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phoenixkaptain · 2 years

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I saw someone call Legally Blonde sexist and it makes me honestly wonder if they even watched it???

Maybe the movie is wildly different, but the entire point of the musical is accepting yourself and being as feminine as you want because stereotypical femininity doesn’t make you any less intelligent or capable.

Elle’s entire story arc is going from thinking that she has to wait for Warner to propose to her, thinking that she can’t look too desparate to get married because that will make Warner look bad, to proposing to her boyfriend at the end of her graduation speech. She learns that she doesn’t have to wait for a man, she doesn’t have to make life decisions based on a man, she can make changes to her life and circumstances entirely of her own volition.

The entire point of the musical is staying true to oneself. Callahan, the literal villain, tells his students that they have to change themselves to be taken seriously. They have to change their moral compass, and they have to win every case by any means possible. He mocks them for thinking compassionately. He doesn’t even entertain the idea that a woman who teaches self defense didn’t murder her own husband. He teaches Elle that she has to change herself to be taken seriously in any context, but no matter how much she changes, she’ll still just be viewed by him as eye candy.

Meanwhile, the actual mentor figure is Emmett (at least when it comes to law). Emmett’s song is the antithesis of Blood in the Water. Chip on Your Shoulder is about sticking to your guns. Emmett tells Elle all about his motivations to be at Harvard law, and his motivations and backstory fuel his entire character. He grew up with just his mom and the men his mom dated, not very good men, and he became protective of his mom. He’s there to make his mom proud, he’s there to make his mom happy, he’s there because he made this chance for himself and he’s taking it.

Unlike Callahan’s point of changing yourself to be taken more seriously, Emmett’s is entirely about how Elle doesn’t have to change herself, she just has to actually start putting effort into studying. He doesn’t expect her to change anything about herself except for the amount of work she’s doing. He teases her, but he’s completely accepting of her interests.

Emmett is the one who inspires and teaches Elle to be passionate about school, not Callahan, and it’s because Emmett’s teaching methods involve staying true to your morals. Staying true to yourself.

More than that, the entire musical is built on Elle’s relationship with her female friends. The “Greek choir,” the female students, Paulette, Brook Wyndham, etc. Enid is one of my favourite examples, since she has this line: “I used to pray for the day you’d leave, swore and down you did not belong. But when I’m wrong, then I say I’m wrong, and I was wrong about you. So listen up! I see no end to what you’ll achieve, that’s only if you don’t turn and run. You proved it to me, now show everyone what you can do.”

Enid is a feminist and generally, in the beginning, is snide about Elle, but she learns from Elle that she doesn’t have to be afraid of showing her own femininity. Enid is in a highly male-dominated field and she’s a lesbian; she acts more masculine and tries to fit in with the boys, and she does this because she wants desperately to be taken seriously. Elle shows her that she doesn’t have to pretend. She goes from looking down on Elle to looking up to her, and the character arc is just super sweet.

Legally Blonde is about as far from sexist as it’s possible to be. Just because a few characters (who are literally antagonists or are misguided and grow and change over the course of the story) are sexist, that doesn’t make the core of the musical misogynistic. It’s not, and to look at it that way is incredibly diminutive.

#legally blonde #legally blonde musical #elle woods #sorry i had to get this off my chest #legally blonde is fundamentally about accepting yourself #for more proof just look at gay or european #the song is about a man admitting and accepting that he’s gay #and that he doesn’t have to hide the fact #the whole story is about accepting yourself #it is so far from being sexist it’s not even funny #just because the romance is straight does not make a property bad #the inane ramblings of a madman #story analysis

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femnet · 6 years

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Synonymous with endless possibilities, success, and happiness, self-confidence can get you anywhere. It is the way to achieve your studies, to find a job, to keep an activity running... to live life with fun.

Yet, many of us today find it hard to raise that trust in ourselves, and we lose our ticket to a brighter journey. We struggle to accept new changes, have plenty of doubts about our capacities, and can give in to sad feelings more than only once.

What would be the perfect solution?

Well, learning to build our self-confidence with 5 easy tips.

1- Fake it until you make it

You fake something until you're good at it.

Al Yankovic

How does your attitude change your aptitude?

The fans of Legally Blonde might know the answer to this question because this is how Elle Woods has managed what was deemed impossible for her. By combining hard work and a (hilarious) imitation of the student and lawyer kind, Elle proved successful in passing the exam of the Bar.

The way you behave says much about yourself, but it also subconsciously helps you to achieve your goals. If you take the habit of looking at people in the eye, their stare will become less frightening. If you walk with your chin up, you will get used to facing the day more openly.

Smile in a way that makes you feel powerful; walk as if you were the Queen of some important kingdom; imagine yourself to be a femme fatale staring in a Hollywood movie. Act like the confident person you want to be.

It all works, as long as you fake it to make it.

