The Effects Of Media On Women

For a long time, American culture has been drenched with memoranda proliferated by the mass media. The dominant media has had a great impact on the construction of gender and gender norms. Having been a platform created for encouragement and consumerism in society, attention has diverted towards the female gender, which is used as an object of marketing in the media. Mass media has become harmful to women since it paradigms deleterious acuities of women and underpins them not once or twice but a number of times. This paper will address the effects of media on women, discussing what should change and why such things should change. Media actions are not always what they seem; instead, they are catalysts for treacherous effects on females plus the entire society.

Mass media has been a tool used by businesses and organizations to sway their audience through different techniques, even though people pretend not to have been influenced by advertisements. They do so because advertisements are quick and cumulative, and most of them are subconscious. The standards created by advertisements in the media affect women in a way that is inevitable. We live in an era where adverts are everywhere. We read on televisions, billboards, walls, and in daily newspapers. Despite the media being barely intravenous spines injecting passive and gullible culture with memos or rather messages, which folks consent willingly and openly, they shape some important aspects of existence like our dreams, identities, hopes, and even ambitions and fears. Media in the United States has a vast reach in society, and its morsel is quick, and the message oozes primarily into the fibers woven together, creating a culture of muddles about women.

The effects of mass media on people’s identity are the most profound since, without an identity, your value in society lessens, and a society consists of people who are the targeted audience. Messages sent by most adverts literally mean that people are correspondents of the products they procure. The products have market value in terms of who we are in society and our aspirations. This turns one’s identity into a product instead of amalgamated thoughts and feelings, which turns human worth into something available in stores. The end result of all this is a skewed image of a person in society where people will perceive him or her as portrayed by the media. Being that these adverts in the media are, in most cases, directly linked to women, they become an endangered species in society since members of the society will always consider the messages from the media as pure truths instead of artistically erected standards of what success means. Identity is very important in a person, and whenever a person’s identity is robbed, they become worthless and they feel stripped of their humanity.

Even though the media has been trying to target every member of society, the flat of acquaintance is verbalized by gender, and mainstream messages are engrossed towards women. This is evident in the newspapers, where people rely on images to relate their feelings, and in such cases, female identity is always made to feel inferior. The body language of women in the media is mostly vulnerable, passive, and distinctly different from the body language given to men. This insinuates the feeling of feebleness in women while, on the other hand, men take credit for their dignity and strength. To make the situation even worse, the larger media for women attempts to make women valueless and worthless in society. Female activist Gill says that women’s touch in adverts is very different from men’s touch. Gill goes ahead to state that men’s tad in adverts is that of grabbing, creating, and building, while women are given the touch of caressing, which seemingly does not have a purpose at all costs.

Theresa referred to this kind of media we have as technologies of gender, meaning gender representation is its construction. By this, she meant that the perception of women we see in the media is not what women really are in real life. They are seen in a given way just because the media makes them be seen. This fallacy propagated by gender-divide mass media distresses women very austerely since men are more detrimentally painted than men are.

Another serious effect of the media in America is that a media-obsessed culture means that they have to live up to the standards put in place by advertisements. In American society, being beautiful is one of the most important roles women should accomplish. Naomi Wolf says that just like the gold standard, women’s beauty is a currency system. People compare products that were previously determinates of self-worth with beauty. The media propagates beauty even further by associating beauty with the morals of women. This is evident in television shows where most of the good characters are always associated with beauty and attractiveness while the evil characters, in most cases, look ugly and cruel. This further shows how women are only valued for their levels of beauty despite the fact that beauty codes make it clear that many women do not measure up aesthetically. The additional moral assumptions on the evaluation of women’s appearance augment the shame they should feel. Beauty is subjective in the real world, but the media has built a thin standard for what beauty means. This, in a broader view, does not only attack the choice of products in our advertisements but also the buyers themselves.

With the high regard placed on beauty and the multi-dollar price tag placed on it, society expects female genders to adhere to the beauty standards. When they naturally fail to fit the required standards since not every woman is born beautiful, they persistently struggle to get to the bracket of failure to which they are tagged as trash or failures and should be ashamed of themselves. Media has been tainting women in a very deleterious manner, making many women in the United States lose their self-esteem. Media has portrayed fat women, skin color, hairstyles, and those very sensitive, and for a woman to fit in society for the better, they have to ensure all that is well kept and to the standards. An instance of skin color stuff is in the cocoa drink advert where a woman of African origin is played in the theme of darkness and sexuality to portray the hot chocolate.

All this crap, which has been in the media since the 1970s, must change in the modern world we now live in. It is important for us to know that media advertisements are myths of what women are in society. Women’s undesirable media imagery must change if we need a country with freedom of emotional servitude. Most women feel like slaves just because of the media’s negative taint on their appearances. First, the media should change their gender representation in adverts. I feel that women should be portrayed in some other ways, which will give them credit in society. As mentioned earlier, many people perceive whatever they see in the media as the truth. Changing women’s representation by making them superior in the adverts will change society’s address to female identity.

The media should stop making women’s beauty a priority in adverts. Setting standards for women is a major injustice to unattractive women. It lowers their self-esteem, and this makes them even more clumsy and vulnerable. They should feel empowered by the media, not discouraged. It is high that media houses should change their tactics of making adverts in a way that no woman will feel offended at the end of the day. Movies and television shows should be general in their character representation. It is not necessary that all the evil women in movies are physically ugly, and it is not necessary that all the good characters have beautiful physical appearances. It is high time the movie directors realize that equality is a consideration. The viper of feminism hypnotizes American media, and this has to change.

Female representation in the media should change because it is the only way we can empower our sisters and daughters. Women have been tainted negatively in the media ever since the media thing began. This has made them believe they are weak since it is something they see from time to time. Changing this negative media effect will not only change the upcoming generation but also alter the future generations to come. Change is inevitable but very important. It is through changes in the media that we have seen women work nowadays. I believe through the same transition, women will feel empowered, and with time, we will have a completely diverse country where men and women have equal chances in society.

In conclusion, media houses are privately operated business activities; they rely on people as their customers to create business opportunities and generate profits. The media has been for a long period tainting black women’s ability from the beginning. They are treated just like the products in the advertisements they are used in, and this lowers their dignity to greater levels. It is important that the media consider redeeming women by creating a different imagery of female identity. This is evitable because women are the flowers of this world; they should feel free and happy about who they are in society.