By the 1980s, it was generally felt that the women’s liberation movement had pretty much succeeded: there was more equality in the workplace, women controlled their reproductive rights and chauvinist behaviour was curtailed.
Second-wave feminists had taken on representations of women in the media, and while they may not have eradicated stereotypes altogether, they had made a very loud and clear point about females having somewhat more purpose than as a body used to sell anything from aftershave to motorcars.
The media, in fact, were held to be largely responsible for the oppressed position that women found themselves in. TV, movies, advertising, magazines and books had reiterated the position of females as the less significant yet decorative sex.
Over the years, as the presence of the media spread to every corner of our lives, so the representations of women contained in them permeated our subconscious. Being able to see that this pervasive representation of women was a fabrication made by the media to serve their own purposes (mainly profit) was quite tough. After all, the more you see of the same thing, the more you believe it to be true.
Media studies often needed to include sessions where the representation of women had to be critically evaluated so that we, as women, became aware of just how much of an impact this constant messaging had affected our perception of ourselves and our role in society.
A significant book about this issue was John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, in which he succinctly writes that "men act and women appear". Throughout the history of visual representation we see that women are constantly aware of being watched and evaluate themselves according to what the viewer thinks.
"Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at," writes Berger. "This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves." However much women may have liberated themselves at home, in the workplace and on the sports field in the last 40 years, we haven’t really liberated ourselves from this preoccupation with how we look.
Our self-worth tends to be centred around appearance and weight – especially in our formative years. A recent Canadian study showed that two out of three teenage girls want to look like a character in a TV series, and one out of three had changed something in their appearance to do so.
The media have been labelled as being responsible for heightening anxiety around our bodies as the images of women that we strive to emulate become less attainable, thanks to the kinds of models that are set up as the ideal (and the application of some Photoshop adjustments).
The media landscape has changed significantly in the past 20 years or so, as well as who controls it. While the old channels still exist (TV, movies, magazines, press) and are still persuasive and powerful visual media, there are now significant new players that get a lot more time and attention: social media – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube.
These players in the communications landscape have more reach, get more attention and have more persuasive power than any previous media could even dream of. And one of the biggest shifts within this media landscape is the fact that the content on these sites is primarily user-generated. Instead of having an impossible-to-attain self-image dictated to us by those who often have sales in mind, we are now in control of our own self-representation. Finally, visual liberation!
However, do a Google search for "selfie" to see how contemporary women are seeing and representing themselves on these free-to-be-who-you-want-to-be channels, and this is what you get:
Women are now totally complicit in the perpetuation of the notion that they are objects to be looked at and evaluated according to their appearance and sexuality. All of these girls are unapologetically presenting themselves as sexual objects and anticipating that the viewer is assessing them as that. The lack of clothing, the dishevelled hair, the pout, the focus on body, the angled head – all allude to girlie magazines from the 1970s and a rather obvious presentation of themselves as being not much more than a desirable body.
In any feminist discussion about women’s poor self-image, it was always "the media" that came in for the most flak: magazine cover images of impossibly perfect models and celebrities that set unattainable benchmarks; movies that perpetuated the "happy ever after" myth that true love completes a woman’s life; TV reality shows that reflected that fashion only works on stick-thin bodies; and advertising that constantly implied that sex sells.
All of this contributed to the bad-guy image of the media. The question now is: Where does the fault lie?
Sisters are not doing it "for" themselves (as Annie Lenox and Aretha Franklin sang), they are doing it "to" themselves. Not only have we moved backwards in terms of what the liberation movement hoped to achieve as to how women see themselves and are represented, we are now our worst enemy in terms of setting precedents for how the next generation see themselves and their self-worth.
Equipped with a camera on every phone, Photoshop on their computers, and their own pages on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, the next generation of women are already seeing themselves purely as objects that need to be looked at and assessed according to whether their appearance matches a "norm" set by their own peers.
The fact that they can edit, tweak and control this appearance to create a fabricated brand image of themselves is not the most worrying part. The worry is that we are once again, as it has been throughout our troubled history, selling ourselves as little more than a decorative object to be evaluated – and how much power and liberation is there in that?