In 1992, Pat Roberston remarked that ‘the feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women’ but rather ‘about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians’. Misogynistic and dismissive rhetoric such as this has served to socialise a stigma around the term ‘feminism’, which should less hyperbolically and more truthfully perhaps be defined as a belief in and advocacy of the equal rights of females as males. Its name is not ‘equality’ as the definition denotes, for such a genderless noun would deny the historically precedent patriarchal bias in power relations and understandings. Feminism is more than campaigning for equal pay or votes for women; it’s also about how we subconsciously perceive the difference between opportunities as viable for, and the breaking down of the apparently rigid dichotomy between ‘male’ and ‘female’. Arguably the greatest vehicle debilitating this movement and continuing to socialise a stigma around ‘The F Word’ in the contemporary political climate is the media, which, Siebel Newsom argues, is both ‘the message and the messenger’. Vitally, the neutrality of ‘message’ and ‘messenger’ should be highlighted in Newsom’s argument, for whilst the media is undoubtedly often a hindrance to the advocacy of equality, reinforcing and perpetuating existing patriarchal structures of power, it can also be used as a powerful and revolutionary vehicle of social change. It all depends on who is behind the discourse.
American teenagers spend an average of 10 hours and 41 minutes each day consuming some form of media. From just this one base fact it is hard to deny the precedence that media holds in shaping our national discourse – one could even go so far as to argue that the media is our national discourse in the technological age, as hinted by the 2011 documentary, Miss Representation. And what, exactly, is the discourse that American teenagers are being fed in their 10 hours and 41 minutes, give or take, each day with regards to femininity? Studies show that 53% of 13 year old girls are unhappy with their bodies, a statistic that increases to 78% by the time girls turn 17. In parallel, rates of depression amongst girls/women doubled between 2000 and 2010, a period of dramatic rise in the pervasion of (social) media into the everyday. And, further, the American Psychological Association has found that self-objectification is now a national epidemic and problem. So? The problem is undoubtedly rooted in the reality that the media treats women as bodies. It’s largely unconcerned with women as intellectuals, equals, or, basically, human beings. As Margaret Atwood insinuates, women are bodies as men are minds. She writes,
It could be argued that men don't have any bodies at all. Look at the magazines! Magazines for women have women's bodies on the covers, magazines for men have women's bodies on the covers. When men appear on the covers of magazines, it's magazines about money, or about world news. Invasions, rocket launches, political coups, interest rates, elections, medical breakthroughs. Reality. Not entertainment. Such magazines show only the heads, the unsmiling heads, and maybe a little glimpse, a coy flash of suit. How do we know there's a body, under all that discreet pinstriped tailoring? We don't, and maybe there isn't. What does this lead us to suppose? That women are bodies with heads attached, and men are heads with bodies attached? Or not, depending. You can have a body, though, if you're a rock star, an athlete or a gay model. As I said, entertainment. Having a body is not altogether serious.
The media treats power as defined by men, and in a world where nothing holds greater influence on the way we collectively perceive power than the ways in which it is treated by media discourse, power relations are not going to reflect the fact that over half the population demographic is female. Equality is hardly perceivable in such a situation where the media is a privatised, inaccessible, sexualised commentary, rather than open discussion. As Newsom notes in her documentary Miss Representation, the role played by (USA) national media discourse in re-domesticating females after the Second World War demonstrates explicitly the normative performance the patriarchal understanding of power that media enables. After the war, ~80% of the ~6 million US women employed in factories etc. wanted to stay on in their jobs, but just 2 days after the war ended and the GIs returned home, the aircraft industry fired 800,000 women. Other industries followed suit soon after. But the political climate had granted women a taste of economic independence and productivity; how could one expect them to unanimously and quietly embrace a life of domestic servitude and dependence? Another discourse had to be promoted which would keep women in their ‘rightful’ place and re-domesticate them to their former way of life. Such is where the role of media came in. In 1947, Newsweek prints that ‘for the American girl, books and babies don’t mix’ and Modern Woman states that ‘an independent woman is a contradiction in terms’, both part of the growing pervasiveness of patriarchal media alongside television shows such as Father Knows Best (1954) for instance. The domestic commodity boom of the 1950s linked to this national domestic discourse on television, women rushing out to buy the appliances implicitly advertised in the domestic settings of television shows, highlighting its broader economic implications. The government further stabilised such discourse through the ever-present threat of Communism.
As a young female in the Western world, I’m able to receive the same education as my male counterparts without an overarching social stigma towards my ‘lesser sex’, I can write this post and publish it, and I can read about the achievements of powerful women such as Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel. But that doesn’t mean the 1950s housewife discourse holds no performative power over the female experience and expectation today. I attend one of three all-girls colleges at the University of Cambridge, institutions which, sadly, remain essential to help address the continued misrepresentation of female students in many courses and faculties which remain male-dominated; so much of the political commentary surrounding Hillary Clinton’s election campaign has been disgustingly misogynistic and completely conceited in its audacious focus upon how her hair was styled, how she’s ‘bossy' or a 'bitch’ as opposed to a powerful and confident female, or what outfit she wore, all of which have sadly been repeated in media coverage of the Rio Olympic games and what clothing female commentators chose to wear (can you even imagine such articles being published on the choice of suit made by Obama during his election campaign, or choice of tie made by Michael Johnson in his Olympic commentary?); and the rhetoric of media discourse remains unashamedly sexist seen for instance in the sexualisation of advertising and derogatory, secondary role granted females in film (their identity is almost strictly unanimously construed around their relationship to (a) male and the relational identity granted from such). There are so many other ways in which this idea of the ‘lesser sex’ continues to perform normatively in our everyday discourse and understanding.
