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Women and the Media
by Jeni Johnson / May 2005 issue of
Socialist Action
When discussing the role of media in the average
woman’s life, I decided the best place to see what the media wanted woman
to want was in a very popular magazine called Cosmo. When I looked at the
table of context, it all looked pretty interesting. I discovered that from
one copy of this magazine I would be able to learn such important life
lessons as: how to do my hair and apply my make-up like the celebrities do,
what to do if I earned more money than my boyfriend, and, most importantly,
Five things a guy never wants me to say, some of my favorites being I am
not allowed to talk about any female bodily function, I shouldn’t ever tell
him if I feel bad about my body image, and under no circumstances should I
ever mention that he might need some work in what this magazine calls his
“in-the-sack skills” .
Now those
things are all obviously very important things to know if you want to be a
good woman but the advertisements were what really caught my attention. In
the magazine, there were: 22 ads for makeup, 16 ads for clothes, 16 ads for
hair care products, 6 for diet pills, 6 for perfume, 6 for cars, 6 for
feminine products, and of the 6 of those 4 mentioned the word discreet
because as I learned from the article men never want to know these things
exist, 5 for toothpaste or mints, 5 for soap, 4 birth control,4 for skin
smoothing lotion, and 3 for deodorant. All of these ads were geared toward
the girly girl stereotypical female. The one ad for athletic apparel
claimed to be “the ultimate way to look cute while burning carbs” . All of
this information was gathered from ONE copy of Cosmo. I should add that
Cosmo is one of the most popular magazine for women. Hundreds of woman see
these ads, read these articles, and actually believe that they have a basis
is real life.
It is true
that this magazine is probably one of the worst of its kind, so I decided
that I should look at some other forms of media to see how they portrayed
woman. What I found was quite depressing. The top movie right now is Hitch.
In this movie, Will Smith teaches the average man how to trick beautiful
but attainable woman into falling in love with him. The most popular book
out right now is Honeymoon by James Paterson. This book has two main
characters, a policeman and the woman he is hunting down. The woman, who is
described as independent, resourceful, and deadly, falls in love but is
avoiding marriage to work on her career so she kills her boyfriends instead
of marrying them. The leading television right now is Desperate Housewives
a show which shows the depths woman will stoop to have fun while their
husbands are away. These are the roles woman are playing in modern society.
We can either be content to try and please our man every way we can, we can
be a sweet and innocent mother figure, or we can ball-busting, boyfriend
murdering, independent career woman. There are so many options!
There are
many complex reasons for assigning these positions to woman. The first of
which is that by telling women their biggest fears should be wrinkles and
keeping their men happy, women get the impression that their real concerns,
such as finding money to pay the bills or finding a good job are things
that are not part of what society expects them to do. In the 80s, mass
media began to derail the woman’s rights movement by claiming that women
who have left the home to live their own lives only end up unhappy because
they are being robbed of their true position in life which is wife and
mother. Though the people that said this admitted they had no actual proof
of this happening, because so many people were saying it, the general
public began to believe that it was true. The reason working woman may have
been happy couldn’t possibly be that even though they were finally doing
what they wanted, society still did not approve, so it must be that they
missed nursing babies and vacuuming the living room.
Another
reason so many magazines and TV shows try and promote this as being the way
real woman are is because when a woman looks at a magazine and sees trim
beautiful women on every page, she thinks this is the norm. So, to get her
man, which she knows she has to do because the article on one page told her
so, she must take the pills advertised on the next page, use the makeup
advertised on the page after that and complete her perfect life style with
the shoes on the page after that. The media helps perpetuate these negative
stereotypes to increase revenues on the products they get paid to
advertise. And it is working. The dieting industry, which through life
experience seems to be almost entirely geared towards the female
population, makes over 40 billion dollars a year. Women have been
distracted from fighting for equality by the fact that every one is telling
them they are fighting for the wrong things, that what they really should
be concerned about is finding a good man and settling down. In almost every
movie or TV sitcom, the woman is portrayed as a sex kitten or a beautiful,
gentle mother figure.
From
overexposure to these forms of media, girls as young as first grade believe
that they need to work on their weight! This is no surprise seeing as the
average American woman is 5’4 144 pounds and the average model is 5’11 and
117 pounds. A realistic female role model does not exist, or rather, she
does exist and the media is only promoting the chauvinistic ideal woman.
The women that girls have to look up today are tall and lack fat
completely, barring, of course, their large breasts. There is very little
chance that a woman will be born with this physique and because of this
women are buying beauty products and pushup bras to achieve a look that is
not even natural. Thousands of woman develop severe eating disorders while
trying to achieve the perfect body they see on the cover of Cosmo, on their
favorite TV show, or at the movies.
Things are not
completely hopeless though. Though Cosmo, Seventeen, or Vogue may not show
women what real life is like there are some alternatives such as Off Our
Backs, the feminist news journal, Bust, a magazine for women who have something
to get off their chest, and Bitch, a magazine that gives the feminist
response to pop culture. These magazine addresses some of the real issues
women face and also do devote half the magazine to clone like models
promoting wrinkle remover and diet pills. Once women know that there are
alternatives, that the average model on the cover of Cosmo isn’t reality,
and the media stop trying to convince the general public that tall, slim,
busty, and maternal are the best things for a woman, then we will be a lot
closer to equality.
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