Feminism 101: Why Sexism in Mass Media is Dangerous – Part 1

Posted on by Jay (Feminism In Space)

“The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.”
~George Orwell

One common response to Anita Sarkeesian’s critique of sexist tropes in video games is to acknowledge the sexism exists in video games, but then argue that it doesn’t harm anyone.

This is really just a derivative of the common argument that sexism in general doesn’t harm anyone. However, there are some nuances here that need to be teased out. If you run into someone who uses this argument on you, feel free to debate with them ad nauseam [1]. Or, if your time is more valuable, give them a link to the following article.

Forward

First, let me congratulate you for acknowledging that sexism exists! You’re already past the intro topic for most Feminism 101 blogs (the 001 course, if you will) which will save us both a lot of time.

Now before we start, realize that this is only a brief overview of why sexism in the media is harmful. Even though this is a multi-part blog post, it is by no means an exhaustive review. We are only exploring the tip of the iceberg here! The power of mass media, and the harms that mass media sexism causes, is a major topic of both second-wave and third-wave feminism (and further proof that the ‘waves’ of feminism are artificial divisions). The book that “pulled the trigger on history” over 50 years ago, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, focusses heavily on the mass media: from soap operas and advertisements, to news and ‘women’s magazines’. Today, we have entire college courses dedicated to feminist film theory, and people like  Anita Sarkeesian and groups like Bitch Magazine continue to critique mass media. So remember that this article will only to introduce you to the topic of sexism in the media. I have linked to other articles when possible, but in the interests of readability many ideas are touched upon only briefly. If you wish to learn more, please check out the ever-expanding reading list at the end of this series.

I Am the Captain of My Soul…

To start off, let’s deal with some obvious caveats.

First, at no point is a movie, tv show, video game, book, magazine, performance art piece, or any other form of media responsible for the actions of a sentient individual. I have yet to see the “video games made me do it” defense work in court, and for good reason. Most sane people can resist the messages pushed by mass media, especially if they are aware of the coercion.

In fact, individual autonomy is something that a feminist analysis of mass media relies on. By making people aware of sexism, misogyny, and harmful imagery in the media, feminists want to help people resist and oppose the damaging messages that bombard them on a daily basis [2].

Women responding to sexist ads
Women have been responding to and resisting mass media advertisements for decades.

Second, the widely known, real-life societal consequences for bad actions are far more effective at influencing people’s behavior than mass media:

At the end of the day, it is the real-life practice of violence and injustice that circumscribes people’s actions the most. The mass media comes in a distant second.

So in light of this, what dangers could the mass media pose to individuals and society?

Plenty.

…but Not the Admiral

Here’s the problem: human beings don’t operate in a social vacuum, but when you dismiss the effects that mass media has on people (by saying that movies, TV, books, video games, etc. don’t affect behavior) you imply that they do. While the romantic notion that the human mind operates outside of societal constraints is quite common [4], the reality of life just doesn’t back it up. Humans are pack animals. We are social creatures to a fault. We have biological imperatives that make us susceptible to the demands of our peers, including those projected through mass media. For example:

  • People have the tendency to favor the groups they belong to (be it a club, religion, race, gender, nationality, etc.) over other groups, to the point of being prejudiced against other groups and unfairly allocating resources to their own group (aka. intergroup bias).
  • We have the tendency to readily adopt something (memes, trends, fads, political sentiments, urban legends, conventional wisdom, etc.) simply because they are more popular (aka. the bandwagon effect).
  • We also have the problem where a majority of people oppose something in private, but wrongly assume (due to a lack of public opposition) that everyone else supports it. We’ll even falsely support the idea in public out of fear of being ostracized (aka. pluralistic ignorance, which plays heavily into “the problem that has no name” in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique).

All of these issues are manifestations of groupthink: a set of natural inclinations that make it easy for us to bypass critical thought so that we can better conform with our peers. Groupthink is why the human mind is not immune to the world around it, and groupthink is why we cannot dismiss the power of mass media. On the contrary, the mass media regularly leverages groupthink (and other cognitive biases) to greatly increase its influence over us.

To start with, the mass media relies heavily on framing. Framing is the tendency for people’s opinions to be influenced by the context that an idea is presented in. Depending on how a story is presented, how a news report is spun, or how the rules of a video game are fashioned, the same group of people can be pushed to very different conclusions about a topic.

