Critical Mindedness and
Media Literacy

Research shows that the media are an extremely important factor in self-perception. Even so, some women and girls may not be accepting these messages at face value.
One of the conundrums for women who watch soap operas or read fashion magazines is that they find these activities pleasurable, says Amanda D. Lotz, Ph.D., department of communication studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

“In many cases, women read romance novels or magazines, or watch soap operas as a way to escape their daily lives, to create a space for themselves,” she says. “So we may be assuming that women are buying into this [gender bias] hook, line and sinker. We all come to the media we watch with varying degrees of critical mindedness.”

That critical mindedness is crucial, say media advocates, who advise women to become better informed about the media. “In every country, it’s critical for intelligent women to know how their media system operates, how public policy shapes the industry, and strategize what they can do to influence more egalitarian public policy,” says Carolyn Byerly, Ph.D., Howard University’s department of journalism in Washington, D.C.

She also believes that a “huge media literacy campaign from a gender- and race-consciousness perspective” is a positive step. “What’s important is policy change, working at the macro level, and media literacy working at the grassroots level,” says Byerly.

Media literacy is an absolute first step, agrees Jennifer Pozner, executive director of Women in Media & News (WIMN), Brooklyn, New York. “But that’s only the first step. We need to be critical thinkers and dissect the news and entertainment around us … we need to be very involved, sending letters to editors, writing station managers, telling advertisers of programs that we think their content is misogynist and we’re not going to buy their products.”—M.Z.

Demeaning women

Sexual images in the mass media are particularly harmful to the self-esteem and development of girls, according to a recent American Psychological Association taskforce study. Magazines, TV, video games and music videos, as well as advertising campaigns, were analyzed— pointing to the sexualization of girls in media as a cause for depression and eating disorders.

“There have been so many TV shows, such as ‘The Real World,’ geared to teens with lots of implied or explicit sexual activity, and studies are showing an increase in sexual materials in prime time,” says Susan J. Douglas, Ph.D., department of communications studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor <www.mich.edu> and author of Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media.

“As University of North Carolina researcher Jane Brown has noted, the media have become a ‘sexual super peer’ for young girls that approves of teens having sex while providing them little information about the consequences,” Douglas says.

However, if teen daughters watch television with their parents, she adds, it’s also an opportunity to talk about the risks and responsibilities, “a way of talking about the sex and health risks as portrayed in these shows.”

Particularly disturbing for many are music videos, especially hip-hop and “gangsta” rap that sexualize and demean women. Various filming techniques (such as camera shots that pan over women's bodies or present fragments of women's bodies as a number of disconnected body parts) can dehumanize women and create an environment where sexual assault and violence against women are not taken seriously.

Carolyn Byerly, Ph.D., of the department of journalism at Howard University in Washington, D.C., a historically African-American University, says her students are concerned about the lyrics and imagery that go with the hip-hop culture. “There’s a huge movement among young African-Americans to confront the sexism and the violence in these videos … young African-American women and men don’t like this, at least the ones I know,” she says.”—M.Z.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is a woman of many “firsts.” A Yale-educated lawyer who became the first female partner at her law firm. The first U.S. First Lady to hold a post graduate-degree and work in a professional capacity right up until the time her husband took office as president. The first female U.S. senator to serve from New York.

Yet, when Hillary Clinton took the step of becoming the first viable female candidate for president in the United States’ 232-year history, this incredibly accomplished woman was reduced to sexist stereotypes.

She was slammed for wearing a perceived low-cut blouse. Her legs were too fat. Her suits too boring. Her voice too screechy. News pundit Tucker Carlson portrayed Clinton as castrating, commenting, “Every time I hear Hillary Clinton speak, I involuntarily cross my legs.”

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews referred to Clinton as a "she-devil,” supplying an on-screen mock-up of her sprouting horns. He called her “witchy” and likened her voice to “fingernails on a blackboard.” He has referred to men who support her as “castratos in the eunuch chorus.” He also suggested Clinton is not “a convincing mom” and said “modern women” like Clinton are anathema to “Midwest guys.”

