"Burst Media Bubbles:" Behind Closed Doors

“He suddenly went mad and started beating me,” sobbed my maid Pushpa on a bright Monday morning. I patted her back awkwardly and glanced at my watch. This was almost a daily morning ritual and I was already ten minutes late for class. I would have to rush.

“I’m buying your mom a Titan Raaga watch for her birthday,” my dad told me over the phone. After I had suitably ‘ohhed’ and ‘aahed’ over the idea, I turned my attention back to an important writing assignment. As I bit my lip and searched for inspiration to write, a thought hit me out of the blue. How different the lives of two women could be. It seemed rather ironical. There was my mother with a loving husband and two healthy children, and probably the only time she had been mildly worried was when my dad decided to go on an African Safari. And then there was my maid. Her life often seemed like a ‘Kollywood ‘movie and not a very good one at that.

As I ‘googled’ domestic violence, the WHO site http://www.who.int/gender/violence/en/ popped up. A WHO's World Report on Violence and Health notes that, "one of the most common forms of violence against women is that performed by a husband or male partner.” This type of violence is frequently invisible since it happens behind closed doors. Moreover, legal systems and cultural norms often do not treat it as a crime, but rather as a "private" family matter or a normal part of life.

I was in shock. With a warm and loving family like mine, I simply can’t envisage dealing with such a situation. What would I do? How would I react? I cannot imagine my father, brother or uncle hurting a woman in the family under any provocation. Why was Pushpa’s life so different and why did she put up with it? As a barrage of questions rose in my mind, I realized that I had not been very sensitive to her that morning. As pages of grim statistics and heart wrenching stories popped up on my computer, I decided that even if I couldn’t be empathetic towards Pushpa’s situation, from tomorrow I would at least be a little more sympathetic.

Burst Media Bubbles: Role models or Eye candy?

Much as with television, video games can confine women in many ways as well. One of the most noticeable elements of many video games is not really so much stereotypes about women’s roles, but the way they are presented as sex objects. The sensuous body of Lara Croft, the female protagonist, can be viewed nude on many websites. Even though she is not a real woman, she is idolized and made into an unrealistic picture of how perfect she can be.
For teenage boys, she represents the perfect woman who is impossibly beautiful. And for the teenage girls, she is the role model with a perfect body that any normal woman would hope for. Thus boys and girls are led to idolizing a figment of imagination, thus making the normal woman look dull and lifeless in comparison. Further, violence and sexiness was paired more often with females in video games than violence and muscular physiques for male characters.



Video games have come a long way in terms of participation of women in the makings of a game, but it still has a lot to learn on being sensitive towards its portrayal of women.

Burst Media Bubbles: Women and Media

Media is widely known to represent and reinforce a mainstream ideology of a contemporary culture. While the portrayal of women in media has attained considerable changes over the years, one has to analyse as to how much the media has accommodated the changing roles of today’s modern woman.

Sex role stereotyping is still seen in various forms of media. Unrealistic representations of women are even more common in fashion magazines where impossibly thin girls are posed in ways that often show off how skinny they are. This creates an impression on many young women and girls that it is important for them to look like a model and thus begins an unhealthy obsession with weight loss. This video explores the media portrayals of women and its effects.

Women’s fashion magazines like Elle and Vogue impose an unnatural model of beauty and many women fall for it. Women looking at these bodies feel less confident of their own bodies and are likely to develop issues like anorexia or bulimia.

Just as a man’s role is stereotyped as a patriarchal one, a modern woman’s role is confined to external beauty and sexuality. It is important to note the effects these portrayals have on people and while this video is by no means a representative of the population, it proves that they do affect people's views on what women should be like.

Burst Media Bubbles: The Nike Woman

A great video on the' progressive' woman. The new Nike Ad is a venture to promote the new Nike shoe series and Ipod nano. The Ad concentrates on a race between men and women with the product. The Ad is sensitive to the changing roles of a modern woman.

Burst Media Bubbles: The Dress Code

The film Sivakasi is a typical mainstream commercial Tamil film that falls under the ‘masala’ category. The hero is portrayed as a brave and honest man while the heroine is the beautiful rich girl falling in love with the hero, a mechanic.
The scene is the introduction scene of the heroine, who is dressed in modern clothes. She is being ‘man-handled’ by a guy in the market. The hero rescues her and starts lecturing her on how Tamil women should behave. He assumes a typical patriarchal role and says that Tamil women should be confirmed to traditional standards by wearing a 6 yard sari and flowers on her head. Take a look at the clip......

