Ms. Green

In the reading for Tuesday, Laura Mulvey addresses the objectification of women in more depth that we usually see in her essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” The paper discusses the key components that go into making films. The main components are maintaining a patriarchal standpoint and narrative (which reflects society), using women as objects to bear meaning and then return to the actual plot, and using women as visually appealing characters with little significance other than looking good to the audience and the men in the scene. I found this reading important on many levels, since even in this modern time, women are still being objectified on different levels and to certain degrees in nearly all cinema and television in some way or another. When I was reading the assignment, I thought of a ridiculous amount of examples of women in film and television fitting these molds. However, I think there are a lot of cases in popular culture that can also apply to these concepts. I tried to think of more obscure examples that would really show how universal this theory is. A weird one to me is the advertisement for M&M’s and the green one is a “sexy” women M&M with white heels and long eyelashes. But using Mulvey’s arguments about women in media, we may be able to stretch it to explain why in the world a piece of candy is supposed to look sexy. For one, the green M&M is made to look appealing to the audience and the other M&Ms on the commercial or in the advertisement in the magazine. The other candies are fawning over this one and she serves no additional purpose than to be appealing. If she wasn’t in the commercial, people would still eat the candy and life would go on.