The Portrayal of Women in Media
Have you ever skimmed through a newspaper and noticed the advertisements? Most often than not, they’re coloured by hues of institutionalised misogyny. Girls promoting a mere showerhead must be skimpily clad to prove something. Two years ago, Times of India covered a story directing everybody’s attention to Deepika Padukone’s cleavage, and unfortunately, this still hasn’t changed.
Even overseas, in Mexico, the weather women or as Elena Reina calls them – “las muñequitas del clima” (translates to weather dolls) have gained so much attention. Wearing a tight dress and high heels, sauntering onto a stage to tells us how hot or cold it is, “Of course these viewers aren’t taking these women seriously,” said an administrator of Televisa, a Mexican multimedia mass media company.
“It’s a ‘boys club’ that runs television in Mexico and has perpetuated the sexualization of the weather forecast with these women,” said another administrator.
Women seemingly don’t have much of a role to play in any sort of media and with very little coverage; the portrayal of women seems scarce. The Bechdel Test is a test with the following three criteria: (1) it has to have at least two women in it, who (2) who talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man. If a movie or show checks these three boxes, then it points to equal representation of women and men. It doesn’t seem to be so tough, but it is. A movie like Lara Croft doesn’t actually pass the test. Even Finding Nemo wasn’t spared. We will look into the use of women as a plot device further.
For ages, we’ve seen women’s body’s being sexualised. A certain body image has been construed by society that a woman tends to feel the need to follow. Surprisingly, even though there are so many different ‘perfect body types’ – be it the skinny girl or the ‘thicc girl’, society throws so many different ‘ideas of perfect’ at us, yet none of them seem right. Body shaming is still a thing and different forms of media portray different ideas based on convenience, leaving us all confused, yet making us feel the need to conform.
Women are portrayed to act in such bizarre ways – the sensual way in which women should drink mango juice or even wash clothes.
A finding by J. Walter Thompson New York and The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media shows that between 2006 and 2016, women appeared in advertisements wearing sexually revealing clothes six times more than men.
This demand and perpetuation of this sexualisation fulfils an illegitmate need of society, a need which is only created and manufactured as a result of the system which perpetrates it. Thus, actual and equal representation of women is sidelined.
One sees this happen time and again in varying female figures of New Media, whichever path of communication it may be. Whether it’s movies, advertisements, social media channels, TV shows, many of them cater to certain gender normative beliefs without meaning to. This happens whenever female figures – actresses, singers or public figures – are forcefully sexualised, and the gaze of the media brought back time and again to their fashion choices or dietary habits or how their physical features are to be aspired, rather than focusing on their careers or their work. This consistent sexualisation and trivialisation of their work can be connected to what went on a few decades ago, when women-centric work was majorly missing in popular culture, or not getting the attention it deserves.
This kind of under-representation of women relegated them to mere marginal roles or characters, whether by assigning them the roles of wives and daughters of great men who go out and rule the world, or as objects of admiration and lust. This dichotomy was barely broken if one traces their way to some of the most popular Bollywood films of the 1970s to 1990s period. Even Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge features reflections of this toxic masculinity as the male characters fight over Simran essentially as a prize when the movie is coming to an end, while movies such as Main Hoon Na and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai cater to impress the idea upon audiences that women are desired only when they’re domesticated and traditional and fit into the normative gender roles of society. Male characters of Mohabbatein are taught by their music teacher to forcefully keep on pursuing the women who rejected them in order to “prove their love,” thus giving birth to the idea that if you keep after a girl, she’ll eventually relent. The idea is fallible at best, but we see this happening time and again, and that too in all the movies we grew up upon and spent our childhoods with.
We find this being changed on a foundational level in industries all over the world, whether its through the rising of women-centric films which focus on their personal character building and their public lives, or through the figures of all the women who are repeatedly questioning and challenging the system which surrounds them. The goal is a long way to go, but we’re reaching there.
Smriti Verma and Tania Bagchi
