The exploitation of women in mass media is the use or portrayal of women as sexual beings in mass media formats such as television, film, music, and advertising to increase commercial appeal, often leading to the detriment of the women being portrayed and women in society. This includes the presentation of women as sexual objects and the standard of feminine beauty ideals that women are expected to uphold, resulting in the sexual objectification and exploitation of women and girls in the media. Sexual exploitation of women in the media can be traced back to 19th century Paris, where ballerinas at the Paris Opera were subjected to sexual objectification and systemic exploitation by male patrons. The most often criticized aspect of the use of women in mass media is sexual objectification; this includes dismemberment where only specific parts such as lips, breasts, waist, hips and legs are shown rather than a whole individual. The exploitation of women in mass media has been criticized by feminists and other advocates of women's rights, and is a topic of discussion in feminist studies and other fields of scholarship.
Specific formats
Advertising Jean Kilbourne, Robert Jensen, Sut Jhally and other cultural critics accuse mass media of using sex in advertising that promotes the objectification of women to help sell their goods and services.
In Gender Advertisements, Erving Goffman sought to uncover the covert ways that popular media constructs masculinity and femininity in a detailed analysis of more than 500 advertisements. The relationship between men and women, Goffman argued, was portrayed as a parent–child relationship, one characterized by male power and female subordination.
Many contemporary studies of gender and sexualization in popular culture take as their starting point Goffman's analysis in Gender Advertisements. Among them, later research which expanded empirical framework by analyzing the aspects of women's sexualization and objectification in advertisements, M.-E Kang examined the advertisements in women's magazines between 1979 and 1991 and found out there are still showing the same stereotyped images of women: Nude or partially nude images of women increased nearly 30% from 1979 to 1991. Lindner further developed Kang's analytical framework in a study of women in advertisements and found out magazines rely on gender stereotypes, but in different ways, particularly in terms of sexualization. For example, in Vogue, sexualized images of women are the primary way of portraying women in positions of inferiority and low social power.
Research conducted by Eric Hatton and Mary Nell Trautner included a longitudinal content analysis of images of women and men on more than four decades of Rolling Stone magazine covers (1967–2009). It found that the frequency of sexualized images of men and women has increased, though the intensity of sexualization between men and women is different in that women are increasingly likely to be hypersexualized, but men are not. Researchers argue that the simple presence of images of sexualized men does not signal equality in media representations of women and men. Sexualized images may legitimize or exacerbate violence against women and girls, sexual harassment, and anti-women attitudes among men. They concluded that similarly sexualized images can suggest victimization for women but confidence for men, consider the implications when women are sexualized at the same rate as men are not sexualized, as they were on the covers of Rolling Stone in the 2000s.
Clothing designer Calvin Klein was criticized for using images of young, sexualized girls and women in his advertisements, having said: "Jeans are about sex. The abundance of bare flesh is the last gasp of advertisers trying to give redundant products a new identity."
Calvin Klein has also received media attention for its controversial advertisements in the mid-1990s. Several of Calvin Klein's advertisements featured images of teenage models, some "who were reportedly as young as 15" in overly sexual and provocative poses.
In a recent analysis, it was found that almost 30% of the clothing items available for pre-teen girls on the websites of 15 national stores had sexualizing characteristics. The clothing emphasized or revealed a sexualized body part (e.g., bikinis and push-up bras), or had characteristics associated with sexiness (e.g., red satin lingerie-like dresses). This exploitation of women is being seen in younger girls.
American Apparel, founded in 1989, is a clothing retailer. Its advertising strategy was described by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation as normalizing the objectification of women by regularly featuring nude young women, emphasizing their buttocks and breasts. The founder of the company and its CEO, Dov Charney, was accused of keeping videos on a company server of him sexually engaged in sex acts with female models and employees.
The overt use of sexuality to promote breast cancer awareness, through fundraising campaigns like "I Love Boobies" and "Save the Ta-tas", angers and offends breast cancer survivors and older women, who are at higher risk of developing breast cancer. Women who have breast cancer say that these advertising campaigns suggest that having sexy breasts is more important than saving their lives, which devalues them as human beings.
Another trend that has been studied in advertising is the victimization of women. A study conducted in 2008 found that women were represented as victims in 9.51% of the advertisements they were present in. Separate examination by subcategory found that the highest frequency of this is in women's fashion magazines where 16.57% of the ads featuring women present them as victims.
