Femininity

June 2008
I begun my communications degree this year and have been looking at issues such as feminity and masculinity and the way gender is represented in the media. I never realised before that women are still being represented unequally and that men are still seen as dominant; in and out of the home! Women's magazines still depict images of women trying to change themselves for men and just trying to look different.
Hegemony is a word used to describe how dominant groups such as media, government etc try to portray certain ideas as dominant to keep the status quo. Kind of like when your in high school and the cool kids beat up on the geeky kids to keep the status quo well that's hegemony, but in real life and on a greater scale! The hegemonic ideas (ideologies) are kept when magazines and television shows represent certain things as being dominant. For example women have for many years been portrayed as housewives this ideology stayed hegemonic because it was represented in all kinds of media, such as magazines, as the right thing to do and that it was a woman's role in life. Not that there is anything wrong with that if you're into it! But nowdays women are still being treated as second class citizens. I don't want to blab on about it too much, but when you watch tv next look at the adverts and the sitcoms what are the women doing in relation to the men? For example the 'One million dollar wheel of fortune' program has a woman co-host you could call her, but what does she actually do? She presses the letters when they light up and by the way those letters come up on their own! and she wears a different outfit and stands there looking pretty the whole show. Now if you imagine the show without her would you still find it as interesting as you do?