Today I went to the Glendale Galleria to see what different strands of love, gender, sex, and relationships I might encounter. I will focus here on sex and gender in popular culture.
At the Galleria I observed a very diverse group of men, women, children, and teenagers, differing in ethnicity and socio-economic background. Most people I observed were in friend pairs; a guy with a guy, a girl with a girl, the male, female couple holding hands, and the occasional small family group. Most ages and ethnicities seemed to stick together but there were a couple of occasions in which I encountered a racially mixed pair, or older people accompanying younger ones.
I watched what stores people would go into and also observed the types of people working at certain stores. Women tended to walk into and work in stores that were feminine such as candle shops or scented bath accessory places. Many men worked in more masculine surroundings such as athletic shoe stores or places that sold flasks and Zippos. This trend was interrupted by the few gay men I saw working in make-up stores or hair parlors, which demonstrated a difference in the sex/gender behavior norm. I also observed the different advertisements stores used to attract people based on our culture’s beliefs about sex and gender.
Stores’ advertisements of Pop Culture, while playing on either the fears or wants of people, produce expectations and are considered to be the societal gender norm for men and women. For women the norm seemed to be that they should strive to look sexy and desirable and for men the norm is to be strong and manly. Basically both men and women were trying to attract each other, but after observing all the skimpy lingerie shops in the galleria, it seemed that women were sometimes degraded to the status of a sexual object. The number of these shops in business shows that there is demand for these products, proving that women do follow through on the stereotype of needing to please men. Men don’t seem to have to go through the extreme lengths that women do, in terms of sexy lingerie, provocative clothing, hair styling and make-up, to be presentable. Sometimes the roughness of a male seems to be his sex appeal and he does not appear to be needing reassurance from women in order to be confident. This brings me to analyzing the master/slave relationship which is discussed by Simone de Beauvior in "The Second Sex"
The master/slave relationship is an interesting one to analyze. Women can be seen as being slaves to men because they seek their approval in order to feel reassured, or taken care of. But I think the fact that they can command the attention of males, demonstrates their role as master. Even if the attention from the male is only sexual, it still empowers the woman. Beauvior says that a "mans sexual desire and the desire for offspring" "makes the male dependent for satisfaction upon the female." Thus both seem to be slaves to each other.
In Ferdinand Saussure's, "Course in General Linguistics", he discusses the "sign, the signified, and the signifier". He explains that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is said to be arbitrary since everyone interprets things differently. Therefore the sign is subjective also. This is very much the way that Pop Culture functions as well because it differs globally among groups of people and always changes throughout time. This can be seen by observing how advertisements vary, as do sex/gender roles and styles come and fade.
Work Cited
Saussure, de Ferdinand "Course in General Linguistics". Geneva. 1916.
