Does Mass Media propaganda affect women and how they perceive themselves?
Media, as we know it today, plays a large role in all of our lives, whether we
know it or not. It is all around us, newspapers, commercials, posters, magazines,
fliers, reality shows, and cartoons only name a few of our everyday interaction
with the media. However, with so much involvement in our everyday lives, is the
media causing some major problems in our society? One of the main issues with
the media is it only appeals to cultural biases, what the public want to hear and
what it supports. Sexism can be found in multiple sources anywhere from
magazine advertisements to movies, all of which support or portray women in a
submissive or inferior and attack women who do not follow this example.
Advertisements are the most obvious forms of usage of sexism in the
media. In an ad selling cleaning products, women are portrayed as the ones
enjoying the product as if men are not affected by it at all. This is therefore a
modern day enhancement of the cult of domesticity. Society still expects women
to be physically, mentally and morally inferior to men and the media is only
driving this force. Brenna Coleman explains in her article, “Portrayal of Women:
Female Stereotypes in the Media” that ads display and highlight the female body
parts (thigh, butt, chest) to sell a product which objectifies a women in the eyes of
a man. Such as: men see women as sexual objects, objects must be owned, and
therefore, men must own women.
The media not only thinks this is alright, but it trains little girls to strive to
be perfect little sex toys. In the article, “Our Barbies, Ourselves” Emily Prager
describes how Barbie was a woman born of a man’s image. The physical
attributes of Barbie cannot be replicated by any living women; but still many
women try everyday with the help of plastic surgery and extremely deadly diets
until they are as plastic and lifeless as their Barbie beauty idol. With Barbie, Bratz
and Polly at every turn, little girls are brain washed beyond saving to believe they
must subject themselves to being pretty and perfect to be accepted in society.
The media absolutely plays a big part in this. A good example of this is the reality
show, “Toddlers in Tiaras” which portray little girls, no older than eight, and their
mothers competing in pageantry. These girls are dressed in skimpy clothes. They
are taught flirty poses and sexy dances all for the sake of winning a crown. The
worst part is that the mothers support it and that the media glamorizes it. If there
is any indication that we, as a society, are forcing girls into an early stage of sexual
maturity, mentally or physically, prematurely ---it is in our media.
Movies are just as guilty of this. Women can be shown in two ways in films;
one, pretty, innocent, obedient, and dependent or two, strong, independent, and
sassy but a half-clothed sexual object. “Tomb Raider” is a good example of the
latter, the main character, Lara Croft, is independent and strong but half-clothed
and always sight appealing to the audience. The problem is it has the same effect
as the advertisements, it objectifies women. Disney movies do this also; they
portray women as slender, fragile, vulnerable and dependent on men for survival
such as in “Aladdin” or “Cinderella” (Prager). Working women are even attacked
and displayed as being isolated and cold-hearted like Cruela Devil from “101
Dalmatians.”
Although women have made great progress from being lawfully
excommunicated from the workforce to voting equally alongside men as equals,
but even with political equality they might never gain social equality. This is
because our media controls practically every kind of information obtainable.
According to “Moral Responsibilities and the Power of Pictures” by Paul Martin
Lester, children watch at least twenty five hours of television, adults spend onehalf of their leisure time engaged in it, sixty million of 1,500 daily newspapers and
7,600 weekly/ semi newspapers are sold each day and 60,000 different
periodicals and 40,000 books are sold each year. As a society, we take in a lot of
information; news, weather, global affairs, new research, and it all comes from
the same people who are trying to sell us something. Lester states that “only a
small percentage of [our] knowledge is biased on first-person experience. The
media provide various experiences and then shape our perceptions of it.” The
media is extremely powerful and it now threatens to take all the independence
that women for centuries had fought for. by Scholar Claudia
http://scholarclaudia.hubpages.com
Kilbourne (2002) pointed out that advertising is a 100 billion dollar a year
industry. Each day we are exposed to more than 2000 ads. Advertising can be one
of the most powerful sources of education in our society. Many women feel
pressured to conform to the beauty standards of our culture and are willing to go
to great lengths to manipulate and change their faces and bodies. Kilbourne
suggests that women are conditioned to view their faces as masks and their
bodies as objects. Through the mass media, women discover that their bodies and
faces are in need of alteration, augmentation, and disguise. In addition, women
are taught to internalize an observer’s perspective of their own bodies. This
phenomenon is called objectification (Fredrickson & Noll, 1997). Advertisements
are loaded with objectified women, and only recently have the effects of
objectification been explored. However, the effects of the dismemberment of
women in advertising have been neglected. Dismemberment advertisements
highlight one part of a woman’s body while ignoring all the other parts of her
body. Dismemberment ads portray women with missing appendages or substitute
appendages. Of course the ads are only symbolic of dismemberment, but the
symbolic imagery creates nearly the same effect. This study highlights the nature
and implications of objectification and requests a similar exploration of the nature
and implications of dismemberment advertisements. It is important to note that
advertisements are not the cause of the problems, per se, but they contribute to
them by fostering an environment in which the selling of women's bodies is seen
as acceptable. The Objectification and Dismemberment of Women in the Media
by Kacey D. Greeening, Capital University.
