Portrayal Of Women In The Media

1 Liu

Xiaotong Liu

Dr. Bobbitt

COM 215

6 December, 2016

Females in Media

According to the article, ?Are Women in the Media Only Portrayed as Sex Icons? Statistics Show a Massive Gender Imbalance Across Industries?, Sifat Azad states that: ?In the 100 top grossing films of 2007, 2008, and 2009, women represented only one-third of speaking characters for all three years. When there was at least one woman involved with directing or writing for a film, there were more female characters on screen. Female characters were more likely to be depicted wearing sexy clothing, partially nude, and referred to as attractive in comparison to male characters. Girls and women from ages

Meyers points out the root cause that: ?James Gilligan, who was the chief psychiatrist for the Massachusetts prison system, finds that men are more violent than women not because they are hormonally driven to aggression but because of the construction of patriarchal gender roles. These roles split the whole human psyche into two ?opposite? and unequal sexes. These roles then ordain women to be sex objects and men to be violence objects.? (38) According to this source, people should know one thing that males are not showing their power and violence deliberately. It becomes a traditional ideology in today?s society. Males are taught that they stand in a dominant way and they can control females? everything. What about the females? They are usually taught that they should obey the males. Even though there are more and more people advocate that females and males are the same and should gain an equal treatment, the media still do not change their portraying

Many people think pornography will absolutely not affect people?s real life. It is just an entertainment that people relax themselves. However, the truth is that a lot of people think that it is cool and exciting to insult females like the pornography does. Thus, the males also want to do the same behavior to the females in the real life. However, in the media, the behaviors are shot as pornography. In the real life, it becomes rape. Julia T. Wood and Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz show in their book, Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender, & Culture, that: ?Sexual assault is any sexual activity that occurs without the informed consent of at least one of the people involved. One type of sexual assault is rape, which is one or more acts of nonconsensual oral, anal, or vaginal penetration by a body part or object. In the United States alone, 12.3% of women over the age of 18 report having been raped.? (258) People should notice that without the informed consent of at least one of the people involved, it counted as rape. Maybe in those pornography videos, both males and females are willing to participate. After all, they need to earn money. However, nobody wants to be raped by others in the real life. It is for sure. Unfortunately, because of the media portraying, today?s society even forms a rape culture and rape myths. Wood and Fixmer-Oraiz explain that: ?Rape culture is