A lot of this stems from capitalism as a power structure. Largely since the 1980s, huge corporate conglomerations have controlled most of our media outlets, operating with an explicitly biased, unbalanced reporting eye. Marketers have been able to dictate our cultural norms and values so pervasively, Newsom suggests, because of the relaxation of rules on advertising starting in the 1970s and ‘80s, with the 1976 grant of First Amendment protection to advertising by the Supreme Court and the 1980 weakening of the Federal Trade Commission’s power to stop ‘unfair’ advertising by Congress being prime examples of such, and amplifying throughout the 1990s, whence studies find a steady increase in explicit sexual images in advertising ,such as the Kate Moss campaign for Calvin Klein. Why does it have to be so patriarchal in its sexualisation? One key reason proposed is that the prime target demographic is men aged 18-34, stipulated to be the hardest demographic to get to engage with media outlets such as television, such that advertisers encourage the production of programming which targets the perceived interests of 18-34 year old men so that their products can sell. What results is a bifurcation in the presentation of male and female along the tropes aforementioned by Atwood and perpetuation of the limited understanding of women as no more than (their) bodies. The internal memo of Michael Eisner, former CEO of The Walt Disney Co., which stated that ‘we have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.’, implicitly highlights the driving incentive behind capitalism which makes it so easy to misrepresent females. It’s as though advocating equality and making money are oxymoronic.
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But as Emma Watson’s 2014 speech as UN Women Goodwill Ambassador for the ‘He For She’ campaign so successfully highlights, feminism is not and cannot simply be about the Female as a sex. Feminism is also inescapably concerned with the Female as a gender trope. In this respect, it is equally concerned with masculinity. Numerous studies by academics such as Linda McDowell highlight a contemporary ‘crisis of masculinity’ largely instigated by the capitalist climate and deindustrialisation. And the discussed discourse of the media is not only toxic to feminism and the perception of female equality, but also to the ways in which masculine identity is perceived and counter-produced. In this respect, feminism is not female territory. ‘A Feminist’ should not automatically be gendered female. Feminism is just as important for male identity as it is female.
The sexualisation of media and representation of women as no more than bodies helps to promote emotional illiteracy amongst boys, socialising them to an ideal of masculinity which is one dimensional and unrealistic. If a man is taught that he should naturally be smarter than women, should be earning more money than women, should be more powerful than women, what does that make him if he isn’t? If a man is taught than Men don’t cry, that emotions are feminine and that being vulnerable will make him a sissy, what room does this give him for emotional expression? If a man is taught that females are worth no more than their body, that ‘pulling’ loads of girls is an expression of his masculinity, then how does that teach him to treat females? What does the pervasive use of the statement ‘no homo’ by males when innocently complimenting their friends say about the potential for emotional intimacy in friendship? It's not unusual for girls to compliment their female friends, so why should it be for males? Newsom questions: Is he less of a man if he doesn’t conform to these tropes of masculinity? How are they expected to treat women with respect when they have these illusions normalised for them? This performance of this kind of masculinity is reinforced in our everyday rhetoric entirely subconsciously, such is the normative power of (historic) media bias.
“Man up!”
“Grow some balls.”
“Hey guys!”
“Be a man about it.”
“What a bitch.”
“Ay you absolute lad!”
“You throw like such a girl.”
“Stop being a sissy and crying like a 9 year old girl.”
It’s harmless enough, right? Studies show, however, that boys are more likely than girls to be diagnosed with a behaviour disorder, to be prescribed stimulant medications, to binge drink, to be expelled from school, and to commit a violent crime. At university level entry in the UK, Eva Wiseman continues, women outnumber men in two thirds of subjects. Men aged 20-49 years old are more likely to die from suicide than any other single form of death. Wiseman surmises that to be a contemporary man means to ‘fight for success and sex, to reject empathy, and to never, ever cry. The result is depression, anxiety and violence.’
What we need is an alternate narrative. Not ‘meninist’ satires or grossly derogatory publications like The Lad Bible, but narratives like the ones listed below, produced to address and counter the normalised discourse of a largely patriarchal, capitalist media.
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Siebel Newsom, when working as an actress, was told to remove her Stanford MBA from her CV because it was ‘threatening’. In 1817, Jane Austen referenced a character called Richard as having ‘never done anything to entitle himself to more than the abbreviation of his name’. The white, heterosexual, middle class, middle-aged man cannot continue to dominate media discourse when he makes up less than ~10% of the (UK) population. A patriarchal setting cannot continue to be the default for media discourse, especially in a world where some of the most powerful leaders are, and could be, female.
“Feminism isn’t about making women stronger. Women are already strong. It’s about changing the way the world perceives that strength.” – G.D. Anderson
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Further reading/watching:
- The Mask You Live In: What Does It Mean To Be A Man? (2015)
- Miss Representation (2011)
- Wiseman (2016), "Depression, Violence, Anxiety: The Problem With The Phrase 'Be A Man', The Guardian
- McDowell (2000), "Learning to serve? Employment aspiration and attitudes of young working-class men in an era of labour market restructuring"
- Rookie Mag, edited by Tavi Gevinson
- Bates (2016), "Girl Up"
- Emma Watson (2014): -click here-
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All figures either sourced from Newsom’s documentaries listed above, The Guardian, or newrepublic.com (all as found August 2016).
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