself as somewhat of a feminist, I never realized how much of our society is still male-driven. For example, Hollywood makes movies that are meant to be enjoyed by a male audience, and in future posts I’ll explain how exactly they do that.

Even in everyday life I’ve begun to take more notice of how I and my fellow females are treated versus our male peers. I’ll take a look at what words we tend to use and how we (males and females alike) unconsciously put women inferior to men. Since I’m not a Women’s Studies major, I don’t know all the ins and outs of the topic; rather, I’ll talk about day to day observations from a college student’s perspective and share my opinions on contemporary women’s issues.

The Passion Continues

This semester I will be continuing on with my passion blog focusing on my Rotary exchange experience in France. There’s so much to talk about, whether that be the cultural differences in France, or exchange programs in general, or how this experience has changed me. Some upcoming topics may be a post about French schools, and how going to high school for a 5th year was probably the hardest part of my exchange but maybe the most rewarding. I’d also like to get more specific, narrating personal events that changed my mind about some things and supported my opinions in others. I’m going to have to talk about my exchange friends who also lived in the same city I did at the time, because those friendships were the strongest I made while I was in France.

This experience of writing down what my gap year means to has also really helped me put into perspective how unique and how amazing being an exchange student was, and that’s another reason to why I want to continue telling my story. What I want my readers to get out of my blog is not jealousy, and I don’t want them to think I merely tell my story to brag about how great my exchange year was. Rather, I hope to inspire them to maybe study abroad in the future, or better understand exchange students or international people at Penn State. I also hope they learn a lot about French culture, the good and the bad!

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