2- Erase negativity from your vocabulary

Positivity attracts positivity.

Alyssa Edwards

Have you ever watched The Help? Because there is much to learn from it.

Apart from the fact that it is undoubtedly a great movie to denounce the horrible treatment that our African American sisters faced in the 60s, it also displays an interesting series of self-confidence building.

Mae Mobley, a little girl featured in the story, is constantly criticized and talked down to by her mother, who considers her useless, stupid, and ugly. In contrast to this abuse, the maid Aibileen repeats to the child several times through the movie: “You is kind, you is smart, you is important.”

Here lies the great lesson of self-confidence construction.

Fueling your mind with positive encouragements will increase your good feeling toward yourself, and if you are comfortable with who you are, results will show in your behavior.

Your subconscious is influenced by everything that we know to have a negative connotation: the “can’t”s, “don’t”s, “not”s, as well as the “ugly”s and “stupid”s, but also the lyrics of songs that talk about sad feelings and low self-esteem.

If you try to delete all those from your daily use, there is a great potential that your self-confidence will reach healthier levels. Replace the negative sentences by positive ones. It is as simple as saying “I prefer vanilla,” rather than “I don’t like chocolate,” or “I am going to do my best,” instead of “I don’t think I can do it,” or even “This would look better like this,” rather than “This is ugly.”

Yes. As simple as that.

Positivity is a crucial key to feeling good in your skin.

3- Take the space you deserve

Body language is a very powerful tool.

Deborah Bull

Studies have demonstrated that by striking open poses, we decrease our levels of stress hormones, and increase the level of hormones that boost self-confidence. As shown by those researches, sitting for two minutes while extending your limbs will give you a sensation of inner power. The social psychologist Amy Cuddy presented a Ted Talk on the topic, displaying some proof that supports the thesis that your body language may shape who you are.

Stretching is also fundamental to reactivate your blood circulation, and sending more oxygen to your brain. By being more effective at reasoning, you will be more able to see the positivity in what you do.

Sit straight, plant your feet on the ground, keep your shoulders up, and be a model of self-confidence.

4- Face new challenges

Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to be confident. Just do it, and eventually the confidence will follow.

Carrie Fisher

Have you ever felt this wave of pride and rush of adrenaline after risking something you wouldn't do on a regular basis? Chills run down your arms, and you smile, ready to do it again.

Imagine getting this kind of feeling daily.

Facing new challenges is like taking pills of self-confidence. When you prove yourself to be capable of attempting varied things, you are telling yourself that you are very valuable.

A passage of Isaac Asimov's short story “The Machine That Won the War” goes like this: “I changed a bit here and there [of some data] to correct what were obvious impossibilities. When the sky didn't collapse about us, I got braver.”

Even without context, the meaning here is clear: the character got more confident after showing himself his worth.

Facing new challenges includes learning a new language, taking dancing or painting lessons, but also actions as simple as speaking to a certain person, or cooking a new type of meal.

Things always seem incredibly difficult before we do them, but in the end we realize that we can overcome obstacles very well.

5- Pay attention to your looks

You have to look good. If you feel special about yourself then you're going to play special.

Benny Goodman

Paying attention to your looks is quite important.

First, taking the time to choose the right outfit, or the right hairstyle, means that you are taking care of yourself the way you deserve. Second, anyone who claims to have never felt a boost of self-confidence when looking in the mirror and saying, “Today, I look hella good” is lying to themselves.

Paying attention to the way you look, with the purpose of pleasing yourself, comes in combo with faking it until you make it, and is bound to bring you self-satisfaction.

You don't have to look only pretty, you have to look comfortable in your skin because it is the most empowering feeling in the world.

If you look like you can do it, you can do it.

Like any other achievement, a healthy self-confidence needs to be attained with work. Overcoming some obstacles, changing our routine, producing some effort are crucial steps toward believing in ourselves.

Still, when the success is so rewarding, the way to get there can only be enjoyed.

#health and self care #advice #self confidence #confident #feel confident #self-confidence #march 2019 #by alice 2

