Lindsey Goodstat
COMM 2360
The Objectification of Women in Media
This semester, having taken COMM 2360 as well as an introduction to women’s studies course, I have become extremely familiar with objectification and fragmentation of women in our media. Although I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on the matter yet, I do think that I have had the opportunity to learn a great deal about the issue. Objectification of women in media has been around for quite some time now but I never really recognized it or fully grasped the concept. What really opened my eyes to it was watching Dreamworlds III. Not only was it assigned to watch in this course, it was part of my women’s studies curriculum, as well. Thanks to these two courses and the research I continued to do on the subject outside of school, I am now fully aware of the inconsistencies between the portrayals of men and women in the media, the effects of objectifying women, and the deeper reasons explaining the root of the problem.
Although many would point out that the various images, videos, and other media outlets are the core of the issue pertaining to objectifying females, Joy Goh-Mah, a Huffington Post blogger, makes it clear that it is not the entire problem when she states, “Yet, while sexual objectification is a huge problem, it is, sadly, only a fraction of the objectification of women that permeates our world, from the moment we enter it.”
Within her article, “The Objectification of Women—It Goes Much Further Than Sexy Pictures,” Goh-Mah discusses the subject as the elephant in the room, meaning it is too large and too obvious of an issue to ignore. It comes as no surprise to most people that the portrayal between women and men throughout various newspapers and media throughout the world is quite difference—women, because they are constantly being extremely Photoshopped to fit a certain ideal of what female beauty is believed to be at a particular moment in time, are “too often reduced to the sum of their body parts.” In Goh-Mah’s words, “It grabs our attention, we recognize that something isn’t right, and we confidently assert that this is sexism in action.” Although we notice that such actions within media are not right, we also don’t seem to do enough in order to eliminate the problem at hand. Having someone be presented in some kind of sexual manner does not necessarily lead to or approximate objectification; for example, the difference between sexy pictures of men and sexy pictures of women is that the pictures of men do not usually portray them as objects, instead it portrays them exercising their sexuality.
Joy Goh-Mah goes on to discuss that because sexual objectification is so visible to us in our day-to-day lives, it has become the most potent sector of objectification; this does not however, mean that the other kinds of objectification should not be resolved. She uses dichotomy and the differentiation between subject and object status in the simplest story lines, and proceeds to say, “…in society’s dominant narrative, subject and object status is heavily gendered, with men granted subject status the vast majority of the time, and women severely objectified.” This proves that our media’s sexual objectification of women is something that stems from something much deeper than photos/images we see daily.
This idea of objectification is something that is present in many films that focus on the stories of men, with women playing periphery roles like girlfriends, wives, mothers, etc. On a yearly basis, only approximately 12-15% of the top grossing films of Hollywood focuses on women and their stories specifically.
In the scholarly journal, The Counseling Psychologist, there is a section dedicated to the issue of objectifying women, titled, “Sexual Objectification of Women: Advances to Theory and Research,” and written by Dawn M. Szymanski, Lauren B. Moffitt, and Erika R. Carr. “Objectification theory provides an important framework for understanding, researching, and intervening to improve women’s lives in a sociocultural context that sexually objectifies the female body and equates a woman’s worth with her body’s appearance and sexual functions.” Objectification theory is one that has become an integral perspective for a large amount of research within feminist and counseling psychology. Psychologists are using said theory and other experiences to understand how contextual factors, such as objectification, plays a role in many women’s lives and the problems that follow them around. “Given, the widespread prevalence of the sexual objectification of women in U.S. culture, and the documented potential negative effects it can have on females, it is important that psychologists know how to integrate this information in their work with women and in their training of future psychologists.”
Again, in different words, objectification theory affirms that women are sexually objectified and treated as objects by others. “Sexual objectification occurs when a woman’s body or body parts are singled out and separated from her as a person and she is viewed primarily as a physical object of make sexual desire.”
This journal submits a model of the key objectification theory tenets: it begins with sexual objectification experiences which leads to self-objectification—in which most cases is internalized by women—that then leads the way to various psychological consequences including appearance anxiety, reduced flow, diminished internal awareness, body shame, and anxiety about physical safety. These consequences along with the internalized self-objectification and sexual objectification experiences all consequently result in disordered eating, depression, and in many circumstances, sexual dysfunction.
“Evidence for the sexual objectification of women can be found practically everywhere, from the media, to women’s interpersonal experiences, to specific environments and subcultures within U.S. culture where sexualization of women is cultivated and culturally condoned.” There are many examples of negative depictions of women in the media including various commercials, prime-time television programs, movies, music videos and their lyrics, advertising, sports, magazines, Internet sites and video games. These media outlets constantly expose the fact that women are more often than men sexualized and portrayed in “objectified manners,” including wearing provocative clothing, serving as nothing but decorative objects, and emphasized as being only as useful as their body parts are. Also, many times, the women and how they are portrayed in the media are targets of the sexist comments men feel it necessary to make, such as their use of deprecating phrases and adjectives to describe women, comments about women’s body parts, and certain behaviors like catcalling, leering, etc.
