Gracie Miller's post on "Dream Worlds"

The movie Dreams Worlds 3: Desire, Sex & Power in Music Videos was highly disturbing but also raised some awesome points.  Perhaps the greatest strength of the film was its ability to remove the images from their context and look at them objectively for what they are.  When shown in a critical light the images were incredibly lude and disturbing.  The film showed how women are portrayed not as people, but as sexual objects, serving only to pleasure men, beyond what men desire, women in this “dream world” have no function.  This image tells girls that their only worth is their sexuality, specifically their physical sexuality.  The world that the movie portrays leaves no room for women to have thoughts, feelings or needs beyond anything sexual.  Women are degraded from people to objects, things that can be bought and sold.  The contrast the movie showed between the portrayal of women in the dream world and their reactions to the same behavior in real life was quite interesting and important.  This fantasy world treatment of women, when applied to real life situations does not elicit the same effect.  Perhaps it is not just the portrayal of women that is false, but also the portrayal of men’s expectations.  Interestingly, outside of the dream world men expect the same things from women that they see in the videos, but women do not expect the same of men or of themselves.  The video also brought up the point that this world is created by white men for men, I wonder what it would look like if the dream world was made by women for women. 

Much the same as its view of women, the images the “dream world” uses to portray African-American men are highly stereotypical and racist.  In much the same way that this world degrades women, it also takes away the humanity of African-American men, only showing them as aggressors obsessed with sex and violence.  It disturbs me that the movie showed how men buy into this dream of women as objects and act upon this in real life.  This phenomena leaves me wondering if men also buy into the stereotypical images of them, and if so why? And if not, why not?