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.