Gendered Media Blog

The blog for this week focuses on Gendered Media: Women, Men, Identity and Politics by Karen Ross. While recognizing that gains have been made in gender equality in different types of media, Ross stresses that the gains are not nearly significant enough to say we have no more work to do in bringing about true equality. The author looks at many different types of mass media, including chapters devoted to analyzing news, television programming, the internet and pornography.

Her section on “masculinity in crisis” was interesting. Growing up in the Christian church, I have witnessed this sentiment over and over again, but of course never from a feminist viewpoint like Ross’. Why should men necessarily have their identities only defined in the context of being better than women? This reminds of a bit of art history. In Neo-Classic French art, women were almost entirely excluded from nude painting in favor of the male form. With the absence of women, men’s bodies began to take on more lithe, supple, passive, and objectified forms. This relates, in my mind, because it shows how constructed and dichotomous gender can be, and it also shows how men and masculinity can take on other forms than the Promise Keepers would hope for.

When Ross talked about women being “less than the sum of their body parts” I could definitely picture the type of advertisements she was referring to. These are accepted forms, and while I would object anyway to the picture of the battered woman to sell, I don’t know if, unstudied, I would have consciously been aware of the brokenness of women in mass produced images.

In the section where the author discusses pornography, she did an excellent job of complicating the issue and presenting both sides of the debate on (un)harmfulness of porn on women. On one hand, it encourages and perpetuates violence against women. On the other hand, women should not be denied their sexuality and freedom to choose for themselves what Ross termed “erotica or porn.”

I was really surprised to hear the statistics on women in the news. I don’t watch the news as much as I probably should, but the drastically disproportionate representation of women to men in both stories and news jobs was shocking. I was not as surprised to hear that many stories featuring women portrayed them as simply victims. Certainly women are victims of male crime, but that is not the sum of their potential contribution to the goings-on of the world! And conversely, men perpetrating violent offenses against women are abnormalized by making the perps seem monstrous, when really, sex based violence is very common, especially among close family and friends.

I thought this book was very well written, both an engaging and informative read. When I talk about any of my own research that suggests we have not fully achieved social justice, I get a definite backlash. I have even been told by an older woman that “we women have been too liberated,” and she went on to describe how women are not being properly taken care of and protected by men.

In my personal conversation with this family member I did not take a very strong response. But in my scholarly work, I think information like Ross has provided can be valuable evidence showing that what we accept as feminist and liberal, like the encouragement of overly sexualized professional and everyday clothing for (young) women, can really be seen as trappings of the same old objectification and subordination of women.