MEDIA AND THE IMAGES IT PORTRAYS : GENDER PERSPECTIVES

Public exposure to media is like flesh to the body and so is its impact on us. The images in media mould our opinion and affect the way in which we see the world around us.

Television is the spinal source of information for the youth of today. The youth reflect what they see and try to emulate that in their day to day lives. The way in which women are represented in the media, especially on television could lead to the continued oppression of women and the continued belief that they are the objects of male satisfaction (the pervasiveness of such stereotyping is evident in advertising).

In the early 1970s there was an upswing in feminist movement which affected the television market as many women oriented issues were taken up by the tele directors. But there was a fall in the trend by the next decade itself therefore the impact was somewhat limited. The images in the media have by and large proved to be detrimental to women as the portrayal of such imagery has clearly reasserted the patriarchal superstructure rather than helping women assert their own ground. Images running through the media not only affect men’s behavior but also affect women’s interpretation of conducting themselves in a particular fashion. The images that prevail in the media are social dangers to women as it circumscribes them from breaking the societal stereotypes.

Media as an agent of socialization (Holtzman,p.76,Weimann,p.20). Sreberny and van Zoonen p.226) stated also in the meaning theory that “by presenting endless portrayals of reality in its content, mass communications provide experiences from which we collectively shape our meanings” and in this way not only does the media influences the society but it also upholds the current societal values and views solidifying the societal norms of the time and hence aiding in creating the social structure.

If we compare the decades of 50’s and 60’s where the women performed their “engendered roles” of submitting to their husbands and were affectionate and consummate homemakers, only 32% of women were seen in television characterization. Later on during mid 70’s as mentioned earlier a slight transformation was seen which also was not that long lasting. For instance, the Charlie’s Angels who were the epitome of strong, tough and independent women crime fighters also worked and took orders from the mysterious male Charlie. In addition, they were dressed to accommodate the male gaze that in no way makes them epitome of impressive independent female crime fighters or women who know what they want.

Another important point to be noted is that women in television are more concerned about sex and marriage as compared to their male counterparts. The Indian television is flooded with the stereotypical storylines comprising of “kitchen politics” where women hold their ground in terms of back biting at domestic level, decorating themselves with ornaments and rearing their children in the most “moral and pro societal” ways. Society’s bias is so commonplace and is more or less a normative thing for the society to commoditize women in terms of their beauty and the kind of work that is “allowed” to them.

The images of professional women which are also taking up the television industry are problematic. The “superwoman” imagery of women who are able to prove their acumen at work and are also identified as model home makers and mothers give the illusion that professional women are capable of “multi tasking” and they can be able breadwinners and at the same time can handle domestic chores without any extended help. This is not a favorable situation for women in any way. There is a great deal of “illusion” of celebrating the spirit of womanhood. When the women were toiling their voices for equality in job, it now seems that the media imagery is depicting women having achieved their aspirations as television every now and then comes up with images of equality won and women across the country are empowered. There is a created sense of women having no reason to fight over anything or demanding equality because the “media reality” depicts the realization of such equality which leaves no reason to fight.

When we see the news on the television, there we witness the male and the female news anchors and along with the “weather girls” which are also a measure of amusement. In addition to this, while participating in interviews women are much more likely to be asked questions about their love life than men while men in all probabilities would be questioned about their careers, goals and accomplishments.

Also issues affecting women are also not issues of grave concern, the issues are mostly overlooked as they are “not to be brought beyond the realm of private”. We rarely hear about the stoning of women in Afghanistan and the genital mutilations that prevail all over Africa and the Middle East. Marital rapes, domestic abuse and wage inequality are also some of the issues which are not brought out into the open.

Also the women issues which are covered did not involve any sort of interpretation in terms of critical thinking of the issues rather they were merely taken to be at the face value and were more or less left at that.

Women depicted in the music videos and other “glamour” performances is another major source of commoditization of women where women are nothing more than merely objects of male desire and the sexual violence in such videos adds to the desirability quotient of the male gaze. The fast growing trend of artificial treatments like “plastic surgeries” and “liposuctions” to turn attractive overnight is also part of “fitting” well in the male gaze where one caters to somebody else’s expectations rather than their own.

Women have been effectively portrayed in the typecast gender roles where the advertisers can sell domestic use products to the ever smiling happy mothers who are symbolic of happy homemakers having no issues with their condition.

The Slut Walk at Delhi- An Overview.

