In the essay “Beauty (re)discovers the male body,” author and philosopher Susan Bordo discusses the history and of the current state of male representation in advertisements. While using her feminist background, Bordo compares and contrasts aspects of how men and women are represented in the public eye. She claims that there has been a paradigm shift in the media with the theory that not only are women objectified in the public eye, but men are as well. Since the mid-1970s, with the introduction of Calvin Klein advertisements, men began to be increasingly dehumanized and viewed as sex symbols. In the same way Bordo describes gender, race plays a similar role in media. People of all different ethnicities and cultures are categorized into an overly simplistic and generally unfair image by the media based on basic characteristics. Bordo's thesis can be illustrated in many common examples of modern media and advertising. For example, in the animated television series The Simpsons, creator and writer Matt Groening uses satire as a way to attack these gender and racial stereotypes by exaggerating certain distinctive traits and personalities of the characters. Yet, simultaneously, the stereotypes reinforced by some members of the series are then unexpectedly broken by others to show the viewer how media can alter their own opinions. In The Simpsons, the protagonist's son, Homer Simpson, is a ten-year-old boy named Bart. He's the kind of man who works hard to try to make women like Bordo spill coffee on a table and become "weak in the knees" at first sight (191). Like a model on a Calvin Klein poster, Bart constantly presents himself to those around him. Instead of monitoring middle of paper......believing in a stereotype while refuting it and making sure it is not true for all people of that particular race. After twenty-five seasons, The Simpsons continues to be an influential series. With animation as a medium, screenwriters use satire to highlight media-generated stereotypes. In some cases they take a stereotype to the extreme, like Apu and her eight children, and other times they go against social norms, like Lisa being a strong, independent woman. It reminds viewers how much say the media has in their perceptions of others and how they constantly make judgments about an entire group of people based on the characteristics of some. I don't think stereotypes will ever stop existing, but I do believe it's important that we at least be aware of what they are..