Write down 3000 words on Images of women in social media
Answers
Building egalitarian societies is one of the priorities of modern democratic states. Mass media play a unique and important role in the shaping of a society where men and women enjoy equal rights. Raising women’s legal awareness is important for the creation of an egalitarian society. This is reached through several means, including psychological, social, economic, philosophical, awareness of human rights, political and so on. The role of media is important for being successful in all the mentioned spheres. The media can promote and speed up the reforms in progress, or, on the contrary, it can hamper their implementation.
A number of international conferences and conventions have voiced and publicized the need to break public stereotypes through change in the media policy. Mass media, however, continue to reproduce discriminatory stereotypes about women and portray them in sexist ways. As a rule, women are portrayed in a narrow range of characters in mass media. If we were to divide mass media into two categories, such as fictional and news-reporting, then in the former, women are often associated with the household or sex-objects, and in the latter category, they lack roles.
Only in a limited number of news programs do women appear as main actors or experts. One of the reasons for this situation is the smaller number of women in these spheres, but even the existing number of women are underrepresented compared to their male counterparts.
In advertising and magazines, women are usually portrayed as young, slim and with beauty that meets the accepted standards. Women with this kind of appearance are often associated with sex objects.
Why do social scientists attribute importance to study of images and stereotypes of women in media? Femininity, as well as masculinity, are not biological, but rather, cultural constructs. Representations and manifestations of femininity differ across cultures, time and societies. Femininity is culturally and socially constructed by the family, education, the public, and to a larger extent, the media. In this respect, the long-term change in women’s images in media could help change the perceptions and stereotypes women face in a society.
In the initial stage of its history, media were managed exclusively by men. The media images of men and women were tailored to men’s preferences. In other words, men were creating media images of men and women they wished to see in reality.
Media images of women have become a subject of criticism in Feminist Media Studies since 1960s, when Betty Friedan in her book entitled The Feminine Mystique (1963) revealed and criticized the image of an ideal woman in post-war America. Friedan calls this image "the happy housewife heroine."[1] Following her, numerous organizations, feminist groups and journals researched and revealed the discriminatory nature of women’s images in advertisements and films. The troublesome findings of their research were behind the reason of UNESCO’s statement on Mass Media in 1979, namely:
Social media has recently made life reach another level since the members of the society are put on one -platform through technology despite the distances that lies in between them. Women have taken this advantage and decide to use this site for enticing and marketing their profiles since they always want to prove their attention.