For this week's assignment, I chose to analyze Jason Derulo's "Swalla" video. 

What roles do the men in the music video play?  What roles do the women play?  Well Jason and the other rapper featured are the only men in the video, and they are basically soaking in all the attention of the woman that appear to be falling all over them.

Does the music video--as Sut Jhally insists all music videos do--tell a story about male and female sexuality?  If so, what story about sexuality does it tell? The story this music video tells is that women are men's sexual play things. The women are dancing sexually and eating candy provocatively. The video is definitely derived from a male's fantasy. Moreover, It promotes the idea that a woman's only desire is to get a man's attention by using their sexuality. Continually, most women in the video have on the same (or very similar) outfits which adds to the fact that they are not treated or dressed like individuals. 

What story (besides sexuality) does the visual music video tell?  If you had to watch the music video without sound, what story are you told and/or what message does the music video offer? It honestly has no story except "dance and act sexual". It was pretty difficult to watch because to me it's not even clever or creative. The video is so focussed on the sexuality of women that it cheapens the value of the song (which is already at a low value in my opinion). 

Does the music video reinforce harmful stereotypes or does it challenge them?  Provide examples from the video. It reinforces the male stereotype that men must surround themselves with loads of women, and only use them for sexual pleasure (a male stereotype that is present in many music videos). Nicki Minaj's part in the video doesn't help the female portrayal of a sexual object either. She crawls around on all fours wearing an extremely scandalous outfit. 

Given that music videos' target audience is adolescents (13-18 years old), what do you think adolescents learn about men, women, and relationships from this music video? I would think that adolescents boys will learn it's okay to treat women like they have little or no value. Adolescent girls may learn that the only way to receive attention from men is to dress scandalously and perform sexually for them. 

Toy Stores & Gender Roles

This week, I decided to choose the toy store assignment. I went to Target and went down the boy and girl toy isles. I wasn't very shocked to see that the boys isle had mostly toy weapons, and muscular action figures, while the girl's isle was mostly pink dolls and "domestic" toys.

Here are some pictures from the boy's isle.

Here are some pictures from the girl's isle:

Something that was pretty shocking was that Wonder Woman was found in both isles, yet her look was much different in the boy's isle than the girl's isle.  On the left side is the boy's isle action figure, on the right is the girl's isle doll. You can definitely see some noticeable differences in the physical appearance of the dolls depending on the sex they are targeting.