kagablog

THE MEDIA AS MIRROR OF SOCIETAL VALUES

(photo johann jourens)

“The media has created a society supporting a million-dollar diet industry spawned by images of anorexic teenagers strutting international catwalks.” This is the predominant approach to the question of the relationship between the representation of men and women in the media. The scapegoat of society’s obsession with weight and the over-population of eating disorder clinics is the media.
Not only is this argument a cliché and an all too easy answer, but it is also fraught with questions of the ‘chicken or the egg?’ variety. The conventional view is that the media creates the benchmark for the human ideal, but is this not a skewed perception? Instead of living in a media-propelled society, is the media not propelled by the values and conceptions of society?
Representations of the genders in the media have changed considerably over the last decade. The macho, club-wielding Marlboro man has evolved into a diaper-wielding sensitive man of the 90’s. The representation of women as a male appendage, an Omo-sponsored maternal figure, has made way for the 21st Century woman in who’s life washing has to take up as little time as possible. She has become the McCain woman who is “too busy to peel a pea.” The one-dimensional “mother-woman” of the past has evolved into an überwoman who can now be a mother, a ‘domestic executive’, a career woman, a hostess and a lover.
Are we as woman supposed to celebrate this? Did our grandmothers burn their bras for this? This überwoman might appear to be a feminist’s dream, but in fact she is simply another stereotyped creation. “Mirror, mirror….” This stereotyped creation is reminiscent of the female characters in the popular fairytale, Snow White. This fairytale contains messages about the roles women should occupy: she is not only a wicked, barren, conniving witch and step-mother, but also a sweet, innocent, virginal girl. The überwoman is not more evolved, more liberated than this fairytale creation; she is simply an ‘all-in-one’ version. She has graduated from a repressed mother to an emancipated, post-feminist female with multiple personality disorder. Whereas before she had to restrain herself (and be restrained) to the mother role, she now has to cope with an even worse fate, the do-it-all-yourself mother/lover/wife who is lost somewhere in her myriad of roles.
Not only is the modern woman caught in a dysfunctional confusion of roles as in Snow White, but, as in the fairytale, she is a representation of woman, not a flesh and blood woman.

(illustration kiriko mukaiyama)

This is paralleled in the media. The ‘represented woman’ thus differs considerably from the ‘real woman.’ The ‘represented woman’ occupies her plethora of roles and completes all her requirements with a smile; the ‘real woman,’ however, struggles to come up for air in this sea of expectation.
The ‘represented woman’ and the ‘real woman’ also differ in one essential way: both Snow White and the wicked stepmother have one thing in common – they are sexless. The wicked woman is barren, Snow White is virginal. This indicates that there is an integral distinction which the media seems to ignore – the distinction between gender and sex. The gendered woman is idealized, multi-roled and sexless. She has no needs, no desires and no reality beyond what her roles require.
The essence of the stereotyped female in the media is, therefore, that of a gendered female, a representation of a female which ignores the distinction between gender and sex. By the ‘sexed’ woman I mean a woman who has needs, desires and hopes that extend beyond her roles: she is a ‘real’ woman.

Where does this ignorance of the distinction between gender and sex originate? The answer is deceptively simple: society. Gender is entirely a social construction. Sex is a biological fact: you are either a male or a female. Gender, on the other hand, is a societal construction of entire identities based on whether you are sexually a female or a male. If you are a male, you are macho, reasonable, immune to bouts of crying and like the colour blue; if you are a female, you are hysterical, maternal and into pink. There is, in other words, no scientific basis for gender.
The media represents this fictional, unscientific, non-biological view of the genders. The modern representation of the man who now changes diapers is only effective in advertising terms because of its comical value. It is comical in its total opposition to the reality of most modern families. More importantly, in the collective mind of society, the image of the ‘fatherman’ who changes diapers, cooks and cleans is an anomaly, an aberration that has homosexual overtones. The representation of the ‘fatherman’ thus works because the media realises that the ‘fatherman’ is a selling point because it simply does not exist in the mind of society.
The mind of society, therefore, is the driving force behind the media industry’s propagation of the gender myth, because the gender myth is a social creation. Advertising is a target audience based, market-researched industry. This implies that the media simply represents the genders as society see it themselves.
The media industry knows: it is not sex that sells, it is gender.