“As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.”
~Bell Hooks
This is part three of a multi-part series on the dangers of sexism in the mass media. If you haven’t already, you should read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 first.
The Normalization of Sexism and Misogyny
Last time, we looked at how the mass media created a spike in youth cigarette smoking. But cigarettes were a success story. There was at an effective pushback to the media’s glamorization of cigarettes, and the levels of youth smoking were greatly diminished [1]. Unfortunately, unlike cigarettes, the heyday of mass media misogyny is far from over.
Many people, including some feminists, believe that the mass media’s depiction of women has improved since the 1950s. For example, men are depicted as owning the world (and by extension, women) in this 1950s ad for nightmarish ties and douchey man-smirks:
But these days…oh, wait:
Perhaps you could argue that at least women aren’t being shoved into the kitchen by the media anymore. And that might be true for (non-cooking) print magazines and most TV ads (outside of retro-sexism ads) [2]. But online, there’s that friggin SNL-inspired “make me a sandwich” internet meme that gets spammed to every female blogger on a daily basis.
But least games aren’t pushing the men-play-while-women-work shit anymore. Not like Milton Bradley did in the 1950s:
And you would be right, as that honor has now been moved to video games:
But at least feminism is more accepted than it was in the bad-old days:
Yes, feminists may now exist in the media, but they’re straw-feminists:
What about violence against women? Could it possibly be as overt as it was in the 1950s?
Nope, its far worse [TRIGGER WARNING].
The fonts may have improved, but the rampant sexism and misogyny hasn’t changed much over the last century. And when it comes to sexual objectification, the media has gotten much worse:
And that’s just the overt sexism that the mass media dishes out every day. There’s a ton of covert sexism that few people barely even notice that’s just as damaging.
The Normalization of Counterfeit Women’s Bodies
For example, if you’re a woman, and your ego, self-worth, self-respect, and standing with your male (and female) peers has survived all the overt sexism above, you still have to deal with another subtle framing that the mass media perpetuates: the unnatural image of women’s bodies. What do I mean by unnatural? Let me put it this way: you have probably never seen a normal, healthy woman anywhere in the mass media.
Never. Not ever.
Really! You never have.
Well, maybe once or twice in your lifetime of media watching, but not more than that. Throughout the mass media, tons of “invisible” makeup, corsets under clothing, routine starvation diets, and plastic surgery has made it so that normal healthy female bodies have been replaced with hyper-feminine caricatures of women.
But for most of history, femininity was checked by the limits of the human body. A human being needed to survive within the unnatural shapes demanded by femininity. Women weren’t required to have a full, happy, or healthy life conforming to the rigors of femininity, but they did have to survive the corsets, crash diets, and surgeries. Beneath any image of femininity was ultimately a person.
That is, until the invention of Photoshop:
With the advent of Photoshop, femininity was no longer limited by human bodies. (Although women were still expected to distort their human bodies into the new inhuman shapes set by these artificial depictions of women!) And over the past few years, all (yes, all) images of women in the mass media have been replaced by Photoshop caricatures.
For example:
The ad above does not show a human being. The arms and legs are not at human proportions, and they are not bending like human limbs. The foot is the same size as the head, the hair is defying gravity, and the right arm is missing!
But that was a Gucci ad. Many people realize that they’re full of shit. But how about something more genuine? Like a movie poster:
Nope. More forgeries. They pushed her chest out, thinned out her belly, shortened her face, and even eliminated those pesky arm muscles. Keira Knightley even says that they alter her image all the time.
And don’t think for a second that movies, TV, or video contain any more truth about women’s bodies than print media. For one thing, corsets and makeup are just as common on Hollywood sets as they are in photo shoots. And special effects aren’t just for explosions. Angelina Jolie, for example, sports over a dozen tattoos. but you won’t see any of them in her latest movies.
I could go on all day with examples, but it’s better if you just check out this extensive board on Pinterest if you still need convincing.
Instead, I tried to find a mass media image that wasn’t photoshopped, and lo and behold, I found one! Here’s the cover from Intelligent Life, March 2012:
This is arguably the first time that Cate Blanchett went without makeup or digital retouching for any public photo. That’s how ubiquitous the forging of women’s bodies has become. In advertising, cosmetics, movies, and TV, it’s now much harder to find real images of stars than it is to find fake ones [3]. These days, actresses are scolded for not using Photoshop, and kids are getting their kindergarten photos airbrushed!
This subtle manipulation of women’s body image is quite dangerous. Over 20 million women in the US suffer from eating disorders, and the number is rising fast. But the media has a solution for that too, more Photoshop! They regularly brush away the signs of anorexia from the bodies of their models, and then take a few more pounds off to keep the beauty standard unattainable for all women while hiding all the damage that it has done to women’s bodies:
Or better yet, they simply get rid of women’s bodies entirely! The latest trend in mass media manipulation is to eliminate that pesky female body that always gets in the way of perfect femininity. So instead of a normal fashion model:
You have a perfectly disproportioned digital body with a human head photoshopped on afterwards!
Mark my words: in the near future, they will expunge the last vestiges of actual women from their image of feminine beauty…oh wait, too late.
Now, the logical step forward would be to ban the visual mutilation of women, or at least require a disclaimer stating that the image has been doctored, so the consumer knows that shit that’s going down. And while we’re at it, let’s eliminate the industry-wide practice of forcing models to starve themselves to death. It would be easily enough to carry out. Hell, Israel has already taken some steps to do so. But you won’t see the widespread regulation of digitally emaciated women anytime soon.
Why?
Well, it’s not because this shit is harmless: Nearly half of 9-11 year-old girls are “sometimes” or “very often” on diets, between 35-57% of teenage girls engage in crash dieting (fasting, self-induced vomiting, diet pills, or laxatives), and the average women has been on 61 diets before the age of 45. And a nation of women on constant diets is a is a nation of women that can’t be on equal footing with men. When Anne Hathaway crash dieted for Les Miserables, she couldn’t function afterwards:
“I was in such a state of deprivation—physical and emotional. When I got home, I couldn’t react to the chaos of the world without being overwhelmed […] It took me weeks till I felt like myself again.”
Diets deny the human body the energy it needs to function. Dieters often experience physical problems such as loss of muscle mass, thinning hair, loss of coordination, dehydration, fainting, weakness, and slowed heart rates. Medical studies show that dieters have poorer concentration and slower reaction times than non-dieters [4]. These studies also link chronic dieting with feelings of depression, low-self-esteem and increased stress. And that’s just the physical effects from dieting! We’re not even including the psychological damage done by the de constant bombardment of digitally emaciated women and the gross sexual objectification that surrounds them.
Unfortunately, the torrent of digitally emaciated women will continue because they have proven to be so useful. The state of perpetual-self-deprivation placed on women by the mass media helps to perpetuate gender inequality. And as we’ve seen, the owners of mass media are fine with gender inequality.
When the messages you hear are the same everywhere (as is common with the mass media), those messages become our norm. And when it comes to normalization, everybody is affected to one degree or another. At one time, cigarette smoking was the norm. Today, rampant sexism and the gross distortion of women’s bodies is the norm.
But it is not just the sexist messages of the mass media that hurt women. What the mass media doesn’t say can be just as damaging.