Social activists (against the walk): Look at the walk ...its all over..everywhere!...these bunch of young women only know hooting and shouting which has nothing to do with the "art" of protestation, "SlutWalk" is what they've named it, following their Western Counterparts, What did they achieve?, look at the media hype and the publicity they've got.. What a sham!..Oh! Praise the Lord!!...they have no sense of Feminism...What is wrong with them?

Well, I am not writing this note to traverse "the type" women/men who would have opinions inclining to the negation of the Slut Walk (Besharmi Morcha), Delhi and who are in sync with the above mentioned pointers! ...because I think each has the right to voice their opinion...But wait, ...if they have a fair chance, so do I !

By far, Asia's largest slut walk and being second in number (after the one that took place in Bhopal on the 17th of July,2011) saw women and men, "the gutsy and the for ones" coming out of their homes on a Sunday to march in solidarity and hoot, yes hoot, "We Support".

One of the major concerns that has been raised is about the Walk's Reach and its Legitimacy.

What section of the society did the "Walk" cater to?...The concern shared is, if at all,some light is seen.... ( Hold on, for the record, you'll need many more walks before you actually see the Sun rising!)...the results are going to remain in the periphery of the urbane...how will it reach the rural dwellings where women have little or no understanding of the word "rights"?..where it is a mere word for them. What about these women?...(Breathe-Breathe-Breathe!...chill man!.. let me spell A first!..)

On a more serious note, Yes, undeniably, we as women and citizens cannot repudiate the sufferings of the rural women, but should that be a reason for women in the metropolis to not take a step forward and initiate a movement?..The step taken is not just in sync with our Western Counterparts...(Duh! so what if its not an "original" Idea, it still is a good one!..it's an 'uproar' where the idea remains behind and the Waves, the very Idea stimulates, create ripples...that's the intent of the "idea"..so don't complain, I am not attempting a Monet here....so spare me the copyrights!....it's a "movement",a cause which I feel for and want to be associated with!)...

Well, there are multi-players who would talk of "Slut" being a repugnant word and would condemn its "women" users terming it uncivilised..while 'the word' might be used as a lingua franca in the male commune..as commonly as a bird shitting,perhaps!...

Also, I didn't see any body in their underpants at Jantar Mantar....to help soothe the roving eyes, which came with zeal to "see" the goings on! and the "thunderous right wingers" who did not get enough to flutter! Well, yes, there were "onlookers" who had little to do or know about the cause, but seemed fascinated with a pool of women shouting and hooting!..so they tagged along the groups and hovered and that's just what they did!..but to their dismay,couldn't fetch much!..Because it is a movement, keeping in mind, the place and context, (please mind the name,"Besharmi Morcha")

Many women turned up how they are "usually dressed" and "chased" to show that "Clothes" have nothing to do with "Rape" and/ or "Molestation", also being the Underlying theme of the movement.

Kudos to this one! ...The movement has just begun....As Chennai follows the trail!

An open letter from friends of WAVE at the Afghan Women's Network against their government's condemnation of women's shelters

To The Gatekeepers of Women’s Honor: an open letter from the Women of Afghanistan:

