Theory Research - The Representation of Gender in You Me At Six's Videos (Save It For The Bedroom).

Released in 2008 (in the same album as 'finders keepers'), 'Save it for the bedroom' was You Me At Six's first single to bring them fame. The genre is a mixture of narrative and performance; the narrative being a parodoxical, vertical intertextual reference to popula talk and help shows such as Jeremy Kyle or Jerry Springer.

In order to gain my target audience's thoughts to ensure I met them within my own piece, I called together a small 'focus group' of four people; two boys and two girls in my year; selected because they all listen to alternative and acoustic music, and are familiar with the band already. To aid me in the selction process, I looked at YouTube's audience demographic figures for You Me At SAix's 'Finders Keppers', and made sure my focus group met the criteria in terms of age and gender. I am going to show them all three of my chosen videos as well as my own piece to really see whether it meets their needs.

Upon first viewing of the video, all of us noticed that all of the protagonists were male, even the 'females'.
Although at first we found this funny, one of the girls admitted she found it slightly unfair that women were not representing themselves, hence representing them as weaker in some form. After discussing this further, we thought that the paradigms creating the representation of women; the gender of the actors, the mise-en-scene in terms of costume and location, and how they were always the complaining characters, never the 'problem' created connotations of women always nagging at the men in their lives; a fairly stereotypical represention. It also showed them to be negative and it encouraged us to laugh at, not with, them. Even though the cross dressing element was amusing, both genders agreed that it wouldn't be appropriate for my video as the tone and subject matter is slightly more serious than this one, and it could cause offence within my demographic. One thing we all agreed on though, was that (like Propp's Character Theory States), the women are always presented as the 'damsels in distress', and we thought that it'd be best to adhere to this theory, as it makes the audience feel slightly more empathic toward her. However, the boys in my focus group thought that it'd be better if I made the man more 'the damsel in distress', as it would add interest and be a bit more diverse. To meet their needs I have taken footage of both characters in distress, and both fighting with eachother - putting forward a more un-biased view regarding the stages of teenage relationships.

We thought the representation of men was cleverly thought out. The band had taken stereotypical aspects of a man's life and created a parody of them. For example, the cultural myth of a dog being man's best friend was dragged out to extremes with the storyline 'my husband's having an affair with our dog', and, even though men were obviously being mocked, the boy's found this funny. By over-exagurrating the problems associated with men, it creates a polysemic effect: either women are too fussy, or men don't listen enough and end up at the extreme.

Overall, we decided that the representation was over-exagurated, but true to stereotypes of the genders. My focus group liked the idea of having the characters in sadness, as it makes them easy to relate to, but the parody wasn't suitable for my own work due to the tone of my song and it's lyrics.