The selected excerpt of the book called “The Pop Culture Freaks” focuses on the representation of gender in American pop culture that is a powerful tool capable of impacting social tendencies and relations or creating particular attitudes. The objectification of women (or female bodies, to be more precise, since their personalities rarely matter) on both sexual and commercial levels is ever-present in the mass media, films, TV, and advertising. As a result, even being the statistical majority in the United States, women are still treated as a minority (Kidd, 2014).
The Bechdel test is applied to detect sexism in films. To test a film one has to choose a movie and then ask a question whether or not this film features two female characters who talk to each other discussing subjects other than men. I tried to test multiple films and all of them failed due to such reasons as lack of a second female character, the absence of interactions between the two female characters, or the fact that the female characters spoke to each other only about men.
Reference List
Kidd, D. (2014). Pop Culture Freaks: Identity, Mass Media, and Society. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.