Friday, December 3, 2004

Claudia Cortes' Colors

My friend Antonia just sent me a link to Claudia Cortes'Colors because she liked it and thought that I might too. She really goes for all of that artsy stuff. All I can say is that it is so riddled with gender stereotypes that I am considering sending an email to the artist to complain and adding Antonia's email address to my spam list so that her emails get blocked.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the site, it includes movies for each of six colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet). In each movie, animated people that look like the people on public bathroom doors (the guys wear pants and the women and girls wear skirts) walk around and act out words that are represented by the color.

But listen to this … which gender is shown to represent the words educated, technical, authoritative, commanding, and rebellious? Men of course! The few women in the movie (wearing skirts of course) represent words like vain and fantastic (a delicate fairy!), or are nursing someone back to health, walking children to the school bus, or reading a book to children at bedtime. Not that I have a problem with showing women as being nurturing or anything, but there certainly are plenty of intelligent, commanding, and authoritative women out there as well (have you ever tried getting a kid to go to bed at their bed time? I rest my case!). There are plenty of nurturing male nurses and house-husbands out there as well (and they probably don't like it that their professions are always being represented by women).

The same thing happens in video gaming as well. The games are just the same old sexist fairy tales rewritten, over and over. The men are there "to save the day" and be some kind of big testosterone-driven hero, while the women are there just to have big boobs—so that the game companies can successfully market their products to all of those horny adolescent boys out there that have nothing else to masturbate to because they are too young to buy pornos. It makes me so angry!