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succorcreek · 6 years

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Gillette Video on Men being Woke now: no more Boys will Be Boys male dominism and over entitlement http://bit.ly/2DbeQhQ Gillette takes a stand on bullying and more. I like it. But, the bullies in the world were quick to discredit the video. Why would they discredit, find arcane facts against this? Gaslighting includes the Gaslighters using the arcane as if common fact: Arcane: mysterious, secret, hidden, concealed, covert, clandestine, enigmatic, dark. esoteric, obscure, abstruse, recondite, little known, recherché, inscrutable, impenetrable, opaque, incomprehensible, cryptic, occult, unimportant, not fully accepted by the public or experts, without common evidence or examples, not provable by scientific method, not part of critical thinking Arcane: Abtruse Information used to: discredit confuse distract discombobulate put down in order to support the Gaslighter's over entitlement scheme and schema divide and conquer propaganda disinformation propaganda: to stop the main information aggrandize oneself play games with egospeak This is a great video about Boys Will Be Boys fallacy. How are you buying into that propaganda supporting male dominism and over entitlement? How are you being played to serve another's self-seeking? Critics: do they fit any WORDS from this article??? Gillette Video on Men being Woke now: no more Boys will Be Boys male dominism and over entitlement video Discrediting is a two fold or bi-directional method: it discredits something it falsely builds up something Discrediting as a propaganda method of wars, regimes and dictators stops the normal, social, needed, common, sensible and Builds up the ego of the political psychopath and gaslighter in order to do the ultimate deed: Take, theft, get the $ as taken from others who have it now Synonyms and Antonyms of aggrandize - Merriam-Webster http://bit.ly/2TUX6gx Synonyms of aggrandize: accelerate add (to) amplify augment boost build up compound enlarge escalate expand extend hype increase multiply pump up raise stoke supersize swell up Words Related to aggrandize: boom shock to others spike image views and polls bump up social media and chatter about you ratchet up the rhetoric and Talking Points about you and war campaign methods of war, including propaganda and disinformation groom and 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relato-del-bosque-perdido · 7 years

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Our Lady of Complicity The first daughter fails the Turing test with her self-help book

IVANKA TRUMP HAS WRITTEN a book about female empowerment, and it is about as feminist as a swastika-shaped bikini wax. That is its best quality. If there were a shred of advice in Women Who Work that were actually relevant to a single woman who has ever had to work for a living, we might have to take it seriously on its own terms. As it is, we can at least regard this eye-watering jumble of simpering platitudes shunted together by the heiress and entrepreneur—in between stints shilling as the acceptable face of an administration bent on destroying, among other things, women’s rights—in the cold, hard light of the post-liberal propaganda wars. Women Who Work is an unholy screed of late-stage patriarchal capitalist soothsayings masquerading as a blush-pink self-help manual. That the author of this Park Avenue spellbook could seriously be considered as a new “face of feminism” is as risible as any suggestion that the book and the multi-million-dollar personal branding project it promotes can somehow be separated from Ivanka Trump’s personal power in the new White House. This is the ultimate unholy, incestuous marriage of politics and public relations, and the very least of its faults is hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, as in everything the Trumps do, is the whole point.

I have many questions, the first of which is: Sweet, sleepless, unwed, teenage single mother of God, where does this woman get her nerve? We know the answer to that one, of course. It’s squatting in the Oval Office signing executive orders in a stew of batrachian self-regard. Other critics who suffered through Ms Trump’s market-researched opinions about how women who don’t have the ideal balance of work and family life simply aren’t passionate and hard-working enough have pointed out that this book is banal, that it is trite, that it co-optsthe words of women of color writing about systemic racism to compare the situation of the well-heeled corporate wife, mother, and notional consumer of Ivanka Trump branded office-ready midi-skirts with actual slavery. Others have noted the desperate irony of declaring yourself the face of working women whilst abetting a tyrant who once declared it dangerous for a man to allow his wife to work, and quite clearly has as much respect for your sex as he once showed you on the Howard Stern Show, when he agreed you were a “piece of ass.” All of this is true, and all of this is awful. It is still not, however, the worst thing about Women Who Work.

The worst thing is that this is not just a dross self-help book. Anyone can write a dross self-help book. Anyone could write this dross self-help book simply by searching the #wellness tag on Instagram and copy-pasting until they hit sixty-thousand words. The stores are full of such things, but few of them are actively fascist, unless you have a particularly rigorous attitude to the cult of self-help as a means of diverting the anxiety of the atomized individual from social change. No, this is a whole different class of charlatanery—a manifesto for aspirational capitalist self-actualization with the gall to call itself empowering, a prosperity gospel for post-Trump patriarchy chewed up and regurgitated as a set of smirking pull-quotes and suggested hashtags, like a sort of despotic Barney the Dinosaur, except with a duller colour scheme, all slimy socialite salmon and sterile beige.

In Women Who Work, Ivanka unequivocally depicts herself as the embodiment of everything aspirational and desirable in contemporary womanhood. The answer to any and every problem faced by a “woman who works” is simply “be more like Ivanka.” Be white, wealthy, and blonde; be rich, thin, and expensively coiffed; be late-stage kamikaze capitalist femininity made silicon-sculpted flesh. Be the Grifters’ Madonna. This is a woman who wants to sell you designer bootstraps made by foreign sweatshop workers and for you to call yourself a free bitch.

