Androcentric culture is the idea that the world, and the culture and history of the world, tends to be viewed through the male perspective, and this is done unknowingly or unintentionally a lot of the time. Basically what I got from it is that when you look out at society, a lot of what you see is centered around the male, related to the male or dominated by the male. Even today people have this idea in their mind that women can or should only do certain things, and the rest should be left to the men. This fact disappoints me a lot because I feel that women can do almost everything in the "male" category without a problem.
In class, quite a few examples of Androcentrism were brought up, including superheroes being predominantly male, athletics and sports events being geared more towards men, and that politics in the U.S. are dominated by men, mostly because women are disregarded and deemed too emotional to handle political positions. Another one I liked was the video game example. I play a few different online games, and even though I am a woman, I still assume for some reason that the person I'm playing against or in a group with is a male because when you think of video games, you relate them to men only most of the time.
When I was going over the material again before writing this SumBlog, I thought of another example of Androcentrism. I went through my movie collection, picked out a handful of movies, and looked up who directed the movie. Almost all of the directors were male, which I guess really didn't surprise me that much because a lot of the big name directors we hear about, such as Steven Spielberg, Alfred Hitchcock and Clint Eastwood, are obviously men. I googled "famous directors" and was linked to list of the 50 greatest directors, all of which are men. I just thought that was an interesting fact because it's not like only men are watching these movies, women watch them too, so you would think that women would be more involved in the creation of the movie. Male direction often leads to a male-domniated main cast as well, or even if there is a female main role, a man is almost always attached to her in some way. Take The Hunger Games trilogy for example. Sure, Katniss is the main character, but she has two guys to support her role. I guess I would just like to see a main female role where there isn't a male in almost every scene as well.
I thought this comic was kinda funny and very fitting for my movie example. It just adds to the fact that movies are often male dominated, and when women do have roles, they are minor.
Kacie, I found your sumblog extremely interesting to read! I could really relate to the point you made about video games. I personally do not play video games, but one day my boyfriend was playing call of duty online and I heard a females voice on the game and I was kind of taken back by it. But then I thought to myself well yea I guess woman play call of duty too. It was just unexpected because the majority of the people who play call of duty online are males. I also found your research on people who direct movies to be interesting as well. I also would like to see a movie where just a woman had the lead role like maybe they should make a superwoman movie for the woman in this world because we can be super heroes too.
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