Parents are a powerful influence on their children. Parents can be the most
powerful force to help foster a healthy self-image for their daughters. Some
experts say it's better to show girls what a healthy body image means rather than
to tell them. Parents can also urge their adolescent girls to momentarily leave the
malls and the fashion magazines behind and head to a park. A parent should ask
them "Look at the young children there, see the joy of these little kids of all
shapes and sizes moving their bodies. They all look so alive," Ressler tells WebMD.
"We need to return to more of that." By Elizabeth Heubeck WebMD feature
www.webmd.com
Experts suggest that parents' energy is better spent getting their daughters
to look at and think critically about the unrealistic way the media portrays girls
and women. This is most likely to occur if mom or dad is engaged in the process,
too. "Co-viewing [the act of parents watching TV or viewing the Internet with
their daughters] allows parents and their daughters to talk about those patterns
of [physical] representation," Hobbs says.
If parents suspect that their daughters' eating or exercising habits, albeit
intended to drive peak performance, may in fact be jeopardizing it, they may
want to tell them so in objective terms. "Explain that if you're running on empty
and have depleted your fat stores, the next thing you're going to do is break down
muscle mass," Gittes suggests. "Get them to understand the processes that are
going on." By the time most girls reach their teens, they've consumed years'
worth of messages about what a female body should look like -- and not just from
the media.
"Mothers play a tremendous role in their daughters' self-assurance and
potential to develop eating disorders," Gittes tells WebMD. Girls take to heart
what their mothers say about bodies: their own, their daughters, those of
strangers and celebrities. They notice when their mothers exercise obsessively,
diet constantly, or make derogatory comments about their own appearance. That
should come as no surprise, as mothers are a girl's first and, often, most
influential role model. Fathers play an equally influential role in shaping their
daughters' self-image. "A daughter learns how to relate to men by the way she
relates to her father," says Carleton Kendrick EdM, LCSW, social worker and coauthor of Take Out Your Nose Ring, Honey, We're Going to Grandma's.
That's why it's critical that fathers check what they say to their daughters
about their physical appearance. "There needs to be a pause where you say,
'What will this comment do? What's my intention when I tell my daughter she
should lose some weight?'" Kendrick suggests.
Equally important -- and extremely obvious to girls -- is the way in which
fathers perceive all females, not just their daughters. To that end, Kendrick urges
fathers to consider the following questions: "Can your daughter see you watching
Internet porn? Are Playboy and Hustler hanging around? How do you react at
halftime when the cheerleaders come on?" Kendrick urges all fathers: "Pay
attention to how you respond to the media images of sexy, thin women because
your daughter is listening."
Parents can shape and mold their children more than any mass media
source known to man. Parents need to step up and be a parent. Turn off the
mainstream media sources and actually teach their children instead of letting the
television, internet, movies, and game systems babysit and raise these young and
impressionable little ones. Parents have more power and impact than they
realize in how they can affect the young women they are raising and how these
young women perceive themselves. Any Parent, grandparent, aunt and uncles
involvement can be the most impressionable, positive, and lasting powerful
influence in how their child perceives themselves and fosters a healthy self image.