Take a look at the clip...
This kind of stereo typing is seen in most Tamil movies where the woman is constantly expected to adhere to the invisible social rules whereas the man is allowed free rein over several issues. In Tamil cinema women are still treated and portrayed as a door-mat, lover or wife of a larger-than-life hero. The woman is either an amazingly self-righteous person with a single-minded dedication for the well-being of her family or a girl who falls in love with the hero hero, dressed in minimal clothes and always singing songs in Swiss Alps or Pollachi landscapes with lewd lyrics.
The all-new woman is rapidly redefining her limits and emerging to claim the traditionally male space as her own.
It is high time Kollywood understands the evolving standards of women and moves away from the traditional patriarchal structure. Cinema, being one of the largest promotional devices, should be used to empower women and strengthen their social ties.

Burst Media Bubbles :Behind every woman’s success there is a fairness cream

The grip of advertising on media strengthens as it become more and more dependent on advertising revenue for survival in the market. This has lead to the growing proportion of advertisements in all media channels and their ever increasing influence on the mainstream ideology of the society.

Advertisements reinforce the stereotypical definitions of gender where traditionally established male and female roles in the Indian patriarchal society are emphasised over and over. Indian advertisements still consider looking after children, washing, cooking, cleaning, and other domestic chores as the domain of women. Most advertisements show women as ‘objects of beauty’ or as representing the ‘glorified womanhood’. This idealisation put tremendous pressure on women. The repeated exposure to these advertisements especially through visual media has profound psychological impacts on the audience.

The message that the myriad of cosmetic advertisements, irrespective of their brands, perpetuates is that for attaining social approval and success in life, women should have a fair, flawless complexion. The ads of popular brands like Fair and Lovely, Lux, Garnier, No marks repeatedly reinforce this notion.

[Check This out:Part1, Part 2 ,Part 3,Part 4,Part 5 ]
Here is the recent example of the ‘Ponds cream’ ad that features popular Bollywood actors Saif Ali Khan,Priyanka Chopra and Neha Dhupia.This advertising tells young girls how important it is for them to be fair and beautiful so that their boyfriends will not leave them and go in search of fair-skinned beauties. The lengthy ad fashioned in a Bollywood movie set-up with 5 parts depicts the relationship between a young girl and her boyfriend. Her boyfriend dumps her because she was dark complexioned and therefore ‘not beautiful’. The desperate girl came to know about his new girl friend and laments over her dark skin. In the meantime, she came across a Ponds cream ad and started using it. They happened to meet again and she couldn’t conceal her love for him. As guaranteed, the seven weeks continuous use of Ponds Cream gives her skin a ‘radiant pinkish-white glow’. Finally Saif left Neha and came back to Priyanka and she is all happy again.

The ad reinforces the ‘absurd notion’ that for a woman to be successful and happy in life she should be fair and beautiful. It implies that women are powerless and at the mercy of men if they are not ‘beautiful’. On the other hand Neha, Saif Ali Khan’s new girl friend is portrayed as a fussy and evil woman .

The racist and gender biased implications of these kind of ads have profound impact on popular ideologies in society. These ads glorify the concept of ‘fair-skinned beauty’ which would help women to win men’s appreciation and they show men being mesmerised by women’s gorgeous looks. The ad indicates that men choose women for their physical attractiveness and not her character and inner qualities. In order to enjoy loyalty and fidelity in love, women should always look good and pleasing and the brand offers its fairness creams as a means to achieve this.

Check out the original version of the ad here: -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LULoHxxsCPs

Burst Media Bubbles!

I'm delighted to announce the launch of a series of special posts, "Burst Media Bubbles", as part of the 2009 16 Days Campaign against Gender Violence.

Between 25 November and 10 December 2009, a small team of four media students - Anusha Parthsarathy, Anusha Surendran, Nileena M S, and Anjali Kispotta - will post links to media stories on gender violence. They will also share their personal views on each link, through a brief commentary, focusing primarily on print and online stories, photographs, advertisements and film clippings. Most of these will either directly depict, or in some way appear to perpetuate gender violence. However, we also that they will find, and lead us to, positive examples, that depict issues of gender and violence with sensitivity.

The bottom-line objective of this exercise is to generate opinion, and debate on words, vocabulary and images that are already in the public domain. What do you think? Do you agree with our bloggers? Do you have other examples to share? Leave a comment on this blog and keep coming back for new posts! Just search for the tag "Burst Media Bubbles"!

This activity is adapted from www.takebackthetech.org - check out their superb website!