User:Mlbeach18/Exploitation of women in mass media

Film Section
In considering the way that films are put together, 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 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.

Girls and women are heavily represented in the media. This has been a reality as early as the 1980s, where women were portrayed as significantly skinnier and younger than the everyday woman. Women were portrayed as being passive, dependent on men, and housewives. The media have also created two types of women: the bad ones, and the good ones. Good women tend to be women that focused on their family life, taking care of the husband and others, and those who are loyal. On the other hand, bad women were the ones that did the opposite—those that are hard, cold, or aggressive.

One nonprofit organization, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, has been pushing the industry for years to expand the roles of women in film. This Institute is a US non-profit research organization that researches gender representation in media and advocates for equal representation of women. Geena Davis has expressed that throughout the film industry, there has been a lack of female representation and a pattern of inaccurate portrayals of women and girls in movie roles. The institute is against stereotyping of female characters, and it furthers calls for roles that empower women rather than denigrate them.

Black women are presented by mass media as obnoxious, ignorant, confrontational and loud. Media often creates a stereotype. Not only do the women struggle with internalizing these fixed notions of who they are, they are also faced with definitions of beauty for African American girls that are measured against white standards of what beauty should be. At the same time black characters are depicted in films in occupational roles such as athletes, servants, musicians and criminals, roles which hold a lower status than the roles of white characters.