This article also points out the research that demonstrates how the media more often than not depicts a narrow and unattainable standard created for women’s physical beauty and then in turn links this particular standard with a woman’s “sexiness and worth.” The article goes on to explain how exposure to media that partakes in such sexual objectification is closely related to greater importance that is placed on beauty and appearance when one—usually women–is defining their own self-worth. Aside from self-objectification, that kind of exposure is also related to body shame, appearance anxiety as mentioned before, internalization of cultural standards of beauty, body dissatisfactions, and symptoms of eating disorders.
A study from 2007, titled “The Effect of Thin Ideal Media Images on Women’s Self-Objectification, Mood, and Body Image,” explores how experiences of sexual objectification lead to women engaging in self-objectification. The authors of this article and experiment, Brit Harper and Marika Tiggemann, presented a study that used an experimental design to examine the effects of certain media images on self-objectification. The experiments images were mainly those of the ideal image of a woman, an image of which society has painted in media through the use of sexual objectification and stereotypical advertisement of what women should look like and what roles they should play. A total of 90 women aged 18 to 35 were randomly chosen to view specific magazine advertisements featuring a thin woman, advertisements featuring a thin woman with at least one attractive man, or advertisements in which no people were featured with the woman.
Participants who viewed advertisements with a thin-idealized woman reported “weight-related appearance anxiety, negative mood, and body dissatisfaction than participants who viewed product control advertisements.” The experiment’s results only proved that self-objectification, negative feelings towards one’s physical attributes and appearance anxiety “can be stimulated in women without explicitly focusing attention on their own bodies.” The study goes on to further highlight and discuss that self-objectification is involved in females’ responses to media and media outlets that portray women.
In today’s world, Western women are constantly under an immense amount of pressure to conform to the perfectly thin ideal of what society tells us feminine beauty is. “Current sociocultural theory offers the most robust theoretical framework for understanding body dissatisfaction, contending that the thin ideal is created and reinforced by a number of social influences.” Among these, the mass media has proven itself to be the most powerful and pervasive.
The article also points out that one of the most common means of sustaining sexual objectification is through the use of visual media, and that looking at images of sexualized women and/or their female body, or images where sexual objectification is portrayed is something that may increase the possibility of self-objectification in women. “In sum, the present study attempted to combine two previously separate bodies of research: that in media effects and that in self-objectification. There were two central aims. The first aim was to investigate the effect of media images that depict the thin ideal on women’s self-objectification, in addition to appearance anxiety, negative mood, and body dissatisfaction. The second aim was to extend the type of stimulus used in media research by using objectifying images which feature an attractive man attending to a woman.” The study shed plenty on light on the fact that the role of media contributes greatly to women’s body image disturbances, but at the same time also pointed out the need to pinpoint the “psychological mechanisms in operation during and after media exposure that create dissatisfaction with the body.”
In Phyllis B. Frank’s article titled, “Objectification of Women,” she starts off by encouraging us to think about all of the pictures of women that we see every day, every month, every year, in magazines, on television, in the movies, and in advertising. “How do these pictures compare with what we see when we look at the real women around us, every day?” She continues in her article by pointing out that we live in a country where the coverage of women’s lives and achievements is hardly equal to that of the men’s lives in our country. In our country and daily media no matter the outlet, pictures of women scientist, writers, and the general thinker and doer are rarely placed in media’s spotlight or the popular press. Instead of seeing these kind of strong and intelligent women “we are awash in photographs of anonymous young women, selected and pictured to sell products, attract attention, and please male viewers.” Magazines like Playboy claim they are “celebrating women’s beauty.” It is clear to anyone who knows anything about that particular magazine that that is not the case because Playboy and similar magazines do not run pictures of females of all ages and sizes, or of the women who actually make up more than half our population. “What Playboy does in fact is ‘celebrate’ one minutely small portion of the female gender. They are usually ‘models:’ young, VERY PRETTY women of a physical type chosen to appeal to male eyes.”
The article then discusses how even those women “lucky” enough to be chosen to be displayed in nations across the world are more often than not posed and positioned in a way that takes away and de-emphasizes each woman’s individuality. Frank continues to explain that the effect at times visually reduces women to their bodies, or in some situations, just parts of their bodies, as if they are not a real or “whole” person—the term and theme that has constantly been describing this issue and phenomenon is sexual objectification. Frank uses her article to define many different things when it comes to the problem with sexual objectification. For example, Frank points out that a definition of objectification itself may be “portrayals of women in ways and contexts which suggest that women are objects to be looked at, ogled, even touched, or used, anonymous things or commodities perhaps to be purchased, perhaps taken – and once tired of, even discarded, often to be replaced by a newer, younger edition; certainly not treated as full human beings with equal rights and needs.” This particular definition is one that is extremely accurate, and Frank continues in her accuracy when pointing out that such objectification is something that is extremely and blatantly common in our mainstream media—everyone sees it in the advertising, Hollywood movies, magazines, etc.
