Page 483 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Representat ons of Women

and critique, which Mulvey answered in a follow-up article entitled “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’”

sTErEoTyPiCaL imagEs oF womEn
In the twentieth century, images of women in the media have largely been
linked with a consumerist lifestyle and a rather domesticated version of femi-
ninity, and these stereotypical ways of representing women are consistent and
enduring over time and across media forms. A large body of research has shown
that sex stereotypes such as women’s “compassion” and men’s “aggressiveness,”
for example, lead people to expect men and women to have different personal
characteristics that relate in turn to their integrity and their different areas of
competence.
In addition, feminist researchers have for decades pointed out the artificial
yet stereotypical divide between the public sphere, largely assumed to be the do-
main of men, and the private sphere of the home, stereotypically the domain of
women. This public/private divide has reinforced notions of women as incom-
petent in the public sphere, and even when successful professional women are
the focus of media attention, they are often represented in ways that emphasize
their competence in the private sphere, rather than their professional abilities.
Early studies of media images, for example, demonstrate that in the Victorian
era, lifestyle magazines modeled, through their editorial and content, a specific
class-based, “proper” lifestyle that placed women firmly in the private sphere
of the home. Women’s first inroads as media makers, such as in children’s pro-
gramming, the writing of women’s magazines, or by focusing on issues such as
health, education, and welfare, functioned to reinforce rather than challenge the
public/private divide. Also, women’s comparatively late start as media producers
meant that once they did enter the media field, they had to enter on male terms
and emulate the actions and voices of men. While women have made increasing
inroads both as media makers and in media images, the public/private dichot-
omy remains persistent in the popular media.
The most common representation of women in the media is as victims, most
commonly of sexual violence. Other consistent media images include women as
hypersexualized or as whores; women as nurturing and caring, based on their
role as mothers; and women as inscrutable and dangerous. Women are often
represented as monstrous creatures, including as vampires, witches, and beings
possessed by otherworldly life forms. While men appear in some of these roles as
well, what differs in these representations is that women appear monstrous and
dangerous specifically because of their sexuality, or their identity as female. This
is mirrored in the common practice of representing women as body parts to
be fetishized, rather than complete human beings. Another growing concern is
the increasing eroticization of very young girls, and the linking of childlike in-
nocence and vulnerability with the potential for becoming a victim of violence.
This is especially alarming when combined with representations that suggest