Response to Ross - Aryeh

Gendered Media discussed a few issues that I have always felt strongly about, yet have rarely had the opportunity to discuss. The most salient issue, brought up often in the text, is the concept of “third-wave” feminism and its possible ills. In my experience, many women (including friends of mine) are very much in line with the “third-wave” feminism approach. It’s basically a post-feminism, ironic attitude used, for example, by “dancers” and burlesque performers and people like that. They always want to say that being liberated in a post-feminist world means “doing whatever you want,” yet this often means, as stated by Ross, performing historically male rituals and/or sexualizing themselves or others. For a long time, I have always wanted to say what Ross repeats in this book: “knowing” you’re exploiting yourself doesn’t make it non-exploitative.  Such theories, however, have typically been met with a lot of resistance among friends of mine. I’m interested to see how several of my feminist classmates feel about the “third-wave feminism” issue. Perhaps I’m not giving these third-wavers enough credit, but I tend to agree with Ross’ contention that this attitude is generally just an excuse for bad behavior in individuals, and a crass way for the media (such as men’s magazines) to promote misogynistic portrayals of women. A great example in the book was when the men’s magazine publisher said, “we have thousands of women waiting to pose for us.” While I’m sure this is the case, it seems to me a form of undercutting what would be a typical feminist critique of such a magazine to essentially say, “post-feminist women like it, so it’s OK.”

Based on reading Ross as well as some of the other materials (such as the “FOX” article Dr. Pimentel sent us a few weeks ago), it seems to me that the media is trying extremely hard to push feminism as both “radical” and “out of date.” While the third-wavers would probably say that their brand of feminism is the true “new feminism,” I would disagree. I think that exploitative feminism has become the “new” feminism because it’s more palatable to big business and western culture. It’s extremely crafty to tell women that they’re “liberated” while jointly exploiting them for profit. The counter-narrative of “radical feminism is no longer appropriate” espoused by conservative and religious commentators is a similar, problematic approach. These pundits (often women) cast feminism as a fringe movement, away from society’s mainstream. If you watch television news media, you’re likely to see such ideas as the dominant portrayal of feminism in the news. All these things greatly concern me; feminism is being attacked from all angles and called irrelevant and out of date. However, our society has not made significant strides toward true gender equality, which makes these (in my view) inaccurate opinions and portrayals quite harmful.

On a related note, I wholeheartedly agree with Ross re: portrayals of people of color in media. As Ross says, very, very often, media uses people of color who have more “white” or “western” features. To take a couple of examples, Beyonce has been airbrushed to appear extremely pale and light skinned in advertising, though such images do not closely approximate her true skin color. I personally have noticed an uptick lately in interracial couples in advertising, which is a positive trend. Still, one of the most common such portrays is of a white male with an Asian female. Quite often, the advertisers choose an extremely tall, light skinned Asian female for such a role, making her almost indistinguishable from a white person if you do not view the commercial closely. Many of the African-American women on television are often portrayed as light-skinned, wearing wigs similar to “white” women’s hair. While the move towards portraying more people of color on television and in advertising is good, I am concerned by these portrayals, because I believe that there is still a none-too-subtle background message of “white is right” going on here.