Reading Synthesis Essay Examples

Reading Synthesis Essay for September 23rd

In this week’s readings we focused on gender roles and feminism. This is a topic I knew little about going into the readings but I have since learned a great deal about the struggle of women in our culture. Pop culture is not a female friendly business and it shows throughout the modern culture. In most blockbuster movies men play the main leads and the heroes are almost always a man or a woman who acts masculine in nature. Television shows are the same way, while women play predominate roles in both movies and television shows they are rarely the lead character or a character of great importance. We mostly see women depicted as the damsel in distress that needs the help of a man in order to survive. The music industry was the only industry where I felt the divide was less. While men certainly run the studios and record labels women are the main attractions. I can count on two hands the number of really big female actors but when it comes to top female singers the list is a very long one. In “Introduction” Storey talks about women in film and the way the media that portrays them romanticizes them. This can be seen in the study referenced in the book done by Jackie
She found that while viewers may not have shared commonalities with the characters in the show the audience did sympathize with their situations; broken homes, families torn apart and so on. Ang divided the viewers into four subsets of people. Group one dislikes the show, group two tolerates it but recognizes the irony, group three works to find pleasure in the irony of mass culture and group four is “informed by the ideology of populism. The core of this ideology is the belief that one person’s taste is of equal value to another person’s taste”. (Storey,