To what extent do the media effects an individual's self-identity?
Context
I have decided to look at to what extent the media affects an individuals self-identity. I am directly concerned with how the media affects young women within today's society, particularly through the use of gender stereotyping within young women's magazines, mainly through articles and advertisements. Here, the ideas and beliefs already created by the media are useful to advertisers because they are socially accepted ideologies. They know that they will influence women. It has been stated in the past that it is these media interpretations of 'The Perfect Woman' that have been the cause for so many women becoming increasingly pressured into looking good and so dieting, keeping fit etc. This can, in extreme cases lead to serious psychological diseases such as anorexia and bulimia, where one of the main causes has been identified as social pressure.
I am going to study this as, being a young woman in modern society myself, I have a very personal interest in this topic. Through conducting this research, I aim to prove my hypothesis that 'women are stereotyped in the advertising media, mainly through the use of supermodels and celebrities and made to feel they have a social duty to look good' (for men).
In order to go about proving my hypothesis, I am going to conduct a content analysis on women's magazines available on the current market. Here I expect to find that there are lots of articles and advertisements that send out both covert and overt messages to their (female) readers. I expect to find that these messages will be mostly sent out by presentation and also language. I am also going to conduct short, informal interviews on a small selection of young women to see how influenced they feel by media pressure.
I am going to conduct this study from a feminist perspective, as most of the work previously done on this subject has been carried out by feminist sociologists, who have been very critical of the representations of women in the media. However, they do differ in their emphasis:
Liberal feminists believe that the situation is improving as the number of female editors and journalists increase.
Social and Marxist feminists believe that the stereotypical portrayals of women are a by-product of the need to make a profit.
Radical feminists stress that the media reproduces patriarchy. They think that traditional ideologies are used by the male-dominated media to keep women oppressed in a narrow range of roles.
The perspective I am intending to take continues from research conducted by one particular feminist sociologist, Marjorie Ferguson, who conducted a content analysis on women's magazines in Britain between 1949&1974 and 1979-1980:
'I have argued that women's magazines collectively compromise a social institution which server to foster and maintain a cult of femininity. This cult is manifested both as a social group to which all those born female can belong, and as a set of practices and beliefs: rights and rituals, sacrifices and ceremonies whose periodic performance re-affirms a common femininity. These journals are not merely reflecting the female role in society; they are also supplying one source of definitions of and socializations into that role'.
Marjorie Ferguson.
Marjorie Ferguson noted that such magazines are organized around a 'cult of femininity', which promotes an ideology that where women should be caring for others/family/marriage and most importantly their looks. Modern female magazines, especially those aimed at young women are attempting to move away from these stereotypes-although Ferguson argues that even these tend to focus on 'Him, Home and Looking good' (for him).
As women have begun to achieve more recognition outside the family home and now are beginning to compete with men in the workplace, it should be reflected in the mass media. However, sociological research suggests that the roles allocated to the sexes in for example, TV, film, and advertising have been restricted in the following ways:
* Women's range of roles have been limited
* Women are presented as ideals
* Women are selected for roles so they can look good for men
* Men are seen as the aggressors and women, the victims
Women's magazines can be interpreted as providing their female readers with step-by-step instructions/recipes of how to be the 'perfect woman', with the two main themes and ideas as being a wife and mother. However, there has been some movement.
Firstly, there has been a shift from 'Getting and keeping your man' to self-help. For example, articles such as 'Why single is better'. The role of the 'Independent Woman' has emerged from the mid 70's in magazines such as Cosmopolitan.
Winship stresses the supportive roles such magazines can play in the lives of young women. She says that such magazines present women with a broader range of options and information, and they tackle problems largely ignored by the male-dominated media. For example, domestic violence, child abuse and rape.
Although, even in the light of these changes, Ferguson still feels that the message is still being reinforced, that women should identify with this femininity that focuses on 'Him, Home and looking good'. It is my belief that mainly the advertising media reinforces this idea mainly through the use ...
This is a preview of the whole essay
Winship stresses the supportive roles such magazines can play in the lives of young women. She says that such magazines present women with a broader range of options and information, and they tackle problems largely ignored by the male-dominated media. For example, domestic violence, child abuse and rape.
Although, even in the light of these changes, Ferguson still feels that the message is still being reinforced, that women should identify with this femininity that focuses on 'Him, Home and looking good'. It is my belief that mainly the advertising media reinforces this idea mainly through the use of supermodels and celebrities.
