Page 484 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Representat ons of Women |

that women are only teasing when they reject men’s advances, and that when
they say “no,” they really mean “yes.”
An issue of special concern in relation to representations of women involves
the media’s narrowly conceived image of female beauty, in particular the over-
whelming emphasis on thinness. The standard of female beauty stereotypically
portrayed in the media is unrealistic for the vast majority of women, yet all
women must deal with the personal and social consequences of such a nar-
rowly defined sense of what makes a woman beautiful. As a result, most girls
and women report feeling alienated from and dissatisfied with their bodies, and
many develop problematic relationships with food and dieting. (For more infor-
mation, see “Body Image.”)
Many of the commonplace media representations of women (and the expecta-
tions they engender) involve contradictory messages about how women should
behave. On the one hand, women are expected to be chaste and pure, but on the
other, they are also encouraged to be sexually adventurous. Women are told to
be tolerant of those who are different, while at the same time they are fed image
after unending image representing an especially narrow version of feminine
beauty. Women are told they should be independent and free-thinking, while at
the same time they are consistently coached to please the men in their lives. As
Susan Douglas points out in Where the Girls Are, these contradictory messages
“make us the schizophrenics we are today, women who rebel against yet submit
to prevailing images about what a desirable, worthwhile woman should be.” This
causes women to develop a conflicted relationship with mass media, and makes
the transition to adulthood especially difficult for girls.
In addition to the often contradictory messages and stereotypical representa-
tions that do exist, it is important to recognize the significant absences in media
representations of women: women of color, lesbians, disabled women, and older
women make few appearances in the media. When representations of lesbians
do appear, for example, they paint these women as unusual by focusing on their
“deviant” sexuality, rather than representing them as leading normal lives. In
addition, the vast majority of studies in English on women in the media focus
on Western cultures and almost always on white women, although this has been
changing in recent years.
Yet it is not images alone that define representations of women in media; this
also occurs through mediated voices. Whereas men are often presented in media

susan Faludi and bacKlash

Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author whose book Backlash: The Un-
declared War against American Women (1992) argues that the 1980s ushered in a backlash
against feminism characterized by a slew of negative stereotypes against working women.
These included the claims that large numbers of working women were suffering burnout and
other consequences of stress, childless women were depressed and confused and found
themselves facing a crisis of infertility, and single women were facing a shortage of eligible
men. News reports also maintained that single working women were more depressed than