Pretty Hurts

By Erica Mendez & Jess Houston

Society today tries to create the perfect image of a woman’s body. Everywhere you look beautiful women are defined by having a thin body, perfect skin, perfect hair, and basically no flaws. That image has caused an issue of how women and girls view themselves. Previously, in pop culture the perfect image of a woman has always been flaunted. Even in music, men describe how they want a woman to be, and those qualities are mostly unrealistic. For example, in 2 Chainz songs, The Birthday Song, he states, “all [he] wants for [his] birthday is big booty hoe”.  Even in 1977, women were judged by their body types. This is seen in the song Brick House by the Commodores, where they give specific measurement for a perfect woman’s body. However, today it is clear that women are starting to break down the pressure for being ideal. This is evident through the songs, music videos, interviews, books, and many other mediums written or performed by notable women. For this reason, we decided to use Beyoncé’s music video to her song Pretty Hurts as our cultural artifact.

In the video it shows a woman struggling with herself based on how others view her. She is a pageant girl; therefore, maintaining the perfect image of a woman is a big part of her life and who she needs to be. This is revealed to us by her throwing up, getting Botox, always looking in the mirror, getting spray tanned, and her endless crying. At one point in the video a man asks her “What are your ambitions?” She replied by saying, “Nobody has ever asked me this…my ambition is to be happy”.

This video pinpoints the problem with the stress that comes with being a woman in a society where popular culture emphasizes the need to be perfect. We felt like this was a very relevant topic because we have seen this happen with the women in our lives. This shows that the culture we live in is obsessed with being the best, which causes many issues for woman and girls.

As we were analyzing this video, we found it interesting that the concept of self-image was only focused on women. However, even though it is not as common, guys do struggle with the same issues. This reveals that our society and pop culture is very narrow and one-sided when it comes certain topics. In reality, men can struggle with the same things women go through.

At the end of this music video we see that the woman finally is able to look herself in the mirror and genuinely smile, showing that she is happy with herself.  Having women like Beyoncé speak out on the issue is crucial to healing our society. If someone as powerful as she can stand up and speak on the struggles that she had and how she overcame them, that gives people a point of connection so they don’t feel alone. It’s also very brave for a woman in our society today to stand up and speak out on subjects as touchy as body image.

This is relevant to our class because there are many signs of our culture displayed in one music video. The fact that the video was made to show the hardships of being a woman goes against our cultural norm. By doing this, Beyoncé has broken the stereotype that being beautiful and famous automatically means that you have a perfect life. She has now opened up a door for society to see how gruesome being a woman can truly be.

Tweet, Tweet: The New Way to Communicate

By Kaylee Hoffman & Jasmine Serrano

Let’s pretend your name is Johnny for just a moment. You're in your pitch-dark room on a perfect 70-degree Friday night.  The only light you can see is coming from underneath your blanket fort you have created without even noticing. “Johnny! Dinner’s ready!” You hear your mother, but you don’t really acknowledge her. She calls for you again and you groan loudly.  She opens your door and you don’t notice because you’re in your fort. She annoyingly walks back down the stairs and eats alone. You’re too wrapped up in your social life on twitter to even have dinner with your own mother. It’s not even a real social life. Being social would require you to actually get up, go out, and socialize with real life human beings. Making pointless tweets and retweeting is the world’s new way of socializing. It’s depressing.

There are so many things about twitter that have taken over society today. For instance, the fact that some people don’t even know that the hash tag we use today in our twitter world is actually the pound sign or stands for the word “number” is ridiculous. Twitter has changed many words into other meanings that wouldn’t make sense to most people. The word “thot” is a word made through twitter but is now used by many people today as if it were just a regular word out of the dictionary. We, as people, used to bring new things to the World Wide Web. People would have great ideas and find ways to incorporate them into the Internet and social networks. Now it’s the other way around. The people behind their computer and phone screens are the new inventors of the world. If you make up a new catchy phrase that makes people laugh, you could get that trending. You could start a whole social war if you really tried to. That was never a thing…until now.

People are too revolved around the mystery Hollywood world and everyone in it. Celebrities on twitter tweet about their fabulous lives and get millions of retweets and favorites. They could post a picture of a spoon and get tons of feedback and attention from it. Nobody cares about the real world anymore. Nobody cares to walk outside or look out a window anymore to check the weather because instead, you could just check twitter. All the people you “follow” will be tweeting about it: “Oh god, I hate lightening.” Twitter is seriously taking over the world by being able to make you think that everything you need to know is on there. They make you think that everything on twitter is what you should know and what you should care about. It’s wrong but it can not and will probably never be stopped.