Hillary supporter or not, the massive misogyny in the coverage of her campaign was undeniable says Jennifer Pozner, executive director of Women in Media & News (WIMN) <www.wimnonline.org>, a media analysis, education and advocacy group in Brooklyn, New York.

“When she laughed it was called a cackle, and when she got emotional at a campaign stop, there were about a weeks’ worth of stories, nationally and internationally, about how Hillary cried, with headlines like, ‘Play Misty for Me,’” says Pozner, a 2007 Soroptimist International of New York City’s Soroptimist Ruby Award: For Women Helping Women winner.

Clinton is not the first female politician to be criticized for emotionalism in public. When former U.S. congresswoman Patricia Schroeder withdrew from the presidential race in 1987 at an emotional press conference, she was widely criticized and mocked. The irony, of course, is that many male politicians have cried in public—including Hillary Clinton’s husband, Bill, and the current U.S. president, George Bush.

University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson sees Hillary Clinton as symbolic of the double bind, who though able to live in a "both-and" world of career and family, nevertheless "became a surrogate on whom we projected our attitudes about attributes once thought incompatible," leading to her being placed in a variety of no-win situations. University of Indianapolis English professor Charlotte Templin points to cartoonists who used a variety of stereotypes—such as gender reversal, radical feminist as emasculator,
and the wife the husband wants to get rid of—to portray Hillary Clinton as violating gender norms.

Many other examples exist of powerful women leaders being defined by sexist sterotypes. Condoleeza Rice, when chosen by U.S. President Bush as national security advisor, was featured in a front page New York Times story about her clothing selection—that she preferred comfortable pumps and conservative jewelry and even had two mirrors on her desk to check the front and back of her hair. Likewise, during coverage of a presidentail debate last spring, NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell felt compelled to remind Chris Matthews that presidential candidate Barack Obama's wife, Michelle, is a Harvard-educated lawyer after Matthews continued to focus on her physical appearance.

“The problem is that the media covers female politicians as if they’re ladies first and leaders a distant second,” Pozner says. “What that does in terms of shaping public opinion is very damaging to the notion that women are competent, effective leaders.”

Katie Couric, who has herself faced harsh and sexist criticism as the first woman solo anchor of a U.S. evening news broadcast, stated, “Like her [Clinton] or not, one of the great lessons of that campaign is the continued—and accepted—role of sexism in American life, particularly in the media.” *

Media not a girl’s best friend
The treatment by the media of women in politics is representative of a greater problem: the rampant sexist portrayal of women and girls in general. Whether it’s the “b------ and ho’s” portrayed in rap and hip hop music and videos, or barely dressed women adorning the stages of game shows—sexist ideas and imagery abound in the mass media.

In a Dolce & Gabbana magazine ad, for example, a scantily clad woman with spike heels is pinned on the ground by her wrists by a bare-chested man while four other men look on. Public outcry eventually forced Dolce & Gabbana to pull its “fantasy gang rape” ad. But it served its purpose—publicity and sales—which is key to advertisers who want to grab the public’s attention and pocketbooks. The connection between the economics and the messages women and girls and men receive can’t be separated, says Carolyn M. Byerly, Ph.D., department of journalism, Howard University in Washington, DC <www.howard.edu>.

“The pattern we see, then, is that women are told they need to be thinner, wear certain kinds of clothing, which in Western countries helps sexualize women,” Byerly says. “It tells them there’s something wrong with them, with the person they are and the body they were born into. If you have a strong, intelligent woman who wants to make her own way through life, who wants to be head of her class or government, who wants to exert her intelligence in some way—these things are downplayed when women are emphasized for their sexuality and allure.”

One mother expressed this sentiment in the Ask Amy blog on <www.feminist.com>, an online community dedicated to women’s equality, justice, wellness and safety. She shared, “Like so many women out there I have an issue with the way women are portrayed in the media because I have a daughter and I’m so scared for her. This problem has made the world a terrible place for women to live in.”

