As a class, we have become very familiar with the oppressed image of women. This portrayal is found within all media, however this post will focus on women in the news. Women tend to discuss a lot of "fluff" stories, and present us with weather, and other simplistic information. Besides the handful of renowned women like Katie Couric, males pretty much dominate the news. we are almost always judged on our appearances, and attitude when conveying information, and this is extremely apparent within news channels like fox five. Although we see this obvious inequality, how are we supposed to go about fixing it? Alternate media is a great way to receive news, which is not always filtered, and does not show such a gender inequality. This weeks readings opened up my eyes to many new alternative medias, which are not only interesting, but also address how to help fix the gender inequality within traditional medias, specifically within our news.
The article within "Youth Media Reporter" highlighted a great alternate media site which focuses on young girls, it is called TVbyGIRLS. TVbyGIRLS uses film to capture the essence and emotions which young girls feel, and tend to suppress. It was some what unclear as to where these emotions where coming from, but I'm guessing about inequality. although the entire article was very interesting id like to comment on something that Leah a thirteen year of girl said from TVbyGIRLS. “Everyone will have different ideas and if a girl has an idea, the boys will just sort of withdraw. They’ll let her do her idea but they won’t be much help or engage much. [However,] if a boy has an idea, the girl will drop her idea and work real hard to make his idea work. You might be disappointed at first but you learn real fast that to fit in, you don’t push your ideas.” I quoted this because i believe this concept relates to women of all ages, and it isn't until we fix this problem, that we will see a change in larger news outlets. As a gender we need to find our voice!
Youth Media Reporter also shared a great article on how women are represented on television shows (which also relates to news!). "we don’t always account for how girls, specifically young girls, are bombarded with images of women as powerless, passive victims noted primarily for their bodies and sex rather than their minds and capabilities." If society keeps thinking that women in general are not as intelligent as men, we will with out a doubt continue to see women in television shows who rely on men to solve their problems, or who are meek and comply with the "standard stereotype". If we let this continue, we will never have more women like Katie Couric, because what we watch tells us that women are not cut out for the corporate world, and therefore no one will take us seriously.
In this post you concentrated almost entirely on quotes from the readings but you didn't really define your chosen quotes. Whereas in your previous post, "The representation of women that I rarely get to see: reality", you use almost no quotes but instead give summaries and (I feel that this allows you to) show off more of yourself. I really enjoyed reading your critique of Vogue in that post, and I would have liked to hear more about "Reddit" in this one :).
ReplyDelete