"Mrs Tough Guy"

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Fake Media stories

In most western universities Media research tends to focus solely on the negative effects of Media on Society. And more so in the case of gender. It is fashionable to say Media contributes to gender inequality. In this essay I will demonstrate that not only the statement is false but also that the opposite is true: Media contributes to and generates gender equality.

Media demons? Hell no!

In all shapes and varieties Media is overwhelmingly present in Contemporary Societies. Human beings living in Western Countries are daily exposed to an enormous amount of Media content. In the late 20th Century, the emergence of new Media, such as the internet and the blogosphere, has increased this phenomenon even more. Since Media is everywhere and is virtually inescapable from, it must have an impact on Society, namely in the issue of gender representation. However, to determine if these effects are of a positive or a negative nature remains at best an elusive question.

The claim that Media contributes to gender inequality, though appealing, is not as clear cut as it could seem to a less critical eye. In the matter of gender as, for instance, in the matter of violence, it is virtually impossible to determine Media effects on Society, though most scholars consider these effects to be of a negative nature. These scholars follow the footsteps of theorists like Adorno, who considered that mass media has a deceitful power over consumers. Adorno thought that by giving the audience what they have been trained to want, the culture industry could encourage conformity. What is more, Adorno claimed that audiences were at the mercy of producers: “Because we’ve never really had anything different, we want more and more of the same. The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object.” (Adorno, 1991: 85). Nevertheless, just because a whole set of researchers, more or less conservative in their approach, have gone to work in order to prove the bad effects of the Media upon Society, selectively picking their case studies examples, that does not necessarily mean that they are right.

These scholars think and would have us believe that their findings are not only true but should also be regarded the touchstone of Media and Gender Studies. Generally, scholars which focus on the negative effects of the Media are the offspring of Postmodernism, in the sense that they only see darkness and deceptions in Media Representations. Their conceptual working framework is embedded in pessimism and in a detachment from every day life affairs. Even if their insights were to prove correct, they lack a somewhat important feature: practical utility.

Commonly speaking, the Radical Postmodern approach blames producers for depicting women in a bad light; producers ultimately wish to sell cosmetic products, household appliances and high-heel shoes and therefore they use Media in order to induce women to conform to well establish gender roles, which these researchers consider negative.

Nevertheless, even it that was to prove correct, it would be redundant. Why? In a word: Capitalism. Radical approaches consider that Media shapes society more than anything else. Their analyses, however, even if true, could not change the system itself, and therefore not only this approach can be charged with paternalism but also with redundancy.

Radicals do not consider the other side of the Media equation, the fact that media reflects society, and that this cannot be discarded. The two sides of the Media equation then virtually make it impossible the establishment of a trustworthy media effects theory. On the whole, when someone says that media representations contribute to generate gender inequality, what is being implied is that media producers are bad people. Terrible people who are willing to do everything for money, even generate horribly twisted representations of gender. But this leads nowhere, except if you are aiming at restraining Media; harnessing producers to what you think are politically correct approaches on gender.

What is more, this approach tends to dispose of an important feature of any serious Media analysis: the fact that the main gold of media tycoons has not to do with controlling society but with generating profits. Mainstream Media, apart from state controlled TV, Newspapers and radios, is a business as any other. Like all businesses it has to please customers. Now, if you are moving against what audiences wish to see, read, listen, and so on, you will most surely alienate your audience and, ergo, be put out of business.

Radical approaches claim Media generates gender inequality because they wish to sell their products and by generating such effects they will be successful. The conclusion is either, a) for radicals people are plain stupid and they fall for it constantly, or b) radicals are wrong, Media gives audiences what audiences want, when they want it and not before; because Media has to sell and cannot go against society, consumers.

Another important aspect has to do with the way in which audiences perceive Media representations. One cannot deny that with the emergence of the Mass Media in the 20th Century the balance between representations of men and women was clearly un-equal: there have always been more men on screen, radio, TV, newspapers and so on than women. Also, it seems fairly obvious that during the fifties, sixties, seventies and even eighties, women’s representations in the Media would seem to us, contemporary Media consumers, quite conservative and negative.