The majority of women on the television and in magazines tend to be under 30. Physical good looks, sex appeal and youth tend to be necessary attributes for women to be successful in show business.
Wolf (1990) points out that the advertising media present a particular physical image as the 'normal/ideal' or 'perfect' image. These images may be unattainable for the majority of the young women who read these magazines and some commentators such as Orbach (1991) have linked these images to the causes of serious psychological diseases such as Anorexia and Bulimia in teenage girls.
The objectification of women's bodies within the media has been a diverse and frequent topic of research by sociologists.
Laura Mulvey (1975) argues that the dominant part of view within the media is that of a masculine, especially where women are concerned.
The female body is used so that the men have 'something to look at'. It is displayed to provide pleasure and equip men with a sense of control. The female becomes a passive object, merely for men's delight.
This idea is taken to the extremes in pornography. Although, there are now some mild forms of this, which have become socially accepted. For example, The Sun's 'page 3 girls', who Joan Smith (1990) says reinforce 'a fantasy of willingness' to men.
Prominent themes within popular women's magazines are the idea of 'The quest for a man', the idea of women striving to look their absolute best, and following the ideas of the female stereotype in order to attract a man.
Women's portrayal in the media is an important aspect of sociological research concerning the position of women in modern society. From research into 'media stereotyping', it has been said that the media reinforces and reproduces stereotypes around gender.
Women are usually portrayed as housewives/mothers or alternatively, they become sex objects for men to look at (eye candy).
The study I intend to carry out will attempt to follow up Marjorie Ferguson's study to see if the situation has changed, or whether women are still being traditionally stereotyped in magazines.
Methodology
As this study is mainly based around research, I should consider very carefully which methodology I will use. As I am looking at gender stereotyping in magazines, the best method of research I can use to gather useful information would be content analysis. I intend to conduct this on young women's magazines available on the market today.
This is a very good and effective method for me personally to use; as being a young woman myself, I have very easy access to these magazines I personally read. Also this method is straightforward and there are no ethical concerns. Also, this isn't a very time-consuming method, is quite cheap and there are plenty of resources available.
Content analysis can be a quantative method; essentially it is simply a counting exercise asking questions requiring answers through the research such as 'How many times does something occur and How often'?
The purpose of content analysis is to help prove my hypothesis so I can display valid and reliable evidence that women are stereotyped, or that magazines deliver both covert and overt messages to their target audience of young female readers. This overall message being that they have a social duty to look good, (usually for men). Content analysis will produce an objective record of the frequency of these pre-selected items
Sociologists who carry out content analysis within the media may use quantative methods, qualitative methods, or they may combine the two.
Tuchman studied how women are portrayed on American television from 1952 to 1974. Using quantative methods of research, she found that men were prominent in all types of programme, women however were very rarely shown in roles of occupation.
Using the method of content analysis is appealing to me as it is mot time-consuming, is cheap and seems the most effective way of gathering my research.
Simply counting how many times a 'stereotypical' advertisement or article appears in a magazine is not enough. I shall have to look into the meanings of the texts and images, and study the language that is used. However, as I am taking a feminist perspective, I shall also have to be careful how I interoperate data, as different researchers may produce different interpretations of different texts.
To avoid this, I will conduct a semi-structured and informal interview on a small group of young women aged between 16 and 25. This will ensure that I can collect useful information on how young women feel towards the medias portrayal of 'The Perfect Woman', and look at how they perceive this image. I am also interested to find out whether these images influence women to look good for themselves or if it is for the pleasure of a man.
Using these methodologies, I am combining both Quantative and Qualitative methods to produce the most valid and reliable results, which should hopefully prove my hypothesis. This will allow me to continue further the study of Marjorie Ferguson who conducted a content analysis on popular women's magazines in the 60's. She found that women were mainly portrayed as housewives and mothers.
I aim to continue with the study, but being aware of the developments that have taken place in women's magazines over the years, I will look at how women are made to feel they should look a certain socially accepted way in order to please the opposite sex.
Content
It is here where I will display what my study found. My hypothesis was that 'women are stereotyped in the advertising media and made to feel they have a social duty to look good'. I kept this in mind throughout my study, constantly referring back to it and interpreting and analyzing my results accordingly.
