Prof. Bui

Professor Bui opens her lecture with the question “To how we know what we know about people as well as  how do we value people? She believes that some individuals or groups of people are valued more and others less. Her lecture focuses in the on the representation of Vietnamese women and how they have been presented in the Hollywood movies to the American society. Often in Hollywood movies Vietnamese women are presented as objects, prostitutes, “dead bodies”; women that do not possess any other values. There are only objects for men to use and take advantage of. By presenting these women as objects to men to our society, we automatically have a picture created in minds that this is how Vietnamese women are. As we have previously learned in class, we as humans do  not spend much time on thinking (as we are lazy. We often use our past memories to what we have seen to associate an individual or a group of people and often attach those attributes to that individual or a group of people without even taking the time to know them before placing a judgment on them. As we have covered in Chapter 2 in our text book is states that our perception is directly connected to the influence of a culture we have been brought up in. It is often understood as stereotyping which means that we “generalize about a class of people, objects, or events that is widely held by a given culture”. Stereotyping is mostly inaccurate and false when it is used on a particular individual. It is unfortunate how easy stereotypes are created today throughout media and how easy we have accepted those stereotypes as the truth.  In most Hollywood movies women are often judged according to how they present themselves with the cloths the wear. Often times if a woman wears tighter and shorter skirt to what is socially accepted as appropriate for a women; this individual is often perceived as so called “slut”. But we can only blame our movies, advertising campaigns, magazines, build boards, where women are often presented as sexual objects and no other qualities to them. We cannot only blame media for stereotyping women, but we as individuals need to realize the mistakes we are making by placing judgments on others. We, as individuals can change the stereotypes in 3 easy steps as has been mentioned in the book, which is intention, attention and time. In the future, we as individuals have to make the first step towards change if we want anything to be changed. We cannot wait on the media to make the first step when we use media as representation of others and accept them as valid.