bell hooks: Understanding Patriarchy:

As per bell hooks reading Patriarchy is a male dominated society where the women are seen as inferior beings who are tasked with supporting and abiding by their male counterpoint without question. Men have a disproportionate amount of power and are in control of all the decisions that are made. They monopolize the positions and systems including, political, economic, religious, and cultural. Hooks explains how most men have never even said or thought the word “patriarchy”.

Toxic masculinity is a part of patriarchy as well because it focuses on the traditional masculine norms and this hugely affects men, women, and everyone in that society. Patriarchy emphasizes the harmful effects of conformity to certain traditional masculine ideas.

Quotes

“Men who have heard and know the word usually associate it with women’s liberation, with feminism, and therefore dismiss it as irrelevant to their own experience.”

“It is the unacknowledged paradigm of relationships that has suffused Western civilization generation after generation, deforming both sexes, and destroying the passionate bond between them.”

I feel like it is a pattern for men to hear the word feminism and automatically roll their eyes. The crazy part of it is, most feminist are fighting for women to be equals. I don’t understand why anyone would have a problem with this. We can’t just forget how extreme patriarchy was in most parts of the world; because that’s how past mistake can happen again. This is why we teach students history, so that we are aware of our past, and we can learn from the error of our ways. If feminist or any woman is not going to stand up and demand equal rights, then who would? Certainly not the men who are rolling their eyes at the mention of the word. It is easy for them to be annoyed by someone passionate for women’s rights but they do not know a world where the women rule with power, and where men are largely excluded from society and government.

John Berger: Ways of Seeing - Chapter 7

Quote

“Publicity speaks in the future tense and yet the achievement of this future is endlessly deferred.”

The message publicity is saying is, “you need this item to go on with your life and be happy/important/glamourous. The thing is this is a never ending cycle, we will continue needing things for reassurance because these are just tangible and temporary. Maybe even a fun house image of a better you. We can’t say or know the actual results we are supposed to get after acquiring these things because we are never going to be that person we see in the magazine, or on the billboard. We don’t really know if we have truly made others envious. We can’t feel others feelings of nostalgia (the nostalgia we get when we look at something). The status quo is forever changing and usually the happiness is fleeting. 

“The working self envies the consumer self.”

We daydream about the feeling we have when we are envied or in those new shoes. When we are  seen, when we look good, leaving out the act of doing the dirty work to get these things that make us feel like that. Dazing off and thinking about feeling desirable never includes us dreaming about the part where we stress and most of the time work under someone more powerful, to make the money to buy the things, to feel this way. We leave that behind because that isn’t involved in the feeling or look we lust for, it isn’t what powerful, elegant, superior people are doing when you imagine them in your head. We just want the results without getting in the unpleasable struggle, and the time and grunt we have to do to afford these things. Mixing that in sort of takes away the sexiness and smoothness we want to feel and portray.

Susan Sontag: excerpt from On Photography

Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, tricked out.”

It is interesting that we take something that is already just a piece of something and manipulate it to our liking's. People get a photo or take one and the process doesn’t end there, there is still decisions to be made if we want to display it somewhere for someone to see. Sometimes taking a picture of something isn’t always to capture and keep the rawness of that moment, people want to edit it to make it look it a certain way that is ascetically pleasing to them. It is also part of the reason why photographs are cool, because they are a piece of art that can be passed on and then configured by someone else. They can be a canvas that isn’t completely done and we can put our own spin on it. We can take a portrait of ourselves and touch it up, whiten our teeth, smooth our skin, in order to present to the world the version we’re proud to share.

“Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience.”

Photographs are usually something that we share with others, so it is really hard to completely drop our normal ideology which is to produce something pleasing to the eye. Even if we want to take a picture of something in its most raw form we still have to find the angle we think is best. If shooting manual we alter and change the shutter speed, aperture, choosing a high or low ISO. No matter what, there is always going to be a personal touch in photography. Photography is probably the closest we can come to reality without being there but it still is never going to be reality, and no one can ever relive that moment again.

Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. They formed in New York City in 1985 with the mission of bringing gender and racial inequality into focus within the greater arts community.

They pooled their resources and created work about racism, sexism, and corruption. Hundreds of posters, billboards, street banners, books, performances, workshops, videos, and exhibitions were produced, exposing the biases in the art world, in film, politics, and pop culture.

*All Guerrilla Girls members use names of late women artists to keep their identity secret and the focus on their message

The Guerrilla Girls ideology was that if you can make someone laugh who disagrees with you that you can hook in their mind and possibly change their way of thinking. A case in point is what they call, “the weenie count” – a survey conducted in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, giving attention to gender disparity in the museum’s 19th and 20th century art sections, where less than five percent of the artists on display are women and 85 percent of the nudes are female. The findings became the basis of the 1989 poster, Do Women Have to Be Naked to get into the Met Museum?

Give them hell