How Media Is Changing Feminism Today

Feminism has become a normal world in our society today. Before, the word was linked to women that were radical, but still searching for equal rights between men and women. Today, the “F” word is more normalized. While being a feminist today still means working to get women on the same level as men in all aspects of life, it is becoming “trendy” according to the article Popular Misogyny, written by Sarah Banet-Weiser. By this, Banet means that with the increase of celebrities promoting feminism, it is becoming more normalized in the media today.

With the normalization of feminism and fighting for women’s rights, Banet makes the statement that it seems like everyone is becoming a feminist and asks the questions from other writers, “What if it becomes trendy?” and “If everyone is a feminist, is anyone?” This raises questions because with everyone being a feminist, feminism is becoming more of a product with so much celebrity endorsement. Banet writes in her article about Glamour Magazine and that they claimed “feminism is the new do,” signifying that feminism is considered a fashion choice and a product to just be told on tshirts, buttons and signs.

According to Banet, one of the problems that occurs with popular feminists is that they rarely get to discussing the complexities and contradictions with global feminist thought and practices. With the media interviews today and on social media with celebrities, it is hard to get in depth with how they really feel about feminism and the complications with patriarchy. That being said, it seems as if the point she is trying to make is that popular feminism today, as we see in the media, is more about saying you are a feminist in order to sway the minds of others, but maybe not necessarily always doing something to combat the core issues of inequality.

With the pushing forward of popular feminism, Banet discuss that there is a reaction that occurs as well. The backlash against feminism isn’t something that is new to the idea, but the more it is accepted, the more push back there is from those who strongly oppose the idea of equality between men and women. 

For example, after the campaign by Feminists, stating why they needed feminism in their lives, surfaced there was a backlash from those against feminism, stating why they didn’t need it and how the ideals of feminism were wrong. So even if feminism is becoming a “trendy” or normalized thing in society, there is always going to be backlash from others in society. This could also be a good thing, because then complexities of feminism that are being overlooked can continue to be discussed, educating others on the what feminism is.

However, some of the backlash towards feminists can be very brutal and undeserving. With rape threats against women gamers and overall violence towards feminists, especially over social media, it is becoming more common for several people to see the backlash from those who are truly against feminism.

It is not uncommon today to see women who are feminists on the cover of magazines. Some are probably really great examples, like Emma Watson on the cover of Elle Magazine. With female celebrities, and even male celebrities advocating for feminism, there’s the possibility to plant a small seed in their fans and watch it develop into something bigger. By using someone who is well known in societies, such as a celebrity, to advocate for feminist ideals can have a huge impact on the media and can reach a broad band of people. It can also be inspiring for young women and men to look at a magazine cover, advertisement or tv show and see women being supported in every way. 

However, it can be argued that seeing a celebrity on a magazine cover or on television supporting feminism can also be seen in a negative light. For example, if a celebrity was represented negatively in the media or did something wrong in the past to taint their name, it can give people a bad view of them and could ultimately lead them to the conclusion that what they are supporting is bad, even if it does mean equal rights for both men and women. 

There is also the fact that with popular feminism, there’s the possibility that the ideals are being looked at as more of a product and commodity than as a protest, therefore invalidating what feminists truly stand for. For example, on the cover of magazines that feature women that are feminists, it truly does make it look like the “new thing to do.” Like it is what the style is right now, but could change in another year or so. While popular feminism can be very beneficial to society, it also overlooks a few things that would benefit feminism if they were addressed properly.

Popular feminism can be something that truly changes how people look at feminism. With the support of people who are looked at on a daily basis and are always in the media, they can use their platform to truly make a difference in the world. Popular feminism will always be something that will be debated on for being either helpful or harmful to society, just like other forms of feminism. However, with addressing popular feminism the right way, it can really change the world. Instead of shrugging off the problems and having the 'boys will be boys' attitude, feminists have the ability to stand up, use their voice and defend other women, working to create an equal society.