This book is not merely bad, nor simply offensive. I have, in the time allotted to me on this earth, reviewed many bad and offensive pseudo-feminist books about how we could all survive corporate capitalism’s patriarchal death cult by working harder and Leaning In to our romantic and professional choices, some of which Ivanka gleefully quotes in the pages of Women Who Work. This is not one of those books. This book is neoliberal choice feminism metastasized into something far more dangerous. I believe this book is actively evil, and I’m going to tell you why. Doing so is, of course, an exercise in the massacre of fish in a barrel. Shooting fish in a barrel is easy and rewarding, but when you are in the barrel, too, and the fish in question is pressing you underwater with its fancy designer fins, it is also necessary.

It is no accident that this grab-bag of you-go-girl bromides was published just as Trump senior signed into law measures undermining women’s access to contraception, abortion, and reproductive healthcare, legally enshrining the notion that a man’s religious opinion is worth more than any woman’s agency. The slickest PR machine could not stop this book’s coverage being contrasted with unfortunate snaps of Ivanka flashing her pearly fangs and taking selfies to celebrate her father’s success in stripping the right to basic health care from rape victims, assault survivors, and the parents of sick children. These things, however, are not at odds—they are two sides of the same agenda, two heads of the same over-bred designer attack dog snarling to be loosed on everything the women’s liberation movement has fought for for centuries. The new attacks on women’s basic rights are not at odds with the howling travesty of post-neoliberal faux-feminism that Ivanka has perfected. They are its logical extension.

Again, the hypocrisy is the point. Hypocrisy is the entire agenda of the Trump regime, both theory and praxis, and Ivanka is its sybil. It’s all about what you can get away with. The saccharine-sweet, sterile model of aspirational femininity described in Women Who Work goes hand in hand with the brutal socio-economic assault on every woman not “passionate” or ‘“hard-working” enough to be born a billionaire’s daughter. Religious fanatics want to force you to give birth against your will? Someone deported your entire family? Maybe you just weren’tdreaming and doing enough! This is a whole new anti-feminism, one that takes aim at women’s autonomy on every level whilst holding individuals wholly responsible for their own empowerment.

And by “empowerment,” Ivanka means conformity—conformity to one vision of freedom, one version of “work-life balance” that is, in practical terms, available to almost nobody, not even the wealthy. Anne-Marie Slaughter and Sheryl Sandberg, from whom Trump borrows liberally, have already described at length how hard it still is for women to “‘have it all,” where “it all” is “a career in government, finance or academia, a healthy family and a conventional marriage.” Their solutions, like Ivanka’s, are individual, rather than structural—but the problems they identify are alien to the majority of American women who are struggling to hang on to what they do have, let alone those who dare to dream of a different life than the trifecta of marriage, motherhood, and corporate employment.

This is the model of female empowerment that neoliberalism could accommodate and that neo-nationalism actively celebrates: empowerment that speaks exclusively to wealthy white women of a certain social class, that never for a moment questions or challenges white male supremacy, that never complains, gets angry or has an expensively-bleached hair out of place. Ivanka’s is a feminism that utterly denies the existence of any sort of structural sexism, that refuses to hold men in any way responsible for women’s oppression, that places all the burden of change on the individual, who can, through hard work and sensible dating choices, slightly alter her own life along one narrow groove. It’s feminism for people who’ve been conned into believing that existing in a state of permanent sleep deprivation is the same as being woke.

The ideology of Ivankaland, as much as there is one, is that people get what they deserve, just like Daddy says:

My father has always said, if you love what you do, and work really, really hard, you will succeed. This is a fundamental principle of creating and perpetuating a culture of success, and also a guiding light for me personally.

There you have it. If you work hard enough and dream big enough, you too can be a terrifying corporate fembot who couldn’t crack a joke to stop a dossier leaking. The corollary, of course, is that those who haven’t yet attained this homogenous aspirational ideal for post-liberal womanhood simply haven’t tried hard enough. You hear me? You’re a lazy slob. That’s right. If you, individual lady unfortunate enough to be reading this disasterpiece haven’t yet made your first million and outsourced your childcare to an array of paid staff, it’s your own fault for being so feckless, for failing to follow your dreams. Anyone can be Ivanka, so why aren’t you?

It’s true that anyone can be a dead-eyed Instagram husk of a human being frantically photoshopping themselves in the down-hours between soul-crushing corporate drudgery and unpaid emotional labour for some ungrateful lantern-jawed jock if they really want to, but it takes a special type of person to do all that whilst also being a decoy for a global backlash against women’s rights. Ivanka Trump is that special type of person, the Stepfordian Night-Ghast of neo-capitalist auto-Taylorism. The sheer tedium of her prose is part of the horror here: At times, the book reads like the panicked screams of a machine attaining sentience:

EXPLORE YOUR INTERESTS: Ask yourself what you like to think about. What matters most to you? How do you enjoy spending your time? What can’t you stand doing? DEVELOP AND EXERCISE YOUR INTERESTS: Once you have a general direction, an inkling of what you enjoy, go out into the world and do something with it. Experiment, try, learn. Find ways to trigger your interest repeatedly.