Framing for Dummies
Framing for Dummies

But framing isn’t just the purview of politicians and those who study rhetoric, it is a normal part of all conversations. We frame our thoughts, arguments, and stories all the time [5]. Unfortunately, while framing is a natural part of human conversation, we have a terrible habit of ignoring the framing of a story that we hear, and absolving the author of any responsibility for the framing that they use, no matter how atrocious it may be.

For example, many people don’t realize how The Castle Doctrine video game frames the legal castle doctrine in a positive light. The game was crafted to present violent, aggressive, stand-your-ground “self-defense” in a way that was intuitive and common-sense. By creating a game with an extensive home-invasion mechanic and no police, with no means to earn income except by stealing from others, and no way to defend one’s home except by personal force, the game makes the legal castle doctrine the only course of action possible for players. By providing no means for players to contact each other, form alliances, or defend each other, the game also discourages the kind of corporation and mutualism that naturally arises in a social species like ours. Beyond the legal castle doctrine itself, the game naturalizes people to the culture of fear, mistrust and paranoia that led to the passing of the broken self-defense laws that we have now, and discourages attempts to look for other solutions. The game is pushing a culture as much as it favors the castle doctrine, if not more so. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, yet questioning the game’s philosophical framing or shallow, tautological mechanics is met with dismissal from the author (i.e. “that was not my intent“) and hostility from the player base.

Now, the problem isn’t with the framing that those in the mass media use for their arguments (no matter how antifeminist those frames may be), my problem is with the unquestioned power that those frames have. Anyone who reads a book, watches a movie or TV show, or even plays a video game is a passive consumer of the author’s framing. And unless you’re an avid comment reader (good luck there! [6]), you’re also passively consuming the frames set up by bloggers and vloggers online. Think about it: when you read the Harry Potter books for the very first time, how often did you stop in the middle of your hours-long marathon read to critique a character’s actions? Did you ever stop to imagine what the story would be like if the teachers acted like responsible adults? Did you ever ask yourself why no one at Hogwarts ever thought that cell phones could be useful? Would cell phone towers harm the local Hogwarts wildlife? Or were they just too bigoted against muggles to ever think that someone could improve on the barn owl? Now imagine that you’re a little kid, or not educated/world-weary enough to think long and hard about the framing of the story. The popular authors and producers in the mass media have millions of people reading, normalizing, and internalizing their mental frameworks of how the world works, and what rational human interaction is like, with little thought, little questioning, and even less pushback (Seriously! Try writing a “Harry Potter Sucks” post and see how long it takes for you to get hate mail!). This is why mass media can be dangerous, especially when wrongheaded or downright bigoted mindsets are perpetuated without question.

Of course, there are those who would argue that cognitive biases like framing can’t override our autonomy. That, at worst, they can make us susceptible to some messages, but can’t actually influence our actions.

And I would agree that this usually the case…

Usually…

(Continue to Part 2…)

1: Or ad infinitum, if they’re a troll who believes that the last one to stop tweeting wins.

2: For example, the Not Buying It app would be useless if people were powerless to resist the messages of mass media.

3: In an interview on the Dianne Rehm Show, Mr. Devlin Barrett of the Wall Street Journal notes how the acquittal of Zimmerman creates a legal situation where the Sole survivor of an armed confrontation can claim self-defense and the law will support them: “what sticks with me is the notion that, in a physical confrontation between two people and one of them has a gun, is the law essentially saying it’s a jump ball for your life or death. And I think that’s a pretty disturbing scenario.”

4: It has been used to justify self-actualization in existentialism (i.e. “you are what you believe yourself to be”), to partake in victim-blaming through the Fundamental Attribution Error (i.e. “YOu are the master of your fate, so everything is always your fault.”), and to absolve men from social responsibility in the nature vs nurture debate (i.e. “I can’t be blamed for womanizing/pedophilia/violence, my man-genes made me do it!”).

5: And it should come as a surprise to no one that I thought a lot about the framing of this article when I wrote it.

6: Considering the anonymous, violent, responsibility-denying, misogynist culture that goes unregulated on the internet. I wish you a thick skin and hearty stomach should you decide to read the comments below most bloggers, especially those who speak against popular opinion, or worse, are into “shock” comedy.

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