Page 103 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 94
It is a male commonplace that women love rotters but in fact women are
hypnotized by the successful man who appears to master his fate; they
long to give their responsibility for themselves into the keeping of one
who can administer it in their best interests. Such creatures do not exist,
but very young women in the astigmatism of sexual fantasy are apt to
recognize them where they do not exist […] Although romance is
essentially vicarious the potency of the actual fantasy distorts actual
behaviour. The strength of the belief that a man should be stronger and
older than his woman can hardly be exaggerated.
(Greer 1971:180)

In a similar but more earnest fashion, Sue Sharpe (1976) and Gaye Tuchman et al. (1978)
see the mass-media as a major cause of the general reproduction of patriarchal sexual
relationships. Sharpe posits that ‘[throughout the media, girls are presented in ways
which are consistent with aspects of their stereotyped images, and which are as equally
unrealistic and unsatisfactory’ (1974:119); while Tuchman proposes that since mass-
media images are full of traditionalist and outmoded sex-role stereotypes, they will
inevitably socialize girls into becoming mothers and housewives, because ‘girls in the
television audience “model” their behavior on that of “television women”’ (1978:6).
Sustaining such early accounts are two related, unwarranted assumptions: first, that mass-
media imagery consists of transparent, unrealistic messages about women whose
meanings are clearcut and straightforward; second, that girls and women passively and
indiscriminately absorb these messages and meanings as (wrong) lessons about ‘real life’.
These assumptions have been considerably surmounted in later work, whose
development can be characterized as gradually eroding the linear and monolithic view of
women as unconditional victims of sexist media. This happened first of all through more
theoretically sophisticated forms of textual analysis. Rather than seeing media images as
reflecting ‘unrealistic’ pictures of women, feminist scholars working within structuralist,
semiotic and psychoanalytic frameworks have begun to emphasize the ways in which
media representations and narratives construct a multiplicity of sometimes contradicting
cultural definitions of femininity and masculinity, which serve as subject positions that
spectators might take up in order to enter into a meaningful relationship with the texts
concerned (see, e.g., Mulvey 1975 and 1990; Kuhn 1982; Modleski 1982; Coward 1984;
de Lauretis 1984; Moi 1985; Baehr and Dyer 1987; Doane 1987; Gamman and
Marshment 1988; Pribram 1988; and many others). These studies are important because
they pay more detailed attention to the particular textual mechanisms that are responsible
for engendering spectator identifications. For example, in her influential analysis of
American daytime soap operas, Tania Modleski concludes that the soap opera’s narrative
characteristics construct a textual position for viewers that can be described as follows:

The subject/spectator of soap operas […] is constituted as a sort of ideal
mother, a person who possesses greater wisdom than all her children,
whose sympathy is large enough to encompass the conflicting claims of
her family (she identifies with them all), and who has no demands or
claims of her own (she identifies with no one character exclusively). […]
The spectator/mother, identifying with each character in turn, is made to