The portrayal of women in advertising is influenced by the beauty myth, an idea that results in the presentation of primarily slender women with flawless skin and other socially acceptable features. Globalization has led to this portrayal becoming more uniform across different societies and cultures. Most women are unable to achieve the beauty standards shown because the appearance of the models has been modified using technical effects.
Since the 20th century, women have increasingly been sexualized and objectified in media, including television, movies, ads, and music videos. The physical appearance, body image, social norms, and beauty of women have always been portrayed in media falsely and unrealistically. In ads, music videos, and films, girls and women are shown as objects, and their humanity is diminished. The exploitation of women's bodies is used for advertising everything for entertainment. The fashion industry oversexualizes women's and girls' apparel; they are typically portrayed in sexually explicit attire, sexually suggestive cosmetics, and hypersexualized in advertisements. These brands usually prey on children and parents striving to keep up with the latest fashions. Models, supermodels, beauty queens, and even toys promote the idea that women and girls require unattainable levels of beauty and physical perfection.
Gallup & Robinson, an advertising and marketing research firm, has reported that in more than 50 years of testing advertising effectiveness, it has found the use of the erotic to be a significantly above-average technique in communicating with the marketplace, "...although one of the more dangerous for the advertiser. Weighted down with taboos and volatile attitudes, sex is a Code Red advertising technique ... handle with care ... seller beware; all of which makes it even more intriguing." This research has led to the popular idea that "sex sells".
Camille Paglia holds that "Turning people into sex objects is one of the specialties of our species." In her view, objectification is closely tied to (and may even be identical with) the highest human faculties toward conceptualization and aesthetics.
Film
Historically, the film industry has been exploitative toward women both on and off screen. Stereotypically in film, women are often depicted as one dimensional characters, overly emotional, and subsequent compared to their male counterparts. This can be attributed to a myriad of reasons, for instance, the male dominance within the industry and lack of female representation. When it comes to the depiction of women on screen, there is a limited perspective of what women's humanity entails. According to Ward and Harrison, "media portrayals typically construct rather narrow and stereotypical portraits of women and of femininity." In film, there is more of an emphasis on the physical and sexual appeal of women, as objects of desire, or on the other side, appear as a respectable housewife or mother, allowing no depth or character development in between these stereotypes.
Furthermore, feminist film theorists have considered the Bechdel test, a popular test used in film to evaluate how women are represented in film. The Bechdel test, named after 1980's cartoonist Alison Bechdel. The test consists of two requirements: two women in the film have to have a conversation with one another about something other than a man, and the two female characters must be named. Even blockbuster movies that are considered to be more progressive fail this test, including The Avengers (2012), Avatar (2009), and Lord of The Rings (2001–2003). Although the Bechdel test is not an indication of whether or not women are properly represented in films, it brings attention to the gender inequality that exists in film and entertainment.
Many feminist film critics have pointed to the "male gaze" that predominates in classical Hollywood film-making. Budd Boetticher summarizes the view thus: "What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance." Laura Mulvey's germinal essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (written in 1973 and published in 1975) expands on this conception of the passive role of women in cinema to argue that film provides visual pleasure through scopophilia and identification with the on-screen male actor. She states: "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness," and as a result contends that in film a woman is the "bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning". Mulvey suggests that Lacan's psychoanalytic theory is the key to understanding how film creates such a space for female sexual objectification and exploitation through the combination of the patriarchal order of society, and 'looking' in itself as a pleasurable act of voyeurism, as "the cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking".
Within the 56 top-grossing films of 2018 in North America, Scandinavia, Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe, women and girls were four times more likely than men to be shown wearing revealing clothing; nearly twice as likely to be shown as partially nude; and four times more likely to be shown completely naked. The over-sexualization of female roles in popular Hollywood films has been found to harm girl's self-esteem and can cause them to want to alter their bodies to look more like the actresses in films and movies.
Although girls and women are heavily represented in the media, they are often portrayed as unrealistically beautiful, such as being significantly thinner and younger than the average. Women are also portrayed as being passive, dependent on men, and housewives. The media frequently present two archetypes of women: good and bad. Good women are loyal and focused on family life, taking care of their husbands and others. Bad women are the opposite – hard, cold, or aggressive.