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 womens 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
womens 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 womens 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 theyre 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 dont fit the beauty standard, they
will feel insecure and dissastified with their body. Medias 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
womens look.

Furthermore, female objectification in media can also encourage womens self-

objectification. Media glorify feminity established by society and expect women to follow the
womanly manner thats 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 ... Youre a man, the champagne of genders or All you hear
women say is Ill just have a salad, Wheres 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 womens
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 theyre 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 womens career, self esteem, and
image about themselves. Thats 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 womens 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.