Women would most likely be fit for nothing except cook, be dramatically saved by men, be beautiful but not really intelligent. They would either be romantic, futile, vain creatures or they would be more or less elaborate variations of the Femme fatale stereotype. For us today this is common sense knowledge, and yet we take this as proof to assert that Media generates gender inequality. Because we consider Media stereotypes of previous decades a representation of values that we could not subscribe today, we assume that in those days Media fed the public with twisted representations of gender. Yet, we fail to realise that maybe these representations, which for us would seem old-fashioned, might have been thought of as perfectly normal for audiences of past decades. We look at cinema, or TV of the fifties and early sixties and most of what we see is man and women interacting in an extremely traditional way and we conclude that media was responsible for the maintenance of a traditional status-quo in gender relations.

However, immediately one can see that this conclusion presents several problems. Firstly, “any media text, regardless of its manifest stereotypical character, can be interpreted against the grain of its dominant discourse. Media texts are polysemic, that is, they carry multiple meanings that do not produce a single, dominant discourse.” (Van Zonnen, 1995:322). Media texts, being polysemic, are perceived in several different ways, and where some may see gender inequality others can see quite the opposite.

What is more, media texts are in many cases ambiguous and research aiming at establishing gender inequality tends to overlook it: “Research on stereotypes rarely acknowledges such divergences and ambivalences; it represents gender discourse in the media as if it is as solid and impervious as a concrete wall, and therewith reproduces the very phenomenon it wants to question – the dichotomous and hierarchical nature of gender”. (Van Zonnen, 1995: 320, 321).
Secondly, when we consider past representations of gender in Media, the conclusion we reach is based on our assumption that Media influences Society more than reflects it, but what if we are wrong in our approach? What if Media, at least mainstream media, operates more on the level of reflecting society rather than influencing it? Maybe what happens most of the time is that Media, being a business, cannot go against the moral codes of a given period, and if so Media will reflect those moral patterns more than attempt to change them.

Thirdly, is it really possible to establish a verifiable link between Media representations and their impact on the social body? Will people absolutely conform to the values and moral codes that Media presents, and be guided in their behaviour by them?

This last problem has been identified among others by David Gauntlett. In an essay on the Media Effects Model, Gauntlett points out that: “It has become something of a cliché to observe that despite many decades of research and hundreds of studies, the connections between people's consumption of the mass media and their subsequent behaviour have remained persistently elusive.” (Gauntlett: 1998). Even if his essay concentrates basically on the relationship between Media and violence, Gauntlett’s conclusions can be applied to the relationship of Media and Gender; the argument being that, if in the matter of violence there still remains to be proven a link between Media representations and behavioural patterns, it logically follows that the same applies to gender representations and gender related behaviours. On the other hand, Gauntlett also notes that most thinkers of the Postmodernist school have what he refers to as “a backwards approach” when they consider the effects of Media on Society; “The 'media effects' approach, in this sense, comes at the problem backwards, by starting with the media and then trying to lasso connections from there on to social beings, rather than the other way around.” (Gauntlett: 1998).

Another problem that Gauntlett sharply addresses in his study has to do with the logistical impossibility of establishing a complete body of evidence to the Media effects theory: “Since careful sociological studies of media effects require amounts of time and money which limit their abundance, they are heavily outnumbered by simpler studies which are usually characterised by elements of artificiality … This view is taken to extremes by researchers and campaigners whose work brings them into regular contact with the supposedly corrupting material, but who are unconcerned for their own well-being as they implicitly 'know' that the effects will only be on 'other people'.” (Gauntlett: 1998).

Moreover, researchers see Media as corrupting the social body, of which apparently they are the elite, since Media is not corrupting them. They will write, for instance, about television viewers as people without critical faculties, with no selective skills: “Most viewers watch by the clock and either do not know what they will watch when they turn on the set, or follow established routines rather than choose each program as they would choose a book, a movie or an article” (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan & Signorielli, 1986: 19).

