Facebook

Like many of my peers, I have a love-hate relationship with facebook. There is not much about myself I want the entire world to know. I post on facebook infrequently, limiting the content of my posts to psa's about political issues that I feel strongly about or links to media that I find very very amusing. However, despite the fact that I am so reserved in my contributions to facebook, I love to read about what others are up to. There are some serious pros and cons to this. Lately, I have been horrified by some of what I have read on facebook. People I know have posted scathing critiques of other people without (it seems to me) much attention to the fact that facebook is a public forum. This sort of public gossip makes me extremely uncomfortable. On the other hand, facebook is a wonderful place to find out about friends' significant lifecycle events quickly. Last year, my partner and I were travelling in Marshall, MN with a group of teens when a friend of ours had a baby. We were able to see photographs of her beautiful daughter, just hours after she was born, even though we were hours away.

Speaking of teens, facebook is also a remarkably effective tool for communicating with adolescents. In my former job, I ran the teen department of a small non-profit. When I was having getting my teens to respond to phone calls, emails and flyers, I established a facebook identity for myself at work. This allowed me to see what my teens were up to (both good and bad) and to get the word out quickly about events and anything else I wanted them to know about. It was amazing how quickly they responded to something on facebook that they would have ignored if it had come to them via email!

Images of Masculinity

I made a voicethread using the first ten images that came up when I did an image search for "masculinity". I was surprised by the range of images I found. Though some of the images suggested a sense of ambiguity about the idea of masculinity, most of the upheld traditional notions of strength and portrayed an unrealistic ideal of the male body.
One thing that stood out to me was the prevalence of homoerotic imagery in my search. Many of the images I found objectified the male body and drew attention to the penis in ways that heterosexual images of men tend to avoid doing. Also, two out of the ten images I looked at defined masculinity in relationship to a woman, rather than something that exists outside of a gender binary.

A Second Adolescence, Deconstructing Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I am having a bit of a second adolescence. In that vein, I have been rewatching a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (perhaps my all time favorite show, don't judge) For this exercise, I analyzed episode 5 of season 2, "Reptile Boy" through both a feminist lens and a deconstructionist lens.



Feminist Lens

This one is pretty easy to jump in on, because the show is about a girl whose calling in life is to kill vampires. Rather than being the "damsel in distress" figure, she is placed in the role of hero, a girl who is charged with saving the world time and time again. It really doesn't get much more feminist than that. Throughout the episode (and the series) the viewer watches Buffy battle vampires and other demons.
This particular episode centers around the abduction of several high school girls by a fraternity. We later discover that the fraternity keeps a giant snake in the basement that must be fed a yearly tribute of girls. This episode plays on the trope of the sexually agressive fraternity brothers preying on young, naive and innocent (read, virginal) high school girls. Though Buffy ultimately triumphs, the episode also serves as a warning, suggesting that older men are sexually (and literally) predatory and that college males only want sex from high school girls. This message is reinforced by the particular demon Buffy must fight in this episode. Machida, the snake in the episode is easily read as a phallic symbol, served by college aged boys (who can, of course, think of nothing by taking advantage of young girls). Buffy ultimately decapitates the snake as it attempts to devour Cordelia, a fairly shameless, but effective, metaphor for assault and emasculinization.

All in all, the episode effectively conveys the straightforward, simple feminist "girl power" message embodied by the show.

Deconstructionist Lens

Like most episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, this particular episode relies heavily on binary, both as a source of amusement and to uphold its "girl power" agenda. The show's reliance on gender binary, and the ways in which this binary unravels the feminist message of the show is especially evident in this episode.

The catalyst that makes Buffy choose to attend the fraternity party with Cordelia is a misunderstanding in her relationship with Angel. Angel, being male and, according to traditional gender binaries, therefore stoic, has not asked Buffy on the kind of traditional date she would like. Buffy, playing the typical teenage girl, lashes out by attending the party and flirting with other boys. Through she is the slayer, she seems to only be able to be strong under a male gaze.

The relationship between Buffy and the male gaze is not only played out through her dating relationships with Angel and the fraternity boys in this episode. She also butts heads with Giles, her "watcher" and father figure. In this episode Giles pushes Buffy to train harder, but she resists, insisting that she requires more time to be a teenage girl (which for Buffy means mostly shopping and dating). At the end of the episode, Giles acquiesces, upholding Buffy's traditional gender role and promising to "nudge" Buffy rather than push her in her training.

The gender dichotomy is pushed to an extreme in the character of Xander in this episode. Like the fraternity boys in the episode, Xander's motives are driven completely by his hormones. Unlike the fraternity boys, however, he is permitted to interact with the women in his world solely through this lens. Out of jealousy, Xander follows Buffy and Cordelia to the party. There he is humiliated, forced to dress in drag and wear makeup for the amusement of the fraternity boys who assume he is a new pledge. This assault on Xander's masculinity is deemed unacceptable by the text of the episode. The gender binaries in the episode work in such a way that it is permitted for Buffy to play with gender by being strong and saving herself when she is placed in the role of damsel in distress, but for Xander, a play with gender norms is considered an insult.