Stupid Girls? More Like Glass Ceiling Smashers: A Music Video and Society Commentary

I remember being in middle school when I first received boy advice from my friend. I liked this boy, but he didn’t act like I existed. She suggested that I stop answering questions in class, wear a low-cut top, and giggle when he talked. She said that guys hated when girls were smarter than them. I was very confused and incredibly conflicted. Why should I act dumb and dress differently to make someone like me? But I decided to give it a try. The next day at school, I arrived and acted exactly as my friend (I use that term loosely) said I should. Sure enough, the boy noticed me. He even seemed interested in me. However, I still felt conflicted. I mean, sure, he paid attention to me. But was it really me? I got home from school and turned on the radio. It was almost like divine intervention when I heard the first lines of the song that played. “Maybe if I act like that/that guy will call me back/Porno paparazzi girls/I don’t wanna be a stupid girl.” Yes. That Pink song from seven years ago, Stupid Girls, hit me like a bus. It was then I realized I was becoming yet another victim in a phenomenon Susan Douglas calls enlightened sexism.

According to Susan Douglas, enlightened sexism is

A response, deliberate or not, to the perceived threat of a new gender regime. It insists that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism, indeed, full equality, has allegedly been achieved. So now it’s okay, even amusing, to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women (Douglas, 2010).

Long gone are the days of fighting for equal pay and reproductive care rights. Now, we’re fighting over the best labels on our clothing and the hot guy in our math class. Much like Douglas, Pink decided she had enough of the enlightened sexism surrounding her when she wrote the song “Stupid Girls.” Picking celebrities such as Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and Lindsay Lohan as her inspiration, Pink took a look at today’s modern woman and challenged the ideals of sexiness and designer clothing being more important than intelligence and independence.

The video shows Pink struggling for male approval by acting like the other females around her. By pretending to be obsessed with her looks, she’s providing a social commentary and discussion point of the exact thing Douglas wants to end. In one scene of the video, Pink’s date starts to pay excessive amounts of attention to another female wearing a low-cut top and a mini skirt bouncing up and down. To make her date pay attention to her again, Pink pulls her “In Case of Emergency” cord to inflate her breasts excessively. The trick works and the date continues.

Later, Pink asks “What happened to the dream of the next girl president?” She answered her own question with “She’s dancing in the video next to 50 Cent.”  Here, she is giving examples of how girl power has changed with the times. Where we once burned out bras to fight the societal oppression, women have now turned on each other and are more concerned with male affection and how attractive you are. Douglas also gave sources of this problem in her book, including the Pussycat Dolls, The Bachelor, and the television show Are You Hot?

Pink and Douglas alike urge girls to ignore the media influence and to have ambitions and goals. They are trying to convince women that there is so much more to them than just how a man feels about them. After reading excerpts from Douglas’s book and listening to Pink’s song, I agree.

I’m not sure where we went wrong, but we as females must have goals and ambitions to excel in the patriarchal society we live in. We have to band together to change the way we are treated today. Women comprise 46% of the American work force, yet they make only 77.5 cents for every dollar a man of equal occupation makes. The statistics are even worse for women of color. Worldwide, four out of every ten businesses have no women in senior management. 4 out of 5 victims of human trafficking are female (MAKERS Team, 2015).

So what’s a girl to do? Women must fight societal pressure to focus on our looks and the male gaze and use our minds to continue the fight for equal rights. Instead of designer labels, let us adorn ourselves with knowledge and courage to crush the glass ceiling. We must band together and smash the patriarchy because the approval of a man means nothing if you aren’t in the same playing field. We cannot forget our foremothers before us and what they were fighting for. If we do, all of their hard work was for naught. We as females can’t let that happen.

Oh, and if you’re curious, I left that boy alone the next day. If he couldn’t appreciate me for all I had to offer, he didn’t deserve my good looks.

Works Cited

Douglas, S. (2010). The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us From Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press.

MAKERS Team. (2015, March 07). http://www.makers.com/blog/21-facts-you-never-knew-about-international-gender-inequality. Retrieved from URL.

Pink. [PinkVEVO]. (2009, October 24). Stupid Girls. [https://youtu.be/BR4yQFZK9YM]. Retrieved from URL.

The perfect woman- A housewife?