Where the girls aren’t
The flip side of the media’s sexist treatment of women and girls is their lack of representation. In early 2008, researchers from all over the U.S. and the world gathered in California for a conference presenting research about the representation of females in films and television. The event was sponsored by the Los Angeles-based Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media (GDIGM) <www.thegeenadavisinstitute.org>, a nonprofit working to increase awareness of gender imbalance in the media and develop strategies to change media portrayals of women and girls.

Academy Award winner Geena Davis (who played the first female U.S. president in the now-defunct TV series “Commander in Chief”) founded the Institute after watching children’s television and videos with her then 2-year-old daughter and noticing a remarkable imbalance in the ratio of male to female characters.

At that conference, Davis said: “Whatever environment we’re in on TV, it’s nothing near the 50 percent we are in the world. Girls see this imbalance and realize ‘I’m not important.’ Women have presence and space in this world.”

A conference overview of female portrayals on U.S. television pointed to programs today with stronger female characters, such as “Cold Case,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” and “Law and Order.” Even with progress, however, research studies from the GDIGM show that both TV and film suffer from an under-representation of females. Today, the on-screen ratio of females to males is still only one in three, up from one in five two decades ago.

“When girls are represented, they are valued first for appearance, and second for inner character, if at all,” says Crystal Cook, the GDIGM’s former director. These were the findings in a GDIGM study of 13 top-grossing children’s films with female leads produced between the mid-1930s through 2005, many of them from Disney. Plots of the extreme makeover and romance were strong in movies such as “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Anastasia” and “The Little Mermaid.” Only one character wasn’t looking for “happily ever after” with a prince charming—and that was Dorothy Gale from “The Wizard of Oz.”

The GDIGM’s studies also found that females are more than five times as likely as males to be shown in alluring apparel. The institute is not only concerned about how these messages affect women and young girls, but young males as well. It’s just as important for males to see females as capable, valued for their character, and their stories as being worthwhile, Cook says.

“Males grow up to be the companions, employers and employees of women,” she adds. “As young children, they are the playmates and schoolmates of girls. Patterns for lifelong behaviors begin when we are very young children and it’s important for both girls and boys to see girls taking up space and being important from the youngest ages forward.”

Multiplicity of images missing
Complex portrayals of both genders in film and TV is also important, Cook adds, because males can also be “stereotyped into being bumbling, ineffective, as distant dads or as overly aggressive.”

However, television has always portrayed a multiplicity of men in various characters, such as fathers and workers of all kinds, says Amanda D. Lotz, Ph.D., of the department of communication studies at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, <www.umich.edu> and author of Redesigning Women: Television After the Network Era. What’s still missing on television is a multiplicity of images that show the diversity of women, such as characters that are lesbian, not white, in stable relationships or lacking rewarding careers, she says.

“In some ways we’ve come 180 degrees with women portrayed overwhelmingly in career roles, but we don’t see working class women on TV very often,” she says.

The lack of substantial roles for women of a certain age in Hollywood also concerns women’s rights advocates. A documentary, “Invisible Women” <www.invisible women.com> sponsored by a grant from the Screen Actors Guild Foundation, spotlights the diminished careers of female actors who find themselves “pink-slipped” at 40, and includes interviews with, among others, Susan Sarandon and Christine Lahti.

“If characters in pop culture are not reflecting women over 40, it makes it even easier for employers to express biases—to put you into a little box based on gender stereotypes,” Janice Grackin, a social psychology professor at Stony Brook University, New York, stated in a Newsday article.

In addition, women of color are scarce in female leads, especially in film, says Cook. Women of color also are “virtually invisible as experts and news sources,” Pozner adds, and whether in news or entertainment, they are “deprived of any kinds of roles that speak to positions of power.”

Gender/media picture worldwide
The situation isn’t much better globally. At the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, the Platform for Action declared that “the print and electronic media in most countries do not provide a balanced picture of women’s diverse lives and contributions to society in a changing world.” In addition, it stated that “violent and degrading or pornographic media products are also negatively affecting women and their participation in society.”

