[slideshow_deploy id=’7302′]
On billboards, in the street and on the underground, in television adverts, music videos and from the front covers of newspapers and magazines, before we even get onto the internet, images of lust and sex abound in our daily lives. The hyper-sexualisation of our media and the commodification of sex and the human body are used to encourage our consumerist behaviour. But whose lust do these images seek to satisfy and who do they objectify in doing so?
Predominantly and historically the images of sex that sell to us most are those of women. Sexual images of women continue to grossly outnumber sexual images of men. The objectification of women’s bodies continues to be used to encourage us to buy everything from cars to cosmetics and airline flights to alcoholic drinks.
Women’s bodies are analysed and airbrushed and discussed by both men and women more frequently than men’s bodies. Even our female politicians are more likely to be mentioned in the press for what they wear than for their policies. On page three of a national UK newspaper and throughout the multi-billion pound porn industry, the media’s gaze is fixed on women.
Talking about the image of the female stereotype in a recent BBC interview, Professor Germaine Greer, author of one of the most important feminist works of the women’s movement, The Female Eunuch, said, “She’s even more obvious now than she was then. Now she’s terribly thin; she has enormous breasts that sort of float on the front of her chest; she has hair extensions; she never says a word. There she is now with the immaculate lip-gloss. So this is the description of the female stereotype. Now the thing to remember about her is that women are in love with her, not just men.”
The idea that both women and men are promoting the ‘female stereotype’ is a noteworthy one. Indeed, decades after the second-wave women’s movement of the ’60s and ’70s, what is deemed to be ‘sexual liberation’ or ‘empowering’ can be confusing. Since then, Feminism has become a negative and embarrassing word, and ideas of empowerment and freedom have blurred into ideas of being sexually available and sexually attractive. Ariel Levy, feminist and writer for the New Yorker magazine, summed this up when she wrote about our ‘raunch culture’, asking how it is that we have reached a point where the objectification of women and exploitation of women’s sexuality for the pleasure of men and for economic gain (as deplored by the women’s movement) are now deemed evidence of empowerment and sexual liberation.
Have we conflated objectification with emancipation? And is objectifying oneself any more empowering than being objectified, if this produces images and behaviour that look so similar and that continue to satisfy a predominantly male sexual agenda? How do media images of sex and lust influence our ideas of gender, sex and relationships, and what do they tell us about ourselves?
To begin unravelling some of the complexities of image and gender in society today, Glass enlisted the help of three leading women in the field. Vivienne Pattison of Mediawatch-UK spoke to us about the influence of the pornography industry on today’s media. Preethi Sundaram from the Fawcett Society talked to us about the politics and economics of women in the media and why she still believes feminism to be relevant. And Jean Kilbourne, eminent American feminist, author and filmmaker, spoke to us about four decades of work surrounding the image of women.
Jean Kilbourne –
Feminist, author, speaker and film maker
Your work has often focused on advertising – can we begin by talking about how advertising is able to affect us?
Most people believe that advertising does not influence them. That’s true around the world – people say, “Oh I don’t pay any attention to advertisements, I just tune them out.” The mistake that people make is thinking that because we don’t pay conscious attention to ads, we’re not influenced. Advertising is intended to affect us on an emotional and a subconscious level. What I do with my work is try to make the subconscious messages conscious, because that actually reduces their power and it gives power back to us. They’re selling a great deal more than products. They’re selling values and they’re selling images and they’re selling concepts of love and sexuality and normalcy.
You’ve been working on the image of women in the media for four decades now – what sort of changes have you seen since you began in the late ‘60s?
In terms of looking at the images from advertising, things have gotten much, much worse. There’s more advertising than ever before; the marketers have more power than ever before. They have tremendous control over the rest of the media – I don’t need to tell anyone who works in the media that! And so in terms of the image of women, things have gotten worse. In Killing Us Softly (one of Kilbourne’s most famous films), I talk about how the tyranny of the ideal image of beauty, for example, is much worse than before, because of Photoshop.