Nowadays, the work place is a very common spot for women. Many women strive to be more than just a housewife, and take advantage of their ability to receive an education and work, whether or not they decide to have children. Stay at home moms are harder to come by these days, since many women prefer to work. Working gives many people a sense of fulfillment- knowing that you accomplished something. Without any sense of accomplishment, life can become very dull and boring. Achieving an education and getting a job may seem like a great way to live, but according to Betty Freidan, this was not always the case.

In “The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Freidan, she analyzes the reasons why women were feeling a lack importance when they were just housewives, which she refers to as “the problem that has no name”. Women thought that by embracing their femininity, they would become the perfect woman and be happy. Unfortunately, the lack of achievement dawned on them, so they ended up very unhappy, without an understanding of why. As Freidan explains, “It is easy to see the concrete details that trap the suburban housewife, the continual demands on her time. But the chains that hind her in her trap are chains in her own mind and spirit. They are chains made up of mistaken ideas and misinterpreted facts, of incomplete truths and unreal choices” (31). So why didn’t women understand what these “incomplete truths and unreal choices” were? It all has to do with the things they were exposed to.

Advertisements shaped the ideology of many women in this era. They were supposed to conform to their husbands wishes, and essentially do everything with him in mind. The main ways they accomplished this was by cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the children for him. They were under this notion that they would be better wives if they did all of these things for him, as this advertisement shows. “For over fifteen years, the words written for women, and the words women used when they talked to each other. . . were about problems with their children, or how to keep their husbands happy, or improve their children’s school, or cook chicken or make slipcovers” (18-19). Women were only expected to do these tasks at home, so it is now surprise that they felt “nothing” at the end of the day.

These advertisements showed how women were supposed to dress, act, and feel. In the advertisement shown, this woman is standing next to an oven, wearing an apron, with food. The advertisement describes her as “a woman of high degree” because she makes her family feel special by waterless cooking. This ideology enforces the idea that women are supposed to serve their families, and make them “feel special”, so it is no wonder that women were not feeling special themselves.

Advertisements like these gave growing girls the idea that their only goal in life should be to become a housewife. Even though they had access to an education, many women stopped attending school, and if they went, it was to find a husband. “The proportion of women attending college in comparison with men dropped from 47 per cent in 1920 to 35 per cent in 1958. . . By the mid-fifties, 60 per cent dropped out of college to marry, or because they were afraid too much education would be a marriage bar” (16). Women would sacrifice their education since it they thought it would make them less tempting to marry. There was no point in getting an education, since it would not be necessary once they were married and living at home. Doing anything but becoming a housewife was truly frowned upon. “They were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets of physicists or presidents. They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights…” (15-16). Women who did obtain an education were frowned upon, since they were not embracing their femininity by living for their husband.

If a women did decide to work, it was to put their husband through school. The women that went to school “…were married women who held part-time jobs, selling or secretarial, to put their husbands through school, their sons through college, or to help pay the mortgage. Or they were widows supporting families. Fewer and fewer women were entering the professional world” (17). Women were expected to put everyone before them, since being a housewife was supposed to be rewarding in itself.

It is important to keep in mind the reasons why women thought this was a good way to live. Growing up under these stereotypes through the media, women thought they would feel satisfied with their lives once they were stay at home wives. Personally, I found if very hard to believe that this was the only thing women looked forward to, but it all has to do with the environment they were raised in.

Work Cited

Friedan, B. (1963). The Feminine Mystique. American Sociological Review, 28(6), 1053

the contradiction of post feminism

            After reading all of the articles on feminism/post feminism, there was one article that exclusively caught my eye, and that was Rosalind Gill’s “Postfeminist Media Culture”. Growing up in the first decade of the twenty first century, my childhood was filled with spending hours watching Toddlers and Tiaras, playing with “Bratz” dolls, and reading teen magazines. Not knowing what post feminism was, I grew up around all of these idea that shape or social media content and even our culture. Keeping this in mind, why do we find it entertaining to watch six-year-old girls scream and cry while they get spray tanned? Who named a line of toy dolls “Bratz”? Lastly, why do we read magazines that are out of touch with reality? In this blog post I will discuss 2 of the most important “sensibilities” in my eyes and my reaction to the matters that she discusses.