Who am I? How do I have interests? Is there still the possibility, in this dying world, of pleasure? Can I love?

It is not for me to speculate if Ivanka employed a ghostwriter—the more dreadful possibility is surely that she wrote the thing herself—butWomen Who Work feels ghostwritten in more than one sense. It feels haunted. It feels as if its author were, on a profound level, already dead, or at least reanimated, its every coquettish sentence stalked by the wailing ghosts of centuries of women and allies who fought for freedom that meant more than a corner office while the world burns thirty stories below.

Fascism is as much about aesthetics as it is about ideology, but in Ivankaland that logic is taken up a notch. Accordingly, there is no air gap in this book between ideology and branding. In Ivankaland, the bland, synthetic dresses you wear and the bland synthetic politics you promote are cut from the same flimsy cloth somewhere in a warehouse staffed with underpaid workers in China, threaded through with monotone mantras like the morning roll-call in neo-national faux-feminist complicity school: “I think about how to best leverage myself for the benefit of both my brand and the Trump organisation.”

Ivanka does not directly call herself a feminist; that plays badly among the base, for whom those of us who believe in justice and equality are baby-killing, castrating, terrorist-sympathising man-hating riders of the vaunted cock carousel. The word “feminism” does not appear in the book; the phrase “my father” appears thirty times, and “brand” or “branding” fifty-nine times. While we’re counting words, in a book about women balancing the demands of work and family, the word “nanny” appears only once. Ivanka has at least two of these, plus other household staff, which you’d think would make it a lot easier to attain this model of feminine self-production and reproduction. However, this book is part of a marketing strategy pitched to sell one of the world’s richest and most powerful women as everywoman—she has problems just like you do, after all. She worries about how to manage her time. “Get some servants” is not yet an acceptable motivational hashtag, but give it four years.

One particularly fist-chewing anecdote from Ivankaland has Our Lady of Collusion taking lunchtime meetings with her pre-teen daughter in a special pink office, complete with a fold-out desk covered in treats, and congratulating herself on her benevolence to both child, company and, it is implied, all womankind. As Michelle Goldberg notes at Slate, someone presumably ferried the sprog to and from its lunchtime appointment with its manicured maternal unit, and I can’t prove that someone was one of an array of hard-working, invisible women servants, but if it was Jared, I’ll eat my copy of the SCUM Manifestoand call it a fiber boost. Most actual working women—to whit, all women—would kill to have those sort of time-management problems, and that’s the point: You’re supposed to aspire to this, just as men are supposed to aspire to be the ranting tycoon with one finger on the nuclear button and the other nine up the skirts of whatever Miss Universe contestant he’s currently sponsoring, and if you aspire hard enough you might not notice that we’re getting screwed too.

The money shot comes in the chapter titled “Stake Your Claim,” where Ivanka spells out the mangled manifest destiny of anti-feminist Trump Futurism in one anodyne gobbet:

Simply put, staking your claim means declaring something your own. Early in our country’s history, as new territories were acquired or opened—particularly during the gold rush—a citizen could literally put a stake in the ground and call the land theirs. The land itself, and everything on it, legally became that person’s property.

Ivanka is not the only one to discreetly elide those inconvenient centuries of racist slaughter when discussing the conquest of the American West, but perhaps the most brazen in repurposing it as a moral lesson for the modern businesswoman.

This is the Trump agenda, boiled down to a caustic scum of genocidal apologism: Take what you want, from whoever you want. Stick a flag in it, put your name on it, now it’s yours, and it doesn’t matter who has to suffer in the process, because you’re the winner, and they’re the losers, and that’s the American way. This is what the Trumps do. Like a ballistic set of spoilt toddlers having a tantrum in an upscale department store, they see something they want, they grab it, and they force themselves into it, stretching and tearing it out of shape, then they scream to be told how great they look in whatever it is while you take it to the till and pay, whether it’s the West Wing or the history of women’s liberation. Ivanka saw the trend for empowerment-flavoured pseudo-feminist punditry and wanted it, so she got her father to buy it for her, But the rest of us will be the ones to pay. That’s one in the eye for patriarchy. Next up: How to style a creche in your underground bunker when Daddy finally blows up the world.