This is not the first time we have gathered here. These walls, this table, this stove, this teapot – how often they have witnessed our gatherings, our frustrations, our stresses. How often they have welcomed this group of frustrated women friends, activists, and allies. How often they have heard us unload the same concerns: how fragile have been our gains, how meaningless have been the laws we’ve fought to have passed, how useless have been the policies we struggled to see implemented in this land where there is no belief in women’s rights. Where a woman’s position in society is considered a mere extension of her role in her family and tribe, and where ethics and beliefs are exclusively understood through a masculine definition, for which women pay the price every day.
Today, the latest blow: women’s shelters. Let us recall the story. First, an uncredible media related to power circle report falsely decries women’s shelters as dens of prostitution and immorality. In response, the government creates a Commission of high level officials – none of them experts, none of them shelter managers, none of them having ever lived in a shelter – to assess the situation. They produce a biased and incomplete report, without discussing their findings with the shelters themselves or the experts and organizations who support them.
We, the women activists, are now accused by the government of having dis-honoured the national pride of the country by publicly exposing the egregious and often humiliating violations of rights that women are exposed to. This, they said, shames us in the eyes of the world. This? The revelation of human rights abuse? Not the widespread corruption, the failure of governance? Instead, what shames us is the age-old Afghan tradition of providing safe shelter to those who most need it, and fighting for the rights of the vulnerable? This shames us?
In an attempt to ‘mend’ these problems and divert international assistance from independent women’s shelters into a regularized government channel the government is using women ministry as tool of curtailing women’s rights. The minister is shamelessly accusing women group of corruption without presenting firm evidence or taking initiative of correcting where problem exist.
On other hand according to the January financial report of the government, most of the ministries have failed to spend even 50% of their national development budget. And now they want to transfer yet more money into a government system that can’t even cope with the money they already have.
But the biggest question is not the funding – at least not for Afghan civil society, and for women’s groups in particular (who have, by the way, routinely optimized their minimum budgets in the past, making the most out of every single dollar received, and whose own financial reports are testament to that). No, the biggest question is what will happen to the women.
Unfortunately, the grandiose vows to protect and respect women’s rights that were made in the London and Kabul conferences and through the Lisbon Declaration have hardly been translated into real action by the Afghan government and its international allies. In fact, since those vows were made, the government has slipped backwards in its commitments to women’s rights. And now we are to put the most vulnerable women of our society fully in the hands of the government??
1 Afghan Women’s Network is an umbrella organization of women organizations, activists and human rights defenders in Afghanistan, with membership of over 5,000 individual women and over 75 non-government organizations.
The experience of running shelters in the last nine years shows that there have always been threats from state institutions and society’s informal power holders to both the women who run the shelters and those who seek refuge in them. These are not threats to cut funding, no. These are insidious threats; threats of betrayal of trust of the worst kind. For example, a 12 year old girl from Shindand District in Herat recently sought refuge in a shelter, but the government, under pressure from a Member of Parliament, handed the girl back to her family who then cut her to pieces.
And her story doesn’t even stand out from the rest. Her story is common. Some of the women we know are taking huge risks – heroic risks – not only with their own lives but also those of their children, to find refuge from abuse in these small safe houses. Some receive threats daily, hourly even. But the risk, for them, is worth it. These are women who have witnessed up close the torture and killing of other women, and have themselves been the victims of horrific abuse. They are already taking the maximum risk to escape it: they are putting everything on the line. Under this new regulation women would suffer even worse odds to protect themselves and their children. How can we allow that?
Today there is a woman in Takhar who is crying out and seeking justice against the powerful perpetrator who abducted, imprisoned, and then killed her daughter. The perpetrator is criminal nephew of an MP who right this moment is sitting in Parliament in Kabul, considered above law by the district authority. How much more blatant can this get?? Don’t you realize that every woman in Afghanistan knows that this is the situation? That for the Afghan government, this is considered normal??
Women who run shelters work every single day to safeguard the lives of their Afghan sisters, regardless of their politics and ethnicity, but are already up against tremendous odds in succeeding. Somewhere between 40 to 60% of all cases of known abuse are manipulated by an influential power holder, who uses his ability to pressure government to have his woman handed back over to her abusive husband or father from whom she sought to escape.
We ask our government – can you really take on the responsibility of safeguarding the lives of these women??
Will controlling women’s welfare, right down to their place of last resort, help you build your international image? Is this decision really made with the best interests of women in mind, even when you know that you rule the second most corrupt government in the world? Will this regulation be magically saved from the powerful and corrupt influences that infect every other part of your government? How could you do this? And more importantly, how can we make you stop it?

Women and poverty - an analysis by Ritu Dewan of Bombay University

From the Skoch Foundation's Inclusion website

That poverty is gendered is a given, whether in terms of causes, results, or impacts. Consequently, it becomes essential to incorporate gender into development paradigms and specifically into poverty reduction strategies as well as planning processes; unless this takes place, the very concept of gender equality not only becomes marginalised but is, in fact, fully negated, says Ritu Dewan

It is necessary to point out that no analysis of gender mainstreaming into pro- poor strategies, plans and developmental processes can be made until and unless viewed in the context of national and international global forces. Thus, it is quite possible that certain currently operative policies may come into conflict with both accepted definitions of anti-poverty strategies as well as the prevailing dominant development paradigm.

Poverty issues in different countries need to be perceived in a specific historical setting, given the fact that all underdeveloped countries have undergone colonisation. This historical perspective has the necessity to be integrated with the current location of each economy in the prevailing international scenario which is dominated by the neo-liberal paradigm of growth. This paradigm is being increasingly debated and sought to be replaced by country-specific alternatives, all focusing in varying degrees on the major issues of poverty and gender.