Kids of all ages have twitters already. It’s been around for a while but it got popular a few years ago. People are so nosy nowadays. On Facebook, you would post every day. Twitter has taken it to a whole new level by making it a normal thing to be able to tweet every hour. Most people tweet more than that! What is tweeting taking away from us? It’s taking away our attention from the real world. We cross the street and rely on the world around us to stop for us. We assume that everything around us stops for us. We finally get bored after five hours of scrolling through an irrelevant newsfeed and look up to see that the day is over, your homework is not done, and your mother is upset because she has eaten dinner alone every day for months. Wake up and stop being a slave to this fake world the stupid blue bird has made.

Anaconda + The Ellen Parody

By Brandon Fornwalt & Josh Inglis

In Anaconda, Nicki Minaj displays how men only desire women that have big butts. She took the song “Baby Got Back” that was released in 1992 and remixed it to fit today’s culture. Nicki sings about different men and their “anacondas.” Anaconda, in this video, refers to the male penis and how men do not want to have sex with women if they do not have a big butt. In the other video, Ellen creates a parody of Nicki Minaj’s music video. In this video, Ellen tries to fit in with the music video by twerking in the same clothing as the women in the music video are wearing. This comes off very funny but yet true in many ways. 

Nicki Minaj’s music video was published on August 19th, 2014 and shows how American culture has changed. Her and her back-up dancers are wearing very little clothing and showing of the size of their butts by doing numerous amounts of twerking. This throws off the stereotype that men only like women with big butts and if you do not have a big butt then you will not get the “anaconda.” Women are doing things to make men more attracted sexually than ever before. From wearing less clothing to putting on a ton of make-up and perfume, some women will do almost anything to get a man’s attention.

Nicki explains in her lyrics of the different types of guys that all are attracted to the same thing. Troy the dope dealer who lives in Detroit and Michael who used to ride motorcycles buy Nicki what she wants for sex in return. Also, Nicki gives Drake a lap dance in the video. When Drake tries to grab her butt, she walks away from him showing him that she was in complete control of the situation. This portrays that as long as women have attractive body’s they can get whatever they want from men. 

Ellen shows that this is accepted in our culture on how attractive women should look. By doing this parody, she gets a good laugh out of the audience revealing that the American people accept women that act and dress like the women in the music video. By revealing so much of the women’s body, it would have offended many people in the past and still does in today’s society but not as many. Just by airing on a television show shows that the television company believes that American culture has changed enough to be comfortable with these stereotypes. Ellen is making a statement about what is acceptable in society with this video. Nicki tries to seduce the male audience with her appearance but Ellen is a lesbian. Considering her video was not aimed at the male audience, you could make a case that she was aiming her video at the female audience. 

These two videos differentiate themselves in many ways. Nicki is very serious about her music video and wants men to be attracted to her sexually. Ellen, however, is making Nicki’s video a joke. She tries to do the dance moves that Nicki does but by bringing out the humor in them rather than the sexiness in them.

Society would have never accepted this as an appropriate stereotype 10 years ago or longer. This kind of behavior is very different from the kinds of things women would do to get attention during that time. Women used to be controlled by men but over the years the role of who is in control has reversed. Women are independent now and if they are in need of anything they can use a man to get what they want. 

What's Going on Here?

Hello and welcome to the ongoing class blog for the Fall 2014 course "Pop Culture America" at Millikin University. In this course, which fits into the larger first-year Critical Writing, Reading, and Research sequence, my students and I are exploring the semiotics of American popular culture. That is, we are examining the many aspects of our entertainment and consumer culture, and asking questions about what these might signify in terms of our larger cultural values and norms.

As part of the class, we are reading a lot of articles discussing the "deeper meanings" behind our popular culture. But we also realize that popular culture is not just the subject matter of academic literature -- rather, it is the stuff of our everyday lives. Thus, in order to enrich and expand our class discussions, I have assigned my students to look to the popular culture that surrounds them for artifacts that they feel reveal something significant about who we are as a society and what we believe. I have asked them to "curate" these artifacts of pop culture: alongside the item itself -- be it song, film, advertisement, social media, etc. -- they are to explain the larger ideas they see at work in the object, and to discuss the implications of the values and norms they feel are being reflected and reinforced, whether for better or worse. This blog continues a similar venture from 2013, found here.

I look forward to what is to come in the ensuing weeks and months. One of the great pleasures of teaching for me has always been how much I can also learn from my students, and I have high hopes that this project will offer me -- and all of us -- a deeper glimpse into how we relate to (and are shaped by) the ever-changing world of American popular culture.

Enjoy!