Living in a culture that has such an issue with sexual objectification when portraying women anywhere, it is no wonder why exploitation of women are not only tolerated but in a sense encouraged as well, according to Frank. She discusses that once one has learned to see a particular class or single human being as some kind of object, it becomes much easier to use said people just as one would go about using an object.
Frank makes specific remarks about what kind of world women grow up in:
-Where images displaying the sexual objectification of women’s bodies are encompassing us; they are on television, newsstands, in advertisements, movies, calendars, etc.
-Where our society teaches women that once they hit their 20’s they should consider themselves getting old and growing unattractive with age.
-“Where women aren’t taken seriously.”
-Where extremely young girls and women and at times some of the most beautiful women are forced into a constant state of worry and panic because they technically cannot make themselves look exactly like their “photographed, objectified images.”
-Where images of half-naked and sometimes fully naked female bodies are displayed on walls in public areas just as an object would be displayed, exposing the bodies in a way that allows men to mark them as their territory or property.
Frank concludes her article by stating, “the direct negative effects on women, as we are exposed to it daily are: negative self-images, shame about ourselves, diminished feelings of dignity, autonomy, privacy, and SAFETY.”
In Stephanie Berbericks journal, “The Objectification of Women in Mass Media: Self-Image in Misogynist Culture,” she touches on the historical aspect concerning the objectification of women in the American mass media. Berbericks not only argues that the image of a perfect woman as presented by the media is harmful, but also reveals quantitative and qualitative methodologies to bring to light the impacts “of absorbing sexist media that presents the audience with unattainable or objectified images of femininity.” Within her work, Berbericks also analyzes the increasing rate of cosmetic surgeries, disordered eating habits, and even relevant deaths in order to prove the point that mediated images of the perfect or ideal woman easily and problematically effect the self-images of female everywhere.
Berberick raises the question of who defines what perfection is in terms of females and their physical and/or sexual attributes. For the women of America, the answer is almost always the media. Social trends within the media focus on the media’s ideal or perfect image of what femininity should be—this has impacted women in what Berberick describes as unprecedented ways. “It has, throughout the years, reduced women to being nothing more than objects to be won, prizes to be shown off, and playthings to be abused.” The media and it’s unrealistic portrayal of women has also created the definition of beauty of which women consequentially compare themselves to. Not only are women making comparisons, but men, too, compare the women in their lives to what they view in the media via their television screens, magazines, billboards, etc. According to Berberick, “Both the self and society has suffered because of the objectification, sexism, exploitation and assessment.”
Berberick brings to light, a set of studies that examined associations between sexist beliefs, objectification, media exposure, and three distinct beauty ideals and practices. The results? Researcher on the study and other colleagues found that “In patriarchal societies, the roles and privileges according to women are inferior to those assigned to men, and as such, sexism plays a central role in the continuing oppression of women.”
She continues to write and focus on statistics about cosmetic surgery and eating disorders among women. Back in 2009, it was recorded that 91% of cosmetic surgeries that occurred in the U.S. were performed on women. Along with the surgeries, there was also a disturbing trend of women with eating disorders—“The National Eating Disorder Association reports that ten million American women are afflicted with Anorexia or Bulimia Nervosa, and there is reported 20% mortality rate for severe cases of these illnesses when left untreated.”
In conclusion, as these articles and journals have exposed, the portrayal of women in media is an issue of such magnitude that it produces a number of consequential problems for women and girls of all ages. This issue is not new to our nation, or the world for that matter; it is an issue that has become more serious and more problematic as time has passed and as technology and media have advanced.
A short film has been created and prepared to accompany this paper and to show real portrayals of women in the media throughout past decades as well as more recent examples. It can be found below.
Works Cited
Berberick, Stephanie N. “The Objectification of Women in Mass Media: Female Self-Image in Misogynist Culture.” The New York Sociologist, Vol. 5, 2010. N.p., 2010. Web. 5 Apr. 2014.
Frank, Phyllis B. “Objectification Of Women | NOMAS.” Objectification Of Women | NOMAS. The National Organization for Men Against Sexism, n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2014.
Goh-Mah, Joy. “The Objectification of Women – It Goes Much Further Than Sexy Pictures.” Huffpost Lifestyle. The Huffington Post UK, 06 Oct. 2013. Web. 14 Apr. 2014.
Harper, Brit, and Marika Tiggemann. “The Effect of Thin Ideal Media Images on Women’s Self-Objectification, Mood, and Body Image.” Sex Roles 58.9-10 (2008): 649-57. Print.
Szymanski, D. M., L. B. Moffitt, and E. R. Carr. “Sexual Objectification of Women: Advances to Theory and Research 1 7.” The Counseling Psychologist 39.1 (2010): 6-38. Print.
Objectification Of Women In Media 