Unsurprisingly, researchers trying to establish a relation between Media and gender will almost always focus on Advertising, and mostly on adverts that can be seen on mainstream TV. Advertising is considered by theorists from the Radical school as the ultimate example of producers cultivating anxieties and fears in order to sell their products. This, they claim, is especially highlighted by adverts related with fashion, light food and cosmetics. Germaine Greer claims:

Every women knows that, regardless of her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful … The UK beauty industry takes £8.9 billion a year out of women’s pockets … Pre teens cosmetics are relatively cheap but within a few years more sophisticated marketing will have persuaded the most level-headed woman to throw money away on alchemical preparations … anything real or phony that might fend off her imminent collapse into hideous decrepitude”. (Greer, 1999: 19, 23)

Though true this may be, Greer fails to see that in modern advertising it are not only women that have to look good, perfect. Increasingly, men also have: “Today, men are also expected to spend time in the gym, working to develop ‘tight, toned’ bodies” (Gauntlett: 2002, 78). It is true enough that beauty ideals set by Advertising do put a huge pressure on people to spend a lot of time and money worrying about their physical attributes and appearances. This can be considered as a not very positive ideal, in the sense that one might think of it as a superficial and shallow approach on life. Nevertheless, increasingly, one cannot think of it as a distinctive mark of gender inequality. Quite the opposite. In modern 21 Century advertising the trend is for men to be as well-toned as women. The pressure is on men as it is on women, as Antony Cortese asserts:

Baudrillard [in Seduction, 1990] states that only women are seducers, but empirical evidence on advertising suggests otherwise. Men, too, are seducers, a male version of the perfect provocateur. The ideal man is young, handsome, clean-cut, perfect and sexually alluring
(Cortese, 1999: 58.)

To summarize, there are several ways in which the relationship between Media and Gender can be approached. However, it seems extremely difficult to establish a direct link between Media representations of Gender and actual social behaviours. Those who advocate such a thesis disregard the active role of audiences, fail to see that media texts are polysemic and cannot establish a definite empiric body of evidence to support their claims. Moreover, it seems that they are paternalistic towards audiences and would wish to have a say in what Media representations should be like, as if they know better what is good for the public.

More than taking into consideration that Media contributes to gender inequality, other thinkers claim that Media reflects the state of moral affairs in Society at a given period more than anything else. This claim is based on three assumptions: a) Media is a business as any other, must sell, and therefore should respect the moral codes of a given period if it wishes to be successful. b) Recent Media content, even if operating in unprecedented consumerist logic, shows more signs of representing gender equality than inequality. c) Audiences are not passive; they construct their gender representations in active ways, from several sources, of which Media is but one.

In my view, instead of influencing society or being influenced by it, most often Media moves along with society, not against it. It is only when society is ripe for change that Media represents those changes, and not before. Nevertheless, in a diachronic analysis of Western Culture, one is forced to admit that gender representations have changed dramatically with the advent of Modern Media. With Media, gender representations that had remained almost the same for hundreds of years were radically altered in the matter of less than a Century. We need just to take into consideration the roles of man and women in the Victorian period and compare them with present ones. So little had changed from the Middle Ages to the Victorian period: Man was still the virile provider, woman was still the passive, obedient housewife. In the 20 Century everything changed radically. The Mass Media, with its polysemic meanings and contents surely had a very important part in those changes.

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor W. (1991) The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, London: Routledge.

Cortese, Anthony J. (1999) Provocateur: Images of Women and Minorities in Advertising, Lanham, Maryland: Owman & Littlefiend.

Gauntlett, David. (1998) Ten things wrong with the effects model [Electronic Version]. Retrieved March, 18, 2006, from http://www.theory.org.uk/david/effects.htm

Gauntlett, David (2002) Media Gender and Identity , London: Routledge

Gerbner, George; Gross, Larry; Morgan, Michael, & Signorielli, Nancy (1986), 'Living with Television: The Dynamics of the Cultivation Process', in Bryant, Jennings, & Zillmann, Dolf, eds, Perspectives on Media Effects, Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Greer, Germaine (1999) The Whole Woman, London: Doubleday.

Van Zoonen, Liesbet (1995) ‘Gender, Representation, and the Media’ in John Downing, Ali Mohammadi, Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi, eds Questioning the Media: a critical introduction, 2th Edtion,, London: Sage Publications