             Millions of people tune in to watch the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, which typically airs around Christmas time, but why do all of these people decide to spend an hour of their time watching pretty, skinny girls walk down a runway? It’s the post feminist era, in my opinion. Many of the viewers of this show are young adults,both males, and females. The first show ever aired in 1999, so that itself is an example of the post feminist era starting to take full flight. Gill included a sensibility by the name of femininity as a bodily property. 

I think this is totally true, and that our society puts so much pressure on girls (especially younger ones) to look absolutely perfect. Society has come up with this idea through social media, which has a huge if not the biggest impact on the way women desire to look. In the reading, Gill states, “Women’s bodies are evaluated, scrutinized, and dissected by women as well as men, and are always at risk of failing.” which takes me into my cultural artifact.

            The cultural artifact I picked actually came from around the world in Great Britain, where they released an ad for the company “Protein World” trying to promote their product.

  After seeing this ad, I immediately thought of Gill’s sensibility femininity as a bodily property. In today’s society, women are expected to either be skinny, but not too skinny. Being curvy is considered sexy, but not too curvy or else you’ll fall out of the beautiful category. Society encourages girls to feel confident in their own skin, yet we have ads out like this, which shows an extremely skinny model next to words saying “Are you beach body ready?” Is this ad saying that if you don’t have the body type shown on the ad that you aren’t beach body ready? After seeing this ad, I question how society ended up making this the beauty standard, an unrealistic figure that not many real women possess. Sure, there are beauty campaigns like the dove real beauty campaign, and the aerie real campaign, but why were these campaigns so groundbreaking? And why was including the word “real” with average women so abnormal to society? These are the questions I ask myself and quite frankly, don’t know the answer to. Society expects us to love and be confident with our bodies, yet we plaster unrealistic women all over social media, which takes me into my next topic.

            Back in the 70’s and 80’s all feminists had to worry about was television and shows/movies that portrayed women as girly or had women that always played the mom role. We have transitioned from that to shows where women are independent and fierce, which by all means isn’t a bad thing, but along with that comes the beauty, sexiness and standards. We have transitioned from not wanting to be sexualized, to wearing what we want and still not wanting to be sexualized. Gill also labels one of the sensibilities as the sexualisation of culture. Women have always been identified as sexual objects to men, and that’s another reason why feminists continue to battle, but does this post feminism culture really help this cause? Between porn, half naked models and the Kardashians, this aspect of post feminism is very contradictory. Gill states, “Nowhere is this clearer than in advertising which has responded to feminist critiques by constructing a new figure to sell to young women: the sexually autonomous heterosexual young woman who plays with her sexual power and is forever 'up for it'.” Even though girls now think post feminism is helping them give themselves sexual power, how does that change how men view women? It is almost as if everything that first and second wave feminists believed kind of went down the drain.

            Along with the development of social media and the internet came porn, another huge issue that Gill talks about. “Once porn and real human sexuality were distinguishable. Not even porn's biggest advocates would suggest a porn flick depicted reality, that women were gagging for sex 24/7 and would drop their clothes and submit to rough, anonymous sex at the slightest invitation.” Gill uses this suggestion to describe how not even back then the porn industry would think about using real life situations, especially rough/semi violent ones. I think overall porn is very degrading to women in general, let alone porn where a woman is being choked and seems to be in pain. I truly believe this is a huge negative aspect that comes along with social media and post feminism.

            After reading Gill’s article I immediately knew I wanted to do a blog on this article. Being very curious on post feminism and all of the contradictory aspects it holds, this article had many of the answers to my questions. All eight of Gill’s sensibilities are very accurate, and I think everything in this reading gives a really important view on this feminist era we live in. The article leaves you with one question: Is this post feminist era a positive or a negative thing? 

Sweney, Mark. "Protein World's 'beach Body Ready' Ads Do Not Objectify Women, Says Watchdog." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 30 June 2015. Web. 26 Sept. 2016.