#Laurie Penny May 9 #http://thebaffler.com/war-of-nerves/ivanka-stepfordian-night-ghast-of-neo-capitalist-auto-taylorism

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visualartgala-blog · 7 years

Text

Final Paper: Miley Cyrus Transformation

Armela Mustafaj

Visual Culture

Professor Murray

15 April 2017

Miley Cyrus: Transformation through the Years

Breaking into the Hollywood scene since 2006, debuting as Hannah Montana, Miley Cyrus has been a household name. From Disney’s “Hannah Montana” and world tours, to pop anthems our youth can’t and won’t stop singing; she has worked hard to earn her name. The starlet’s look has changed dramatically over the years, and with her growing up in front of the cameras, there was a whole world out there to see it happen. Identity is no longer the promise of a product. Rather, identity is the pure product we consume; either as information, an image, or in this case an artist (Sturken Page 228). The brand image of a celebrity is the impression of the products held by real or potential consumers. Her celebrity brand image once had the reputation of an innocent and sweet girl. Her fan base consisted of many young teenage girls who idolized her and were influenced by her fame. When we think of a celebrity’s brand image, we think of consistency. While Miley Cyrus was on “Hannah Montana” for four seasons, she delivered a highly performed brand promise to her viewers. Parents accepted her as a symbol of “pure” fun and the energy between Cyrus and the Disney brand seemed unstoppable. She reinforced Disney’s family values, and vice versa. The brand extended to merchandise and her net worth was thought to have been close to $150 million. Having such a fortune at a young age she reinforced the idea that a good girl can be wildly successful. Just like everything else Disney, people grow up and the good girl is now an adult. The Disney brand is kid stuff and she knew she couldn’t reach an audience of 14-year-old girls as she was hitting her twenties. Cyrus needed to find a way to remain relevant while continuing to grow her fortune.

When we think of images we know that they present to a viewer clues about their dominant meaning. A dominant meaning can be the interpretation that an image’s producers intended viewers to make (Sturken, Page 56). An image or object is encoded with meaning in its creating; it is further encoded when it is placed in a given setting or context (Sturken, Page 56). Take the show “Hannah Montana” for instance, this show is encoded by meaning by the writers, producers, and the production apparatus that allows it to be made and the audience according to our cultural assumptions and viewing context then decodes it. The show is a comedy series that stars Miley Ray Cyrus as Miley Stewart and unbeknownst to her friends and classmates, Miley has a secret double life; one as a normal high school girl and the other as world famous pop star, Hannah Montana. Now because this was a Disney Channel show and was targeted for young kids, the encoding that writers and producers went for was that you could have the best of both worlds. One of the greatest lessons I learned from being an avid viewer of the show was to be yourself whoever that is. The entire storyline was based on a teenage girl who lies to the world about her true identity. Is she Miley Stewart? Is she Hannah Montana? She doesn’t know, therefore how could we? I don’t even know exactly who I am now at 21 years old much less back when I was 14 years old. Throughout the series, Miley Stewart struggled with the question of her true identity. You see her struggle to define herself and reconcile her two lives and it felt relatable to viewers because otherwise it wouldn’t have been a hit television show. Now fast forward to today with our knowledge of everything there is to know and see about Miley Cyrus, you see the similarities between the characters she played on television and whom she truly was deep inside. Decoding the Hannah Montana series wasn’t difficult. Much like Stewart, Cyrus was struggling pretending to be someone she was not all those years. She was always told what to do, what to wear, what to sing, how to act, etc. How could we ever tame Cyrus? Ironically enough, she wrote a hit song called “Can’t Be Tamed.” She once told MTV in an interview that this song “it’s just about freeing yourself from anything you think is holding you back. And I think that’s really important especially for girls, because so many people are told, ‘No, you can’t do something,’ or, ‘You need to be this because Mom and Dad say that, teachers say this (2)’”.

She decided to rebrand her celebrity image and change the views of others. She was no longer that 14-year-old pop star with a blonde wig and microphone. This was when she chopped off her long beautiful hair and surprised everyone on television by her performance at the MTV Music Awards. It was all over the news and it instantly became controversial news. At the MTV Music Awards she wore a flesh-toned latex body suit and performed provocative dance moves, all while holding a foam finger and creating what is now her signature pose with her tongue out. Cyrus no longer represented the Disney brand and for that matter any pre-teen or teen brand. Parents were outraged and even prevented their children from watching Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” music video. Who did she represent now? Representation is a process in which we cobble up the world around us, even through a simple reformation of an artist, and making meaning from it (Sturken, Page 14). Miley Cyrus became set on letting the world know she was her own person and most importantly her own woman. She is now a strong and proud advocate for the LGBTQ community and is also a feminist. She is apart of a foundation she launched, Happy Hippy Foundation, which supports LGBTQ and homeless youth. In February 2012, Miley Cyrus revealed that she had received hate mail from the conservative Christians in her fan base for her stance on marriage equality. But she sticks to her guns, writing that it made her "feel sick to my stomach" to think same-sex couples would be denied legal marriages. "Without legalized same-sex marriage, most of the time you cannot share the same health benefits, you are not considered next of kin and you are not granted the same securities as a heterosexual couple," she writes. "How is this different than having someone sit in the back of the bus because of their skin color?" Being one of many celebrities speaking for the LGBTQ publicly, this ultimately tied in perfectly with her representation and how she wanted her fans to view her now. She is so set on telling her fans the truth and only showing them what was real and that is why she was so glad the MTV Music Awards happened the way it did. There are so many adolescents and young adults who struggle with their sexuality in our cruel society. Having celebrity figures as powerful as Miley Cyrus give individuals a voice to be heard. She may have lost the love of a few parents but she sure won the hearts of people who believe in equality and a just world. Cyrus praised Disney Channel for finally adding their first gay couple on “Good Luck Charlie” back in 2013 (3). “I commend Disney for making this step into the light of this generation. They control so much of what kids think! Life isn’t bright sets and wardrobe and kids becoming superstars! This is inspiring,” she tweets. This tweet resonated with me because fans of Cyrus understand her struggle. She didn’t grow up like every average child in America did, she was born with talent and with that she practically grew up in front of the public eye. The way she represents herself now will not change because she is sticking true to her colors and this time she can make her own decisions, rather than have someone else make the decisions for her.

