'Pop music and pornography' sheds light
Dave Germinario
Issue date: 3/29/07 Section: Opinion
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I walked into Meredith LeVande's lecture, "Women, Pop Music and Pornography," Monday night in the Eynon Ballroom thinking that I had it all figured out. I thought that I was going to be subjected to generic feminist rabble-rousing with the Indigo Girls playing in the background. I volunteered to write about the event just so I could tear it apart. An hour later, as the presentation came to a close, I realized how ignorant I was to assume how I would feel about the presentation before I even saw it.
Instead, I listened to a lecture that was insightful, concise and eye-opening. There is no doubt about it, the media and popular culture as a whole has gotten, for lack of a better term, sexier. It's not a trend. At least not anymore it isn't. It's become an institution, an atmosphere.
I was incredibly skeptical going in. Pop music and porn aren't the same. Porn is porn. Jessica Simpson isn't porn. Well, like most things in this life, it's not that simple. The objectification of women in the media is the rule rather than the exception. Said objectification desensitizes us and makes us more accepting of pornography. Media conglomerates profit heavily from both mainstream entertainment and porn. Porn, by the way, is an industry worth about $13 billion dollars.
My first reaction was that this was just a mechanism of capitalism. The entertainment industry, like any business, is simply supplying what the market demands. The only catch with media conglomerates is that they are so powerful they dictate what we want and therefore control both supply and demand. It's not a conspiracy, it's business.
I'm not going to pretend that I can understand this situation from a woman's point of view. That would be an exercise in futility. I can only see what it has done to the women who are close to me. I think back to my cousin who is in the eighth grade. At a recent family function I saw her in a skirt that didn't so much resemble a skirt as much as it did a scarf wrapped around her torso. I couldn't believe it. But it really isn't that hard for me to believe when I think about what girls are wearing on TV.
Instead, I listened to a lecture that was insightful, concise and eye-opening. There is no doubt about it, the media and popular culture as a whole has gotten, for lack of a better term, sexier. It's not a trend. At least not anymore it isn't. It's become an institution, an atmosphere.
I was incredibly skeptical going in. Pop music and porn aren't the same. Porn is porn. Jessica Simpson isn't porn. Well, like most things in this life, it's not that simple. The objectification of women in the media is the rule rather than the exception. Said objectification desensitizes us and makes us more accepting of pornography. Media conglomerates profit heavily from both mainstream entertainment and porn. Porn, by the way, is an industry worth about $13 billion dollars.
My first reaction was that this was just a mechanism of capitalism. The entertainment industry, like any business, is simply supplying what the market demands. The only catch with media conglomerates is that they are so powerful they dictate what we want and therefore control both supply and demand. It's not a conspiracy, it's business.
I'm not going to pretend that I can understand this situation from a woman's point of view. That would be an exercise in futility. I can only see what it has done to the women who are close to me. I think back to my cousin who is in the eighth grade. At a recent family function I saw her in a skirt that didn't so much resemble a skirt as much as it did a scarf wrapped around her torso. I couldn't believe it. But it really isn't that hard for me to believe when I think about what girls are wearing on TV.
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