Wheel Keeps on Turning

The Power and Control Wheel was created in 1984 to illustrate the pervasive patterns common to violence against women, all of which revolve around power and control: coercion, intimidation, emotional abuse, isolation, minimizing/denying/blaming, children, male privilege.

The wheel's been modified thousands of times as a teaching tool to analyze different manifestations of the ways power and control are negotiated in various contexts. Gendered Media kept reminding me of the Cultural Power and Control Wheel: 

The wheel is a successful metaphor because the giving and taking of power and control are at the heart of all systems. Whether that system is a family, a culture, a nation, or a global economy, power and control are the gears that make it run.

As Ross illustrates, we have plenty of other tools at our disposal to look at the tensions between power and control in gender issues: turn on the TV, read a newspaper or magazine, have a simple conversation, look in the mirror.

We have made progress but like Ross keeps reminding us, Western culture is still overwhelmingly normative.

Particularly when women are sexual, successful, powerful, assertive, or manifest other behaviors out of sync with accepted norms, it's assumed they are fair game:

Oscar host Seth McFarlane on 9 year-old nominee Quvenzhané Wallis:

“to give you an idea of how young she is, it’ll be 16 years before she’s too young for Clooney.”  

Tweeet (one of many) ridiculing the appearance of Brittany Howard during Alabama Shakes' 
SNL performance:

 Slate's Daniel Engber on Girls episode "One Man's Trash," and the  fact that  "rude," "ugly," "sexually ungenerous," "defiantly ungraceful" Hannah has a fling with a handsome doctor, played by an actor whose girlfriend is apparently a great deal hotter than Lena Dunham made it too difficult for a seasoned television critic to take seriously.