The exploitation of women in mass media is the use or portrayal of women in mass media such as television, film, music, and advertising as objects or sexual beings, in order to increase the appeal of media or a product to the detriment of the women being portrayed, and women in society. This process includes the presentation of women as sexual objects and the setting of feminine beauty ideals that women are expected to reflect.
The exploitation of women in mass media has been criticized by feminists and other advocates of women's rights , and is a topic of discussion in feminist studies and other fields of scholarship. Jean Kilbourne , Robert Jensen , Sut Jhally and other cultural critics accuse mass media of using sex in advertising that promotes the objectification of women to help sell their goods and services.
In Gender Advertisements , Erving Goffman sought to uncover the covert ways that popular media constructs masculinity and femininity in a detailed analysis of more than advertisements. The relationship between men and women, Goffman argued, was portrayed as a parentβchild relationship, one characterized by male power and female subordination.
Many contemporary studies of gender and sexualization in popular culture take as their starting point Goffman's analysis in Gender Advertisements. Among them, later research which expanded empirical framework by analyzing the aspects of women's sexualization and objectification in advertisements, M. For example, in Vogue , sexualized images of women are the primary way of portraying women in positions of inferiority and low social power. Research conducted by Eric Hatton and Mary Nell Trautner included a longitudinal content analysis of images of women and men on more than four decades of Rolling Stone magazine covers β It found that the frequency of sexualized images of men and women has increased, though the intensity of sexualization between men and women is different in that women are increasingly likely to be hypersexualized, but men are not.
Researchers argue that the simple presence of images of sexualized men does not signal equality in media representations of women and men. Sexualized images may legitimize or exacerbate violence against women and girls, sexual harassment, and anti-women attitudes among men. They concluded that similarly sexualized images can suggest victimization for women but confidence for men, consider the implications when women are sexualized at the same rate as men are not sexualized, as they were on the covers of Rolling Stone in the s.
