{"id":74,"date":"2014-12-10T02:46:02","date_gmt":"2014-12-10T02:46:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/michellekofreshmanseminar\/?p=74"},"modified":"2014-12-10T02:46:02","modified_gmt":"2014-12-10T02:46:02","slug":"sultanas-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/michellekofreshmanseminar\/2014\/12\/10\/sultanas-dream\/","title":{"rendered":"Sultana’s Dream"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Screen<\/a> \"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

When reading \u201cSultana\u2019s Dream,\u201d at first I was very aware of gender equality in Muslim societies and in Western societies, too. The story talks about a reverse situation where men are taking on the role of women in Muslim societies and I cannot help but think of a video where women\u2019s roles in TV advertisements are replaced with men (https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=2SrpARP_M0o<\/a>). The video was ridiculous and it is fascinating to think about women\u2019s and men\u2019s roles in society. Moreover, \u201cSultana\u2019s Dream\u201d to me was a commentary not only on how wrong sexism is but also how equally wrong reverse sexism would be. In other words, female empowerment should not be equated to male denigration (this was also something that I watched Kelly Cutrone comment on recently on television on America\u2019s Next Top Model over Thanksgiving break–not the best show but great for rare moments of wisdom like this).
\nI believe Sultana\u2019s Dream makes an excellent commentary on feminism (or rather women\u2019s rights if people are adverse to the western connotations sometimes associated with the word \u201cfeminism\u201d) and women in Muslim societies and the world in general! I wanted to do a similar piece through my collage of words and pictures taken from \u201cSeventeen Magazine.\u201d Interestingly enough, I think when I was gathering data from \u201cSeventeen Magazine,\u201d in other words reading \u201cSeventeen Magazine,\u201d I noticed that today (in comparison to perhaps a decade ago) there are more direct statements calling for \u201cgirl power\u201d and empowering girls to \u201crock the world.\u201d However, I find that ironic with a lot of the material generated in the magazine–for example, one statement comments on how \u201cgirls can look good AND do good.\u201d Well, I guess my response would be girls can do good and look good (yes in that order of importance) if they want to and if they don\u2019t then that\u2019s their choice and their decision. It is in THEIR power to decide what looking and doing good means to them. Additionally, despite the recent addition of messages of female empowerment, I found it ironic that the magazine still encourages women and young girls to show as much skin as possible–hence the \u201cmicro miniskirt,\u201d \u201cthe backless tank,\u201d and \u201cthe crop top\u201d which all manage to somehow expose some part of a girl\u2019s epidermis to the air outside–what happens when winter comes? Anyhow, I purposefully used the words and headers to replace the female model\u2019s heads because I felt that for the majority of the magazine anyhow the focus wasn\u2019t on the female model but on the clothes and on her body anyways. I wanted to make this point especially clear. Moreover, I found interesting statements that encouraged women to change their looks, saying \u201cyou change your style. Why not your eye color?\u201d and other advertisements for changing hair color. Although I am a strong proponent of \u201cyou\u2019re perfect the way you are and don\u2019t need to change a single thing,\u201d I guess if a girl WANTS to change the way she looks it is entirely in her decision. I do however think that these advertisements do add some sort of additional pressure and influence that may suggest changing one\u2019s appearance is necessary or conducive to one\u2019s life when it is simply just a matter of personal choice. Moreover, I wanted to talk about the way men are brought up in this magazine–first of all, there was one section where a bunch of men were just talking about how they are able to \u201cflirt\u201d with girls and lure girls into their \u201ctrap,\u201d which to me sounds absolutely horrifying and scary. The men spoke about women nonspecifically, not caring about the girl or the woman herself but rather de-individualizing the woman and stating their strategies for getting women as if this were some sort of game or some sort of hunting expedition. This was a problem for me. Lastly, interestingly enough in the article all of the advertisements with male models and female models happened to have the female model looking directly at the camera and the male model looking at the female which may or may not have connotations about a weird female-male girl\/boy power balance. Either way, I found this magazine to be incredibly enlightening about what seventeen year old teenage girls are reading and almost a little disappointing and disheartening. Just as \u201cSultana\u2019s Dream\u201d made me more aware of the gender inequality in Islamic societies and the world in general and of the dangers of having reverse sexism, I found \u201cSeventeen Magazine\u201d to have the same effect on me and I hoped to capture such messages in my collage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When reading \u201cSultana\u2019s Dream,\u201d at first I was very aware of gender equality in Muslim societies and in Western societies, too. The story talks about a reverse situation where men are taking on the role of women in Muslim societies and I cannot help but think of a video where women\u2019s roles in TV advertisements […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7089,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/michellekofreshmanseminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/michellekofreshmanseminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/michellekofreshmanseminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/michellekofreshmanseminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7089"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/michellekofreshmanseminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/michellekofreshmanseminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/michellekofreshmanseminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions\/75"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/michellekofreshmanseminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/michellekofreshmanseminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/michellekofreshmanseminar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}