Media Sexism Over The Past Decade

“How Women Are Portrayed in Media: Do You See Progress?” is a 2016 opinion article written by Caroline Turner for The Huffington Post. As the title of the article suggests, the author wonders whether, or not the negative and limiting representation of women in media has improved over the last decade. As she builds her arguments, she makes references to a multitude of media sources, as well as some organizations related to media sexism imposed on women. Turner believes that “there has been a slight, but positive shift in how women are portrayed in media”. She further expresses her opinion by referring to how a lot of women anchors are now shown as rigid and powerful, rather than being weak and feminine compared to male anchors. However, her words convey her concern over how it must be very complicated,  or nearly unrealistic to completely change the stereotypical perspectives of people, because the media has portrayed such sexist images ever since it was available to people. She also worries about the negative effect on women and girls in reality due to media’s portrayal of women as the “minorities” of the society. The author remarks that her way of rejecting sexism in media is avoiding to watch films, or any other media materials which demean women. She also recommends others to follow her way to strike the limited and stereotypical representations of genders in media.

My opinion is actually quite the opposite of this article. The author, Caroline Turner, believes that media has improved in exempting from negative images of women, but personally, that sounds inaccurate. In fact, there are even more sexual representations of women nowadays, because the media industry has become very competitive. Hence, many media related companies are trying to come up with contents that are arousing, so that people are tempted to read, listen to, and watch various media sources available. Although I believe that many developed nations have been, and are still attempting to deteriorate the stereotypical images of genders, the way that our media is sexually, and sometimes negatively portraying women still requires more time and effort to be discarded.

 

Refer to the article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/caroline-turner/how-women-are-portrayed-in-media_b_9320666.html