How I Found out about the Importance of Sexuality for Feminism and How I Developed My Own Variation of Being a Feminist

A Reading Journal about the Seminar "Pornification of Culture"

Talia Baskaya

• Publisher: GRIN Verlag
• Year: 2020
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9783346134899
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: English Language
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Miscellaneous, grade: 12,0, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, language: English, abstract: Living in a time in which it seems natural for a President (to be) to brag about him to "grab them by the pussy" (Jacobs, Siddiqui 2016) solely because of his fame and without paying attention to whether women give their consent or not one tends to believe that women will never be respected and objectified forever. How could one criticize this pessimistic point of view which I share too, as long as Tom Ford positions a bottle of his fragrance on a woman's shaved vagina or between her breast – in both cases one cannot see any other part of the woman and the perfume bottle or the models' fingers cover only the parts which have to be covered – and presents this as advertisement for perfume for men? Where is the context? Does the newest fragrance smell like a vagina or does it develop a special scent if it is rubbed against women's breast? Having advertisements like this, men in higher positions boasting about women or women like Kim Kardashian who achieved her big breakthrough due to a sex tape consequently on my mind, in my opinion women have been completely sexualized and objectified, hopelessly lost in a world in which they are devices to sell products by using their bodies. Given that, the seminar "Pornification of Culture" caught my attention and appeared interesting since it was not only the topic that is the most tempting of the whole module but it is also up-to-date and seemed to be related to feministic subject matters. Just by reading the course description I realized that the objectification does effect both women and men and that most of the described phenomena which have become common in our society are not only accepted but also may be desired by both genders, for instance being considered "fuckable". In consequence I thought about how much my opinion would change by attending the whole course if solely the course description has been able to make clear that I may have put women in an all-time-victim role in which they are sexualized and objectified by men without even considering that women may want to be sexualized or that men may be victims of sexualizing and objectification, too.