As my hypothesis is quite specific, I chose magazines that seem to be popular with young women aged between 16 and 25. Ideally, I would have liked to have looked at selling figures of certain magazines to determine the most popular, but lack of time disallowed this. Instead, I chose magazines popular between my peers and myself. The magazines I decided upon were:
* *Bliss
* *More!
* *Cosmopolitan and
* *Company
I tried to divide the magazines into age groups. For example, Bliss is generally for between 14-16 year olds, More! is probably 17-20 year olds and both Cosmopolitan and Company are magazines generally for the over 20's. so I had a varied age range that still fell under the category of 'young women'.
My hypothesis states that it is magazines that make young women feel pressured into looking 'perfect', usually for men, so I specifically chose fashion and beauty magazines as well as general teenage girl's magazines because I wanted to find out the reasons why women feel they have to look good, as since Ferguson conducted her study, it has become socially accepted that women do enjoy taking an interest in fashion and beauty. However, it is my opinion that women only want to look good because of the influence of supermodels and celebrities portrayed in the media. Not because they want to look good for themselves.
The initial selling point of a magazine is usually the cover, as this is what is displayed on the shelves. One of my magazines studied, Bliss, had a photo of Britney Spears on the cover. She is supposedly an 'idol' for a young teenage audience. Her image is that of the 'perfect' female. Eg) Flawless skin, beautifully made-up, fashionably dressed etc. as an 'idol', many young girls would love to look like her due to high social pressure.
The other three magazines I studied displayed the faces of young women on their covers who appeared to follow the ideology of the 'Perfect Woman'. Of course, this could simply be my perception which is where interviewing was useful.
The main theme running through these magazines was fashion and beauty, which I was aware of because this is now general and accepted theme of most women's magazines. As mentioned however, it is how the magazine represents this theme and the reasons why the media believes women should follow the stereotype that I am interested in.
I purchased 4 magazines and conducted a content analysis. I looked through each magazine individually for certain criteria. I was mainly looking for articles that overtly focused on encouraging the reader to look like their favorite celebrities and supermodels, also advertisements delivering this message covertly by using these celebrities and supermodels to advertise beauty products. This leads the female reader into a false impression that if they use the product advertised they will look like the model in the advertisement.
I also looked at articles focusing on men and sex. These articles such as 'Position of the Fortnight' in 'More!' magazine and 'How to make him fall in love with you', featured in Cosmopolitan.
I finally looked for any articles that were moving away from the stereotyped woman who must look good and that instead focused on the idea of the 'Independent Woman', encouraging feminism.
My results are shown in the table below:
It is quite clear from the table that most of the articles and advertisements in magazines tend to focus on encouraging women to look a certain, socially accepted way. They seem to do this by using examples of 'The Perfect Woman' to sell products or to reinforce the idea that this is the socially accepted way to look. Advertisers are obviously aware of the influence of celebrities on young women as use this as a selling point.
'Bliss' was a magazine that tended to move away from the idea that women should look good for men, but bearing in mind the age range of it's audience, most of the articles were about pop stars and television or fun quizzes such as 'Are you a control freak?'. These were generally just for the entertainment of young girls.
Although I found a lot of fashion and beauty articles, but these were mainly just advertisements.
I found that it was the other magazines that were more for young women, rather than young teenagers that had the most articles focusing on looking like a celebrity/supermodel. Cosmopolitan even had articles actually headlined 'Look like a star' and 'Steal her style', where a celebrity was pictured and a selection of clothes were presented almost identical to what she was wearing, encouraging women to look like the celebrity. I was quite shocked at this as the magazine was delivering the message so overtly to the reader. Articles like these were used solely to stereotype young women and make them feel they have a social duty to look good, exactly what my hypothesis stated.
Magazines such as 'More!' featured articles on how to look good for men's benefit. When conducting my content analysis, I found that there was an entire section on men and sex, featuring articles such as 'Position of the fortnight' and 'How to make him fall in love with you', which again quite overtly deliver a message to women that they must look a certain way for the benefit of men.
Although, I was impressed that Cosmopolitan included an entire recruitment section to encourage women to have careers and be independent.
However, most of the magazines focus on how women should be looking. They are full of celebrities and supermodels in order to encourage young women to copy them instead of being individual, hence reinforcing the idea that women are naive and want to look as beautiful as they can in order to appeal to men. So these magazines see women as sex objects.