While not getting into the details of the discourse on what defines ‘gender’ and ‘poverty’, there can be no debate on the fundamental issue that women and men generally experience poverty differently, whether in terms of causes, processes, impacts, outcomes, results, or coping strategies. The central issue, however, is that perceiving poverty as a static ‘outcome’ negates the fact that it is primarily a process, one that is fully gendered. The loci of economic and patriarchal power determine how, when, where and who makes choices. A woman’s choice is determined for her by her economic resource position, by ‘home responsibilities’ assigned to her by society and by the socio-cultural as well as religious sanctions imposed on her. As a consumer, the woman acts as the purchasing agent for the family and buys the raw materials she uses in household production. As a producer, she is involved mainly in subsistence economic activities, which, even though not recognised as work, underline the basic survival strategies of especially poor households.

The absence of gender incorporation and analysis in development leads not only to misallocation of resources but also virtually denies the very existence of households as well as ‘vulnerable’ sections. Policies that do not take into account gender discrimination - particularly those relating to access to resources and production outlets - negate women’s multiple roles in production, reproduction and maintenance tasks, as also in the distribution and absorption of resources within producing households. This brings into question the very appropriateness of using market analysis in underdeveloped countries where the unit of production is primarily the household rather than the firm, where the non-monetised sector still predominates, and where the motive force of production remains subsistence for the majority of the population both in the urban and rural sectors.

The exclusion of the concept of the family thus has important consequences. As many of the commodities produced at home are substituted for purchased goods, what is maximised is a common utility function in which the household is the unit of inquiry. This utility function is generally equated with that of the household head. The assumption here is thus that the head of the household is genderless - neutrum oeconomicum.

The fundamental problem, however, arises when analysis is based on the notion of the ‘household’. The presumption here is that there are no inequalities within a single household, that its ‘well-being’ is represented by the head of the household. This assumption is one of the most prevalent conceptual biases in both poverty as well as gender analysis. In most Asian countries the ‘head’ is determined by culture and tradition rather than by the economic definition of ‘main earner’. This is very common, for instance, in India, where the reality is that almost one-third of particularly rural households are female-headed. Thus, ‘poverty lines’ as defined often hide the fact that men and women have differential household utility functions, and that both inter- and also intra-household comparisons need to be focused on. It is essential, however, to emphasise that gender analysis by itself cannot be adequate. Gender, which is an asymmetry, is based on the fact that though men do have economic and social power, this power is diluted by various societal and situational conditions that prevail, and also by specific forces that operate at a particular phase of historical development of a country.

Every economy is characterised by two interdependent systems - the system of production of material goods and the system of reproduction of the labour-force, patriarchy being fully integrated with both. The relationship between development, poverty and gender can only be perceived in all its complexities if gendered analysis is integrated at all levels.

A related problem is the eternal linking of women and children even in the sphere of the State and its developmental and planning processes. The very fact that a single ministry such as that in India and several neighbouring countries deals with the issues of both women and children implies that the two are interconnected at every level - nature of problems, solutions, resolutions. The argument for two separate ministries for women and for children is based on both conceptual and methodological grounds - that children are not the sole responsibility of only women, and that an overwhelmingly large share of the already meager allocations are spent on nutrition and other child-specific programmes and schemes rather than on gender-specific poverty alleviation strategies.

Finally, the prevailing dominant paradigm of growth and development works against the solution to the ‘central’ problem of poverty. When the paradigm itself results in raising poverty levels through non-implementation of land reforms; by increasing unemployment via informalisation where labour laws do not operate; withdraws subsidies to the agricultural sector when in fact developed nations are increasing them; reduces expenditure on the public distribution system; refuses to redefine the poverty line in terms of the economic reality of the people; denies that poverty goes beyond the concept of income; throws millions of people into the ranks of the ‘unemployable’ and unemployed particularly through displacement by reducing access to common property resources and appropriating fertile land through the setting up of Special Economic Zones, Special Tourist Zones, etc and also for national and multinational corporate houses in the name of furthering ‘development’ through industrialisation - then no anti-poverty strategy can be successful either for the poor and consequently, even more so for women.

Select References
1. Dewan, Ritu, (1999), Gender Implications of the ‘New’ Economic Policy: A Conceptual Overview, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 22, No. 4, pp 425-429.
2. Dewan, Ritu (2005), Gender Budget Perspectives on Macro and Meso Policies in Small Urban Manufacturies in Greater Mumbai, Discussion Paper Series-12, Human Development Resource Centre, UNDP, India.
3. International Poverty Center - UNDP, September (2006), Working Paper No. 22.
4. Tenth Five-Year Plan (2002-07), Volume II: Sectoral Policies and Programmes, Planning Commission, Government of India, New Delhi.
5. Eleventh Five-Year Plan. Planning Commission, Government of India, New Delhi

Ritu Dewan is Professor, Centre for Women’s Studies / Gender Economics, Department of Economics, University of Mumbai