Gender Roles In House Bunnie

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Gender roles play a significant role in society. These roles affect how the world views women. Films shunned absurd ladies with their maturing appearance and slumping, bulging frames since they had shifted from the “norms” of womanhood (Douglas 183). The movie, House Bunny, plays on these female gender ideals. An ex-playboy bunny, Shelley, stumbles upon the Zeta house filled with a group of misfit sorority girls. If the Zetas do not receive enough pledges, they will lose the charter for their sorority house. Shelley, portrayed as the ideal feminine character in the movie, persuades these misfit girls to allow her to become their housemother. Throughout the course of the movie, Shelley transforms a group of misfit girls into confident …show more content…
Before the transition, the Zetas felt invisible, especially to guys, and felt like the “anti-hot”. All of their thoughts reversed after they transformed and “got hot”. People started to notice the Zetas. During the movie, when the Zetas strutted their new identities in the busy streets of Los Angeles, California, the group of misfits started feeling important and walked with confidence. When the Zetas sold their calendars during a fall festival, the girls were ecstatic by how many people came to their booth to check out the “new and improved Zetas”. In “The Princess Effect”, Sarah Kendzior talks about how magazines play on the idea of giving women the superficial qualities and promoting gorgeous bodies, clothes, houses, and makeup. The magazines promote an ideal woman who does not exist in real life. This idea that in order to live a happy life, you need to look and act a certain way gives a false reality to women (Kendzior 205). In House Bunny, the directors sketched the same effect. Starting with where Shelley spent the majority of her life, the playboy mansion, the movie exploits these superficial qualities. Everybody knows what the playboy mansion stands for, good-looking girls, constantly in the party setting with a lot of hot guys around. It makes sense for an ex-playboy bunny to help transform a group of misfits into popular sorority girls who everybody …show more content…
This happened to the Zetas. Towards the end of the movie, none of the Zetas liked who they had become. They fell into the social pressure of being something they were not, leaving them feeling empty. After Lily confronted the Zetas, they realized that what Lily said contained truth about how their transformation went too far. Shelley painted the Zetas a superficial portrait of what it takes in order for people to like you, and the girls bought into it. When it came down to the end though, the girls felt empty and lost. Joy Parks, in “Mad Men, Mad Women”, explains that advertisers use images of women to disguise women's feelings of emptiness from men telling them they need to stay home and perform housework (Parks 212). Shelley used her ideas of how to gain pledges in the same way advertisers use images of women to make them think differently about how they actually feel. Before Shelley came along, the Zetas did not know what it felt like to “be popular”. Shelley painted a picture in their minds of what popularity looks and feels like. Once the Zetas experienced that feeling, they understood what they had been missing out on. In Parks’ essay, advertisers over-fantasize the livelihood of a housewife. They make a housewife’s work seem greater than it actually is (Parks 212). Shelley essentially did the same thing with the image she gave the

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