It’s now possible for the image to be completely, impossibly perfect and yet girls and women are told we’re somehow supposed to look like this. The obsession with thinness is worse than before because the models have become even thinner but also because Photoshop is being used to create a body that doesn’t exist. Violent images are worse, the sexualisation of children has gotten much more extreme, so all of those things that I started talking about so long ago have gotten worse.
But what’s gotten better is that much more attention is being paid to this now. When I started out I was really alone – nobody else was looking at these things, people thought I was a little crazy, my ideas were considered a little radical. But now there are many organisations, books and films, a real ground swell of opposition to this stuff and of education about this, that didn’t exist when I started out.
Why are the images getting worse?
What’s happening with advertising, of course, is that the images get more shocking to get our attention. Whether these are sexual images or violent images, they are intended to shock us and to grab our attention. But then, of course, what happens is that we get desensitised to those and then the images have to become even more extreme. We’re still very much in the stage where the images are getting more and more extreme. For example, there was a Belvedere vodka ad that really uses an image of rape to sell vodka, which is horrifying. It shows a man with a smile on his face but nonetheless attacking a young woman, and the copy says, “Unlike some people, our vodka goes down smoothly”. But there was a lot of protest against it, so I think they’ve issued one of those non-apology apologies about it and stopped using that particular image.
How does this affect men and women?
Women’s bodies are objectified much more than men’s, but I think that men are actually deeply affected by this. Men’s bodies are also objectified but men are affected by the negative images of women. It basically teaches men how to look at women; it encourages a kind of callousness towards them. It normalises some very dangerous and destructive attitudes towards women and it makes them normal, it makes them acceptable.
It really is hard to imagine if we had a world, let’s say, where there was no advertising. If then all of a sudden there were massive amounts of advertising and it all featured mostly women, scantily clad and that sort of thing – we would be stunned by it! It would be so shocking and yet we’re not, of course, because we’ve grown up with it, we’re used to it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t having a profound impact.
I’d like to ask you about “raunch culture”, the influence of pornography on our culture. Do you think we have confused being sexually empowered with being sexually available? Have we confused sexual freedom with something more pornographic?
I think one of the things that has happened in recent years is that young women have somehow been led to think that presenting themselves as porn stars is liberating, is empowering, an emblem of sexual freedom, and I think that’s a profound mistake. As I say in the film, the definition of sexiness and attractiveness is so clichéd and so stereotypical that it’s hardly a choice. One of the things that’s happened in recent years is that pornography has become so widely available, inescapable really, and the language and images of porn have become mainstream. And so we see music stars doing pole dances at ceremonies and the music videos are extremely pornographic. There’s been this awful pressure on girls and young women not only to be beautiful but to be “hot”. And to be hot is defined in only that one particular way, the way a porn star is hot – and then to suggest that this is empowering!
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be sexy and attractive. Obviously, I think everyone wants that, but what’s wrong is that girls are pressured at such young ages to be this way and also they’re given only one option. Ultimately it’s an option that excludes all women – if you’re no longer young or you’re not thin, it’s as though you have no sexuality, it’s as though your sexuality is completely erased.
What continues to drive the media glare on women?
A lot of ads are aimed at women, women are in many ways the primary consumers, and a lot of them are meant to increase anxiety because that sells a lot of products. I mean, if we all felt great about ourselves and if we were allowed to age, imagine what would happen to anti-aging products. If a diet ever worked, imagine what would happen to the sales of diet products. And then there’s a whole other category where women’s bodies are used to sell products to men, and that is meant to give men a sense that if they buy this product, they’ll be sexually powerful, and in both instances it’s women’s bodies that are used.
What are you hopes for the future?
