I have watched this video so many times now that I know it word for word.
The cultural impact of this video has been significant. But arguably, it has been important for the wrong reason.
The fact that so many women can relate to this is concerning. Despite gender equality making leaps and bounds, we are still subconsciously conditioned to conform to these gender roles.
As a joint honours History and English Language and Linguistics student, we went into great depths about the impact of the media in controlling our perspective of the world. We’ll never have a true view of the world we live in. Think about the readers of particular newspapers, how their political views bias their writing and askew the truth.
Roland Barthes talks about the creation of myths in his 1957 book Mythologies. The myths created by society are reinforced by the media, for example, think about the Fairy Liquid adverts when you were younger, with mothers in the kitchen with their daughters washing up the dishes. Reinforcing the myth that it is a woman’s purpose to take on domestic roles and to pass that onto their daughters.
Moving on from domestic roles to the role of women in the workplace, I do feel that there is a pressure for women to ‘act like men’ to be seen as successful. I could go into greater depth, but here is one example I personally noticed.
The way women are presented in magazine covers are often in power suits with ‘masculine’ poses. For example, Kylie Jenner’s Forbes issue.
Here she wears a tailored power suit and the other she sits in a huge minimalist office and you can see her full suit paired with louboutins. Even her hair is slicked back and up, almost mimicking a typical business man’s hairstyle.
Now, I don’t have an issue with power suits or the hairstyle or the fact that women in power are being highlighted. The issue to me is that she’s imitating male behaviour in order to be presented as a serious business mogul. Whether it's consciously, by having the photographer tell her to pose, or unconsciously, she put on the suit and just naturally fell into that pose. The association of a suit holding power is because it is linked to male success. This needs to be disassociated. There needs to be a balance and blur of the binary line between gender roles.
It's not just the media, but the language we speak everyday too. Ever heard of semantic derogation?
It means that ‘feminine words’ have aged negatively. For example, mistress once was equal to mister but now has the negative meaning of being a woman of promiscuity or “the other woman”, whereas mister has not changed in meaning.
Language is inherently sexist and the media reinforces this in their use.
Overall society dictates so much of how we move around in the world and the media is the vessel for which these unbalanced myths are presented. To be successful, women have to essentially become ‘The Man’. Despite that, they still are victims to heavy criticism. Same goes for men, they’re either pressured to be ‘trash’ or criticised for being ‘wet’ for expressing their emotions.
Either way, society judges. However, we can fight against it. Most of the time you will only ever know 80% of the truth.
So consume, but don’t take everything for fact.
Writer's Note: Currently I am taking a social media break however, I will still be active when discussing my blog posts. If you have any comments or questions feel free to leave me a comment below or tweet me @roann_gutierrez and I will be sure to reply.
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