Follow up: Responding to Caroline's Post

“…mass media are simply mirrors, reflecting reality...” (Douglas 18)

  

This is a vital quote to understanding the answer to a commonly asked question: what comes first, the chicken or the egg? In this case, is the media creating and selling images to society or is the media simply reselling back images society portrays? Douglas answers this question very well. Through the analogy of a fun house mirror, Douglas states that the media is indeed reselling back images society portrays, but on a much exaggerated scale.      

 

Unlike the traditional idea that women should use their intelligence and abilities to obtain power, the emergence of enlightened sexism has allowed women to use their appearances and sexuality as the means to gain power. This idea seems extremely contradictory to Rich’s notion of women being seen as human rather than sex objects. Enlightened sexism permits women to confidently and proudly embrace themselves. I feel as if embracing this concept, women view it as having the power to devalue something that society view as negative, in this case women flaunting their appearances and sexuality, and making it into something worth celebrating about. My main question, which I can’t answer, is how effective is the action of embracing something society uses against you and making it yours? 

 

After reading Adrienne Rich’s “Claiming an Education” and Susan Douglas’ “Fantasies of Power,” I can’t help but to think about the time when I was a senior in my AP Composition class reading an interesting article by Deborah Tannen titled “Marked Women, Unmarked Men.” In the article, Tannen thoroughly explains all the ways women are marked in which men are not. Women are marked by their appearances, attire, and even their title. An interesting quote from the article states, “Women can't even fill out a form without telling stories about themselves. Most forms give four titles to choose from. "Mr." carries no meaning other than that the respondent is male. But a woman who checks "Mrs." or "Miss" communicates not only whether she has been married but also whether she has conservative tastes in forms of address -- and probably other conservative values as well. Checking "Ms." declines to let on about marriage (checking "Mr." declines nothing since nothing was asked), but it also marks her as either liberated or rebellious, depending on the observer's attitudes and assumptions.” 

(To read the article visit http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/tannend/nyt062093.htm)

 

It seems as if the media and even our own English language want to trap women in certain categories without any options to choose otherwise. Labeling women seems to be much easily done than labeling men; even if men are label, their words are not as bad of a connotation as those assigned for women. (Think about all the negative connotations we thought of when we tried to define 'feminist' in class the other day). Why are women view through the lens of a men? Is there a such thing a as an unmarked woman?