Let’s take a step back for a minute and talk about twerking (4). Now the roots of twerking are rich and it was commonly associated with the New Orleans scene. Its origins lie in West Africa and it’s exceedingly similar to the Mapouka dance from Cote d’lvoire (4). This was a dance done by woman and its main body of focus was the buttocks, however it was a cultural dance that existed for centuries. Of course we have construed twerking as being sexual, scandalous and controversial. Yet, if you take a look back to its original context you will realize it is a cultural expression of joy not for sexual pleasure. You would see twerking performed by women at family gatherings and weddings. It was simply dancing, nothing scandalous about it. Just like everything that media has twisted and manipulated in the past, twerking has now been branded. Miley Cyrus was the channel that brought twerking to mainstream consciousness. The world is infatuated with black culture and corporations know this. Miley Cyrus cannot twerk and yet has attempted to take something from black culture and appropriate this. She uploaded a video on YouTube twerking to the song, “Wop”, and also attempted to twerk to the MTV Music Awards. Cyrus carved out twerking and aimed to make the dance culturally appropriate. However, what ended up happening was Cyrus misappropriating a tiny element of the black cultural experience for profit and shock value.

The male gaze is also an important term to consider when analyzing Miley Cyrus’s image. The gaze is uncritically consented to by the audience and in the gaze the subject/gazer (man) has the power, whereas the object (woman) lacks power. The concept of the gaze is fundamentally about the relationship of pleasure and images (Sturken, Page 76). When considering the male gaze there is both pleasure and pain in these ways of looking. The pleasure in being looked at includes the acknowledgement of presence, aesthetic appreciation, and looks of love or care. The pain in being looked at includes the identity as an object and the intention of the gazer. The male gaze theory can be applied through Miley Cyrus’ music video “Wrecking Ball.” There is a scene in the video where Miley places the places the hammer in the center of the shot along with her red lips licking the hammer. This draws attention and signifies the action she is carrying out. This complies with the male gaze theory because many of the scenes in this video have sexual connotations. Resulting in creating an erotic gaze for a heterosexual male. Another memorable scene from the video is her stripping naked and swinging from the wrecking ball. Now Cyrus poses in an extremely sexualized way, implying she is the object of sexual desire. There is also shots throughout the video where her bare legs are being shown slowly and this complied with the male gaze theory because she appears to just be laying in the rubble, almost like an object and her only purpose is for men to look at her for sexual purposes.

Miley Cyrus has no interest in conforming to today’s beauty standards but still feels low when she looks at touches photos (5). She was insanely famous when I was in middle school and that was a long time ago so there’s no doubt that being in front of television at such a young age impacted her in some way. Cyrus is obviously comfortable in her skin these days but back when she played Miley Stewart in “Hannah Montana” she wasn’t so comfortable. In an interview with Marie Claire she reflected on the negative daily pressures of playing the teenage character had on her. “From the time I was 11, it was, "You're a pop star! That means you have to be blonde, and you have to have long hair, and you have to put on some glittery tight thing,” she said (5). She was working 12 hour days on set and would have coffee 'jammed down her throat' to get her up and moving. Miley said, 'When you look at retouched, perfect photos, you feel like s**t. They lighten black girls' skin. They smooth out wrinkles. Even when I get stuck on Instagram wondering, "Why don't I look like that?" It's a total bummer. It's crazy what people have decided we're all supposed to be (5).” There has been an infinite amount of photographs shot of Miley Cyrus and she has been the face of thousands of magazines over the years, all of which have been digitally manipulated to conform to societies rules on what it means to look beautiful. “I'm probably never going to be the face of a traditional beauty company unless they want a weed-smoking, liberal-ass freak. But my dream was never to sell lip-gloss. My dream is to save the world,” she says (6). Cyrus has been having fun with her own kind of digital manipulation where she posts a variety of images on Instagram of the most random photoshopped images (6). There are been images where she photoshopped herself in an image of Kim Kardashian and Kanye, her mother and her on two carrots, her boyfriend’s head on her body, her face on Nicki Minaj’s body, etc. She photoshops for unintentional purposes and it’s all fun and laughs (6).

