How the Media Affects Your Daughter and What You Can Do to Help. 3) How is Gender Constructed Within Mass Media? | Gender in Mass Media. The media has a very powerful effect on culture, shaping societal structures and operations. Dominant media forms have heavily assisted in constructing gender and genderalized norms. Advertising and mass media forms display codes that are associated with representing male and female attributes. These gender codes shape the way in which society views gender and assists in determining what is acceptable gender performance. It is through media’s reinforcement of gender stereotypes, codes and gender displays that shape the way in which society perceives and constructs genders. Gender is not formed at birth, this self identification of being male or female is shaped through cultural, and social conditions.
Mass media forms set societal standards for men and women. These gender codes become heavily assimilated within mass media and marketing, as many advertisers display men and women to portray stereotypical gender norms and roles. Like this: Like Loading... The Hawkeye Initiative. PSA: Your Default Narrative Settings Are Not Apolitical.
Image taken from tumblr. Recently, SFF author Tansy Rayner Roberts wrote an excellent post debunking the idea that women did nothing interesting or useful throughout history, and that trying to write fictional stories based on this premise of feminine insignificance is therefore both inaccurate and offensive. To quote: “History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth.History is actually a long series of centuries of men writing down what they thought was important and interesting, and FORGETTING TO WRITE ABOUT WOMEN. It’s also a long series of centuries of women’s work and women’s writing being actively denigrated by men. Writings were destroyed, contributions were downplayed, and women were actively oppressed against, absolutely.But the forgetting part is vitally important. Let’s start with the latter claim, shall we? How female corpses became a fashion trend.
Marc Jacobs 2014 ad campaign featuring Miley Cyrus. And a dead girl, it seems. Photograph: David Sims/Marc Jacobs For once it's not the image of Miley Cyrus herself that is controversial. It's the woman lying next to her. In a new advertising campaign for Marc Jacobs, Miley and two female models pose on a moonlit beach, Miley sitting up, staring moodily into the middle distance, a woman standing behind her, while another lies on the sand. This model isn't reclining happily, or curled up asleep; she is flat on her back, hair partially covering her face, with the stiff, sightless demeanour of a body in the morgue.
This ad campaign was released a day after the latest cover of US magazine Entertainment Weekly, which shows the two stars of upcoming film Gone Girl lying on a gurney. This isn't the first time dead women have been used in fashion or entertainment, of course. Do people actually want these images? Still, there's a reason these images proliferate.