I couldn't prove my hypothesis by simply conducting a content analysis as my opinions as a feminist could be selective and my interpretations could then overlook the study. So in order to avoid this, I decided to conduct some short, informal interviews with 3 women.
One was aged 16, one was aged 20 and the other was 25. This way I could get a fair age range. I used women that I know on a personal level, as I was able to conduct the interviews informally, also it was easier to get people I knew to take part. The main question I was asking was:
"Do you think it is the magazines you read that influence you to look good eg) Celebrities, supermodels etc?", and the overall answer was "Yes", especially from the young 16 year old I asked:
"You see pictures of people like Jennifer Lopez and Kylie and you know boys fancy them so you want to look like them because they're pretty and fashionable".
I think this summed up the overall opinions. I also asked a 20-year-old girl who said that the main reason she read these magazines was "to see what all the stars are wearing". The 25-year-old girl I asked agreed that it is magazines that influence her style.
In conclusion, I found evidence that it is the magazines that are still reinforcing the idea that women have to follow social norms and look 'perfect', or the socially accepted idea of perfect to look good for men's pleasure.
Evaluation
My rationale was very clear about what I was setting out to do. I had a very detailed hypothesis so that it was a definite, achievable task. I knew what I was looking for, what I was going to study, the aims of my study and the methodology I would use to study it. I stated what perspective I would take and what I expected to find. I found the rationale helpful to refer to throughout the study, so I could stay focused on the specific aims and my hypothesis was regularly referred to.
My context was very detailed as I had a lot of secondary sources. A lot of sociological research has been conducted on the media, especially by feminist sociologists. The main study I was interested in, Marjorie Ferguson's research on women's magazines in the 60's, is very well documented in local libraries. There are also lots of sources on media influences so I found research to be quite straightforward to explore. There were quotes from Marjorie Ferguson herself, so I had an insight into her opinions.
The methods I used to research were appropriate. I chose Content Analysis, which was the most effective way to research the media. I firstly made sure of this by researching it using books and the Internet; I was able to make sure that this an appropriate method to use, and after researching, I still feel it was the best methodology for the study as it was used successfully by Ferguson in her study. It allowed me to present that it is the magazines young women read that pressure them into thinking they have a social duty to look good.
In order to avoid any biased interpretations, I also chose to conduct short, informal interviews so I could get an insight into what young women actually think about the females represented in magazines and the perceptions the images presented give. Although this was another good method, I would have preferred to ask more questions or even use a questionnaire to get a wider variety of opinions as I only used 3 women due to lack of time. So obviously, the findings of the interview, though valid, cannot be generalized, as they are not representative.
Having chosen these suitable methods, my findings were presented in the content very clearly. The evidence was analyzed with reference to my objectives. I presented the results of the content analysis in a table of the tallied scores, which displayed clearly how many articles appeared under each category. I made these categories in order to keep to what exactly I was looking for in my content analysis and they were successful in keeping the research in order. I think my results could have been displayed further by using pie charts and bar graphs etc.
I could have also recorded (overtly, to avoid any ethical dilemmas) the interviews and transcribed them rather than simply taking notes, as my interview could then be more reliable.
The conclusions reached clearly relate to the hypothesis and prove it to be correct, that 'women are still being stereotyped in the media though the use of celebrities and supermodels in magazines making women feel they have a social duty to look good (usually for men).'
My study's advantages are that it is reliable and replicable. It effectively follows up Marjorie Ferguson's research indicating clearly that there have been some developments of which I have analyzed. Disadvantages are that the results from interviews may not be fully representative.
Overall however, the conclusion is that this study was successful, which showed quite clearly that women are still made to feel under a certain amount of pressure from society reinforced by magazines showing supermodels and celebrities as the 'Perfect Woman'.
However, if I were to conduct this study again, I would use a wider range of magazines, for example I could look at older age groups to see if it is just young women's magazines that reinforce the idea of looking 'perfect' (for men), or if indeed older generations eg) Over 25's 30's etc are also influenced. I could look at older generated magazines such as "Woman", "Woman's Own" etc.
I could also look at men's magazines such as "FHM" to see how women are stereotyped there. Or consequently, I could conduct the same study, but look to see how males are perceived in magazines to find out if there is 'a typical male', and if men also feel they have a social stereotype they feel they must look like.
Kerry Robson 13MH