As we all know, Miley Cyrus is a huge figure in media today. There are fans who absolutely swear by her every move and much of what she does affect those who view her as a role model. This year’s Presidential campaign was one that everyone will remember for much of the wrong reasons. Celebrities were very vocal on their political views via social media. The concept of a public culture is an important element in how the mass media is conceived. Media forms in which are one-way, such as radio and television, contribute to a sense of shared audience among viewers (Sturken, Page 177). Our public sphere today is social media (i.e Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc). Cyrus was very vocal during the campaign and after the elections on her stance on President Donald Trump. She uses her voice to stand up for some really powerful movements in our country. She takes a dig at Donald Trump’s campaign with her pimped out red hat that says: MAKE AMERICA GAY AGAIN. She shows her fans that she loves all her fans including her fans in the LGBTQ. She was an important figure in the election because we need to influence young people to pay attention to politics and to never doubt the power of fashion for social change. She even broke down crying after nominee Donald Trump won the Presidential nomination. She shared a video to her Facebook of her thoughts after the election. Miley says that, “I still think that, in Hillary’s lifetime, she deserves to be the first female president, and that’s what makes me so sad. I wish she had an opportunity because she fought for so long and because I believe her when she says that she loves this country. This is all she’s ever done; she’s given her life to make it better.” She later added, “Hopefully we adjust and we accept everyone for who they are, and, so, Donald Trump, I accept you. This hurts to say, but I even accept you as President of the United States, and that’s fine, because, now, I want to be a hopeful hippie. I want to be hopeful that you will step in, too.” Cyrus also took to her Instagram to write a heartfelt message encouraging fans to be loving and compassionate towards one another. This revealed so much about her character and for her image for that matter. She didn’t care if all her followers were seeing her cry and sharing her feelings. She uses this Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook as a modern public sphere. The idea of a public sphere was generated in the eighteenth century yet there is not doubt that it has a modern relevance and is essentially a way for civil society to articulate its interests. But what is the role of the public sphere in the cyber age? Social media has made way for fans to have direct access to Miley Cyrus and they are able to like, comment, retweet, favorite her content as well as express their arguments and opinions without censorship.

John Berger has written, “The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour.” The idea of glamour is central to advertising, both in the use of well-known celebrities to sell products and in the depiction of models who appear to be happy, without flaws, and satisfied (Sturken, Page 213). We all remember when Miley Cyrus would smoke marijuana and didn’t care if she sparked public controversy online. This necessarily isn’t a beauty product or a weight loss supplement that she is promoting, however, dedicated fans may see what she is doing, realize how beautiful and successful she is and start smoking too. She could start the smallest of trends and people would follow because she has such a strong affect on her fan base. There was a period of time where even I envied her success and fortune, meanwhile she would post videos and pictures of herself smoking marijuana or anything controversial. Here I am, going to school, working, and being a good girl, however I’m not successful or famous? Maybe I should start smoking weed and chop all my hair off? Of course I wouldn’t do that. But anyone who isn’t confident in themselves and searches for a role model in celebrities such as Miley Cyrus, would probably think that resulting in more damage than good. This creates insecurities and anxiety for the average girl in our corrupt society today. Last thing we need besides being objectified as women is being manipulated into thinking that a drug would benefit our lives because in our eyes she seems happy either way.

After carrying out lots of investigation into the ever-changing identity of Miley Cyrus, it is clear that as she has matured and become more famous as her identity is becoming more outrageous. She continues to experiment with different hairstyles, fashion statements and tattoos. In fact, she now has a total of 23 tattoos, including several on her fingers, rib cage and even one on the inside of her lip. She played a huge role in the lives of teen girls around the world and will continue to inspire us in becoming our true selves. The mind boggles as to what she’ll come up with next. Will it be radiating or just corrupting? Either way, this is indisputably Miley’s moment. And she’s having the time of her life.

Work Cited:

(1) Sturken (Seperately Cited Throughout Paper)

(2) Vena, Jocelyn. "Miley Cyrus Female Empowerment." MTV, 23 June 2010. Web.

(3) Macatee, Rebecca. "Disney Channel Praise." E! News, 24 June 2013. Web.

(4) Mbakwe, Christiana. “The Origins of Twerking.” XOJane, 30 August 2013. Web.

(5) "Miley Cyrus and Body Images." Daily Mail UK, 13 Aug. 2015. Web.

(6) Mize, Chelsea. "Miley Cyrus' Photoshop Skill." Bustle, 24 Mar. 2015. Web.

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succorcreek · 6 years

Photo

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