Representation

Representation

In today's lesson, I learnt that certain groups of people are represented falsely in the media and are a lot of the time, categorized into one type of person. An example of this is when many people think of a Frenchman, they think of a man with dark hair, a mustache, a stripey t-shirt on, a neck scarf, a bere, and holding a baguette in their hand. The reason you think this is because the media have shaped the french society to represent them that way to their audiences. This is applied to many different types of people such as: the 'ideal' woman, the 'ideal' man, teenagers, middle aged people, muslims, black people etc.

 Another example of stereotypes in the media are the iconic bond girls featured in the famous 'James Bond' films. The film extract shown below demonstrates how the ideal woman is represented as a white, blonde, tall, slim, half naked woman with bronzed skin and a beautiful face. Although this woman is undoubtedly beautiful, like in all of the other films of the sequel, they only cast the same type of tall, slender, young women which sets high expectations for female aesthetic which makes other girls that do not look like that, feel like they are only worthy of the title of 'a beautiful woman' if they look exactly like the women shown in these types of films. What the Bond films fail to do is show that beauty can be in the form of intelligence, confidence, passion, happiness and much more, which is what all women in the world are able to relate to as beauty is not always a physicality.

Another noticeable factor about how men and women are portrayed in this clip is how the man is fully dressed and is awoken because he hears the beautiful sound of a woman, when the woman appears, she is half naked and the man shows an interest in her by joining in on the song and undeniably staring at her. This therefore suggests that she is only there to be admired by the man for her looks, he is not interested or attracted to her because of her personality or intelligence.