JESSICA

CHEMICAL ENGINEERING
1606883064
CLASS S501, TUESDAY
Essay
Transforming Media: From Female Objectification Tool towards
Empowerment

Are you sure that media is on our side in women’s empowerment? Think again.
Examining pop culture nowadays, women's role in media hasn't improved much. While
you're strolling on street, it's not hard to find advertisements or magazine covers which use
women’s sex appeal as a bait. Common potrayals of women in media are too idealized.
Women are represented in their perfect standard: no blemish, no stretch mark, and skinny.
This body image is intended to be idolized and to put a benchmark for women so that
'ordinary women' would like to buy the products they sell to achieve the beauty standard. A
glimpse, it may look harmless. However, media attitude in depicting women can be
categorized as objectification, since women are treated as a tool to gain purpose, dispensable,
and being reduced to certain body part[ CITATION Pap15 \l 1057 ]. It causes detrimental effect
in women’s empowerment as it creates false self-image, encourages self-objectification, and
limits women achievement by promoting stereotypes. Thus, we should stop objectification of
women in media.

The first point to highlight about the impacts of female objectification in media is how
it creates false self-image. The ideal woman is shown to be skinny and immaculate, despite
the fact that such woman is actually nonexistent. However, we can consider Victoria's
Secret(VS) models are close to the definition, since they’re being called as ‘Angels’. Female,
especially teenage girls, easily accept the mindset and regard VS models’ body type as body
goals. They struggle to fit the frame of woman considered attractive by the media. Then, it
makes them overly cautious to their appearance. If they don’t fit the beauty standard, they
will feel insecure and dissastified with their body. Media’s attitude in assigning woman to
their body has made the female audience forget that women are worth more than flesh.
Moreover, the male audience can also be influenced and have unrealistic expectation in
women’s look.

Furthermore, female objectification in media can also encourage women’s self-

objectification. Media glorify feminity established by society and expect women to follow the
womanly manner that’s constructed by patriarchal culture. The forms of this doctrination can
be found in sexist jokes. For example, TV show such as Big Bang Theory sometimes
included sexist line such as ‘... You’re a man, the champagne of genders’ or ‘All you hear
women say is “I’ll just have a salad”, “Where’s my lipgloss”...’. As you can see, media
sarcastically offend women as immature, emotionally unstable and illogical. The 'good
woman' term is constrained to certain standards. Women are imposed to do self-monitoring
whether they have behaved in media favor. Worse, women become incooperative with
JESSICA
CHEMICAL ENGINEERING
1606883064
CLASS S501, TUESDAY
feminists view of empowerment as media justify those roles as how a woman should be.
Indeed, Women are directed to view themselves as objects.

Last but not least, the most disastrous effect of media which damage women’s
empowerment is promoting stereotypes about women to public. It indirectly contributes to
the persistence of women postion as second-class citizens. The popularized calling 'Dumb
blonde' and 'sex bomb' bring society perspective of woman body as primary view of
judgement[ CITATION Fre97 \l 1057 ] . In media, feminity is looked down. All feminine traits
such menstrual blood, wife, and motherhood are degraded as burdensome and disgusting. To
illustrate, Carrie film potrayed sexist bullying which later made Carrie commit terrifying
revenge. It delivers impression that women with power are monster. As a result, people think
women are better to stay at home and disqualified to handle 'men's job'. The data about
women career discrimination is no less astonishing. A blatant discrimination is figured out by
Dechter analysis of the US 1980 – 1996 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Blonde
women are paid lesser by 9% to their brunette counterpart, despite no real scientific evidence
that proves hair color is related with cognitive ability. Media may claim it as a repercussion.
However, it has ruined women's career opportunity  just because they’re judged for their
appearance.

A woman is entitled to her own body. Unfortunately, the culture media follows often
contrasting this fact. Objectification in media has damaged women’s career, self esteem, and
image about themselves. That’s why stopping media distorted vision on women is necessary
to establish gender equality. Actually, we can start empowering through media such as
making blog to educate and inspire women about gender equality. We can also make petition
to raise awareness about female objectification issue. In near future, it might be possible to
make affiliation with mainstream media and persuade them to stop female objectification.
Transforming media can be a big leap toward women’s empowerment.

Bibliography
Frederickson, B. &. R., 1997. Objectification Theory: Towards understanding women's lived
experiences and mental health risks. Social Justice Research, 21(2), pp. 173-206.

Papadaki, E., 2015. Feminist Perspectives on Objectification. Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, p.

1.