The article deals with the media images of women at this present era. It is not only an assessment but also a critique.
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Author: Arpita Ghosh
“Blondes, wars, famines, football, sex, music, coups d’état – they all arrived on the same train. They unpacked together. They stayed at the same hotel”. (p. 27)
– The God of Small Things: Arundhati Roy
Perhaps this is the most lucid way of referring to the reality of how one can preside over the world on satellite TV by simply sitting back cozily in one’s drawing room couch. The impact of globalization and technological advancement has its maximum sway over the mass media. This called mass media has its firm grips on the minds of the ‘fairer sex’ of humankind. One cannot deny that the primary concern of the growth of media has its eagle-eye on women – both as key target audience and the main protagonists.
Media, the plural form of medium, is a word directly borrowed from Latin meaning ‘an intervening agency, means or instrument’. First applied to newspapers two centuries ago, the word began to appear as a singular collective noun during the 1920s. However, following the World Wars, media has been consistently associated with the mass communication. In this ever-changing world, nothing is static; everything is in a state of flux. Unlike any other forms of communications, mass media too flourished to advocate business and social concerns and to dish out the political-economic scenario of the world before the audience via print, broadcasting, satellite television, or more recently, the web hosting.
In this present era when the globe is being rocked by the aura of globalization, the fundamental concern of media shifts drastically to the ‘women and her body’. The coloured photographs in newspapers or in the glossy pages of magazines, in the huge hoardings at a traffic signal or on the terrace of sky scrapers, in the high definition LCD TV screen at home or the laptops and desktops, everywhere the images of women are all pervasive.
It’s difficult to demarcate from where this attitude of distorting the images of women started. Is it the innovation of the silver screen or is it the brain-child of the consumerism? The answer is debatable. A quick glance into the past will reveal that in the West, it came into existence with the end of the World Wars. After a long span of intermingling with gunpowder and weapons and bloodshed, men went back to the comfortable corners of hearth and women in turn were once again back to the four walls of domesticity; caring and nurturing husband and children. The minds of these women were easily captured with the flooding market of electrical and electronic gadgets which claimed to make their house keeping easier than before. Perhaps it is here that the demarcation started and women with appealing figure and attractive faces started campaigning for consumer goods, and in the process allured the other women at home.
Indians are expert in importing anything and everything from the West, starting from consumers’ goods to dress materials to cosmetics and even etiquettes. Thus in India each and every campaigning of products is associated with female models. Thus the emergence of images of women is various and multi-faceted. However, the images they uphold are at times obnoxious and even contemptible. These ads add nothing but only reinforce the age old prejudices about women. Whether it’s the fairness creams or the ready-to-mix cooking masalas, whether its jewellery or electronic gadgets like washing machines, water purifiers and micro-wave ovens, all these in a round about way restate the fact that women are meant only to cook, wash, and try to look beautiful; that’s the only purpose of their lives. We hardly see any ads which project the women as a hard core professional. On the contrary, they are portrayed as the “superwomen” breed who can very deftly juggle between the roles of a homemaker, a professional, a perfect wife and a mother. I remember the ad of Axe Effect which was being telecasted a few years back which really stuck my mind with the concept it has used. The ad shows that as the man uses that particular spray, women clad in bikinis come rushing from all sides, from the jungles, deserts and like swimming mermaids from the oceans, as if they had incessant female hungers. What does this type of portrayals refer to? One can look into the fairness creams also. Don’t they only reinforce the fact that if one has to win, one needs to be fair complexioned? But what are they going to win? The appreciation of the other sex? We never see ads where men are trying to impress women in such a way. Not only televised ads, even the markets are flooding with books highlighting women; they are referred to as “women’s magazines”. How many of us have heard of “men’s magazines”?
The question remains, are the media images doing justice to the “women”? We all are habituated with the appealing images of silver screen women clad with ravishing dress materials or diamond studded jewellery, or campaigning for laptops or fitness regimes, but what about those innumerable women who have topped the IIMs or IITs or Medicos or CS exams? They are also held up by the media but in scanty ways, in some competitive exam magazines perhaps. We just get flipping glances of those women who have won fame in the intellectual realms. What does that point to? The “intellectual realms” are still heavily guarded by the males. The ones, who get through those gates, are hardly given wide recognition.
Why blame only the ad agencies? The silver screens, whether big or small, are always inventing ways to perpetuate that women are better suited for home-making than anything else. Leave apart the daily soaps and serials, even in the mainstream bioscopes we hardly get to see them with female lead roles. They are only to dance and sing amid the meadows and valleys and ice-capped mountains with the thinnest apparel, and are more indulgent in the arms of the robust heroes. The soaps and serials are far more farcical. All the characters are always seen in gorgeous make-ups and dresses; even in the sleeping scenes they are seen with their eyes heavily laden with eyeliners and mascaras and eye shadows. At times I try hard to contemplate that don’t the directors ever give a second thought to the reality? As long as the whole package is attractive and appealing, none give a damn thought about the reality.
There was a time when “media” had the sole purpose of showcasing the real lives, with which the audience could identify themselves. But standing at the threshold of the first decade of the 21st century I ruminate with the idea, what is it that we all are seeking ways to escape from the real life to embrace the reel life? Since time immemorial, women have been shut up within the four walls to gratify the needs of the men; but lately women are caged within the glamour world to enhance once again the profit of those same men, who are now using the female body to sell their products all across the globe. No matter how much appealing they seem to us, the media images of women are only degrading their status and at times, humiliating too; they only reinstate the age old myths of femininity with an invigorating hype, which in turn are being mindlessly grasped by the masses, irrespective of age, class and socio-economic background.
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