The media in Asia, for instance, continue to focus on an idealized version of beauty. When Fabienne Darling-Wolf, Ph.D, lived and taught in Japan in 1995, more than 50 percent of models in Japanese magazines were Caucasian, she says. A professor in the department of journalism at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania <www.temple.edu>, Darling-Wolf focused her dissertation on Japanese women and their representation of attractiveness in the media. Her research found that in Japan’s media-saturated society, magazines and “trendy dramas” (the equivalent of Latin America’s telenovelas) all portrayed Caucasian and Westernized versions of beauty and appearance.

“When I conducted interviews about this for my research, all the women were quite assertive about not liking the fact that there were Caucasian models in their magazines. They said, ‘This does not fit us.’ They were very adamant it was a bad thing,” she says. “Since 1995, you look at Japanese magazines and you have fewer Western models but you have Japanese models who look Western.”

The Japanese media also are notorious for pushing the starving beauty trend, where ideals of thinness and weight have become an obsession. Research points to the media-weight connection in the U.S. as well. One study found the amount of time adolescent girls watch soap operas, movies and music videos is associated with their degree of body dissatisfaction and desire to be thin. In another study, 10-year-old girls told researchers they were unhappy with their bodies after watching a music video by Britney Spears.
“Many women feel they have these unrealistic standards the media has set to live up to in order to be wanted by a man,” wrote another blogger on Ask Amy. “It’s no wonder anorexia and depression affects so many young girls these days!”

One Canadian report, however, found that not all young women and teens were so easily influenced. They voiced everything from disappointment to annoyance and disgust at the media’s portrayal of their gender. “As I get older, I’m trying to be a lot more comfortable with myself rather than trying to look at the images and say, ‘I wish I was like that,’” a 21-year-old Ottawa student told CanWest News Service. “You’re trying to figure out who you are, but there are some girls still trapped in that mindset—they’re trying to be what the image on TV is telling them.”

Behind the scenes, on the screen
One reason women and girls suffer from negative portrayals in the media—if they’re portrayed at all—has to do with whether women have access to authority and ownership levels in media.

“We have to really understand how news is made, how TV programs are made, how films are made, and we have to look at the politics and economics of these,” says Howard University’s Byerly. “We have to understand that public policy has an awful lot to do with that.”

More media mergers means fewer people are setting policies and their values trickle down through their main industries. In December 2007, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the U.S. voted to allow greater consolidation in media ownership, despite vocal opposition from consumer groups and women’s rights organizations. Whenever the FCC allows big media conglomerates to gobble up more stations, it leaves fewer outlets for women to purchase, and the voices and viewpoints of women and people of color are even further marginalized. Today, women own only 5 percent of commercial broadcast television stations and 6 percent of all full-power radio stations.

There is also a dearth of female ownership in the entertainment industry, adds Cook, formerly of the GDIGM. “Although there are many more women in executive positions than before, women still lag greatly behind men in creative positions that hold power, such as writer, director and producer.” Of the 150 films nominated for best picture from 1977-2006, only a handful were directed by women, including “Awakenings” by Penny Marshall, “The Piano” by Jane Campion and “Little Miss Sunshine” by Valerie Faris.

If anything, Byerly would like to see concerned women of all perspectives refocus or shift their attention to those who produce content in media. “It’s important to keep writing and documenting and complaining about what we don’t like,” she says. “But I can tell you these things aren’t going to change until we restructure industries and until women move into more decision-making positions in media.”

And it will be up to women to make that happen. Dismayed at the way Hillary Clinton had been portrayed, supporters drafted language into the Democratic platform standing up against sexism and all intolerance. It reads, “Demeaning portrayals of women cheapen our debates, dampen the dreams of our daughters and deny us the contributions of too many.”

*Editor’s Note: Since this article was written, U.S. Senator John McCain chose Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, as his vice presidential running mate in the U.S. presidential election. This historic choice immediately resurrected the issue of how women are perceived by society and portrayed in the media. While the U.S. election will be decided by the time this issue is printed, discussions about the status of women will be an important part of public discourse as people rethink women's roles.