I think there’s a lot that we can do. From the beginning I’ve been addressing this as a public health problem – that this is something that affects everyone and that it’s not trivial and that it can have dire consequences. I mean, the most obvious example would be the obsession with thinness and the rise in eating disorders. Teaching media literacy in schools is important; teaching our kids how the media works and how these images are constructed, how they’re not real, all of that is important too. I have an extensive resource list on my website of all sorts of organisations helping to bring about change. The first step, as with everything, is to pay attention to it, to take it seriously.
Vivienne Pattison – Director of Mediawatch-UK
Much of your work deals with sexual imagery and pornography: I’d like to talk about that in terms of how it affects our ideas of gender and sexuality.
We need to remember the scale and influence of the pornography industry: it’s estimated to be worth 97 billion dollars worldwide and it generates 68 million daily search engine requests. Any industry that has got that kind of money, of course, is going to shape the cultural, political and social landscape. The food industry shapes what we eat, the fashion industry shapes what we wear and the porn industry shapes our approaches to human intimacy.
And what about the effects on young people?
You don’t have to look very far to see the influence of pornography seeping into childhood. The average age for exposure to pornography is thought to be 11 years old. It’s important to be clear here that we’re not talking about them being exposed to playboy or the kinds of things we might have seen in our youth. We’re kidding ourselves if we don’t keep up with what it is. It’s nothing to do with making love, it’s about making hate to women’s bodies. And the influences are everywhere. Certainly when I was growing up body hair wasn’t an issue but it certainly is now, you can’t have it now. It’s still really quite a new area, the sexualisation of children. But it’s been linked to all kinds of things from poor academic performance to poor body image to eating disorders to depression.
Do you think this level of sexualisation of media content is new?
I think we’ve always had it to an extent. I think back to the ‘70s and we had car adverts with women’s bodies draped across the bonnet but I think it is becoming much more pernicious. The pornography industry is a multibillion dollar industry. The porn dollar pays for lobbyists on Capitol Hill to affect policy. We’ve got to this place where we don’t notice it, because it’s very subtle.
Preethi Sundaram – Fawcett Society
Can you tell us about the current work of the Fawcett Society?
We are the UK’s leading campaign on equality between Men and Women. We trace our roots back to Millicent Fawcett who was campaigning to win the women’s vote. And our current areas of focus are two different campaigns: one is looking at women’s economic equality, the second area is women’s access to power. We’re very much of the belief that if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.We want policies to be considered from an angle that considers how they will affect women and men differently. At the current rate of change, a child born today will be drawing her pension before she sees equal numbers of men and women in the House of Commons. And it will be another 14 general elections until we achieve parity in parliament.
How does the image of women that we see in the media have an effect on the work you do for economic and financial equality?
We’ve been quite concerned that female politicians, where they do reach the top, are very negatively portrayed in the media. Where attention is given to them in the media, it’s usually relating to their shoes or their clothes rather than political views. And I think that serves to reproduce this notion that actually leadership is very much conflated with ideas of masculinity and assertiveness and that it’s not really a women’s world. The media’s portrayal of women serves to compound the inequalities of our times. We’ve developed a strap line at Fawcett, which is Views not Shoes!
What are your hopes for the future?
We’re in it for the long game. It’s not something that’s going to be fixed overnight. Gender stereotypes are really deeply entrenched through socialisation. It’s going to be different for different women from different socio-economic backgrounds. Women in the UK are already more likely to live in poverty than men, and they are already more likely to experience a gender pay gap. We want to ensure that this inequality isn’t further entrenched.
What would you say to people who think that perhaps feminism is less relevant today, that we’ve achieved most of the aims of the women’s movement and that we have equality?
I think the crucial thing, when I’m thinking about feminism, is that feminism is always going to be relevant as long as we still have a gender pay gap, as long as we still have women more likely to live in poverty, and as long we still have women much more likely to experience violence than men. So when we’ve still got all these indicators that give us an idea that there still is all this inequality, well there’s always going to be a place to campaign for women’s rights.
by Tara Wheeler
From the Glass Archive – Issue 10 – Lust