Women, the most vulnerable members of a society

Mass Media and divertissements should help women, the most vulnerable members of a society, embrace Dramaturgy and Impression Management to put aside glass escalator and glass ceiling, both hidden situations that prevents women from striving for self-esteem

Sweet sin

Your Goddess face like mask strange,

Beautified by two eyes emerald-like,

Oh, woman, oh, woman,

And by a Venus's mouth, peerless,

Splendid and sinless,

Makes gods and angels,

Alas, alike,

Remorseful though, be human!

We presume that this poem portrays a woman whose beauty is beyond the standard. She is such a woman who is impossible to exist unnoticed, and who is able to inspire more than a poet, painter or sculptor.

Then, if God,

Was the Master of the universe,

Unequalled fabulous Author

As like a lovely poetic verse

The Eden He carved with fervor,

I wonder…

Who knows how was our Eve,

Ebony, copper or ivory,

Whom He far from agony

Daydreamed, as I do believe!

In sum, if the universe is so splendid, how might've been the first woman!



In our social environment, contemporarily conventional and stratifying on the basis of status and role, indeed plenty of taboos and prejudices, females are the most vulnerable humans, given barriers like the invisible accelerator that pushes men into higher-level positions encompassing higher salaries_ glass escalator, or the obstacle that keeps women from advancing to top levels at work_ glass ceiling (James M. Henslin, Essential of Sociology, p. 262). However, neither glass escalator nor glass ceiling should prevent women from striving for self-esteem, an important component of personality. Unfortunately, women struggle for self-esteem to achieve self-actualization, a state of self-fulfillment by which people realize their higher potential, each in his or her own unique way (Essentials of Sociology, p. 262), might be disrupted by agents of socialization such as the family, the neighborhood, the school, the church, the workplace, peer groups and the media.

Agents of socialization, according to James M. Henslin, (p. 68) would highly influence on gender, behaviors and attitudes that a society considers proper for its males and females (Essential of Sociology, p. 246), mainly when this sort of assumed-similarity bias which leads us to believe that others have similar attitudes, opinions, and likes and dislikes as we do (Robert S. Feldman, essentials of understanding Psychology) is held within a given social context.

Cristine before

However, achieved social behavior and attitudes would not be shaped so tremendously by family and peer group as by mass media and advertising, greatly undermining factors on developmental personality and gender. And given the “ideological effect” of mass media and advertisements into people's mind, many girls spend enormous amounts of time, energy and “money” attempting to achieve something that is not only trivial, but also completely unattainable (Jean Kilbourne).
Few disagree that women and girls must fight the additive power of the ideological affecting of advertising messages in this environment where “adolescents are new and inexperienced consumers, and thus their prime target”. They are in the process of learning their values and roles (including gender), and developing their self-concepts. Most teenagers are sensitive to peer group pressure and find it difficult to resist or even to question the dominant cultural messages perpetuated and reinforced by that media,” (Jean Kilbourne).

According to Margaret Mead, today our children are more brought up by the media than by their parents themselves. This is a factor through which “adolescent girls compare themselves with those perfectly shaped female figures and get painfully disappointed by the obvious gap” (Jean Kilbourne). That's a reason why adolescent girls and young women often feel impelled to conform to materialistic, consumer-drive and explosive stereotypes. (Jakarta Declaration and Plan of Action for the Advancement of Women in Asia and the Pacific, adopted by the Second Asian and Pacific Ministerial on Women in development, held in Jakarta, June, 1994, and in the United Nations Economic and Social Council, January, 1995).

It is obvious that “we are the product of socialization. Following criteria decoded in Essential of sociology, socialization “goes in us, and behavior comes out” despite the fact that many factors influence behavior. These factors, such as our biological background, the way we are raised, our emotional state, and the ways in which we are influenced by society, are the result of our exposure to socializing agents like mass media and advertising, both important parts in the process of socialization, including gender emancipation regarding females.

“We know that when girls enter adolescence, they face a series of losses_ loss of self-confidence, loss of a sense of efficacy and ambition, and the loss of her ‘voice. They lose the sense of being a unique and powerful self that they had during childhood. Consequently, their esteem plunges rapidly.

The bottom line is that the culture, both reflected and reinforced by advertising, urges girls to adopt a false self. They strive to break barriers through strategies like those Erving Goffman called impression management and dramaturgy as the efforts to manage the impressions others receive of them and the conventionalism to conform to other atypical behavior (dramaturgy[1] and cross-cultural behavior_ Essential of Sociology p. 95).

In certain way, mass media and advertisements help women compete to break socio-psychological sex-stereotyping barriers using strategies like dramaturgy and impression management (mentioned above). In rare occasions, only people with a poor self-esteem do not perform social dramaturgy as they might not understand the meaning of having good public image (Impression management).

Another strategy adolescent girls manage to bury alive their real selves to become “feminine” which means to be nice and kind and sweet to compete with other girls for the attention of boys and to value romantic relationships with them, is looking-glass self, due to the fact that “humanness” is socially created; i.e. the sense of self develops from interaction with others (Charles Horton Cooley in Essential of Sociology p. 59).

In fact, girls are put into a terrible double bind or standard as they have to repress their power, their anger and their exuberance, and to simply be “nice”, although they also eventually must compete with men in the business world (Glass escalator and glass ceiling) to be equally successful. They must be overtly sexy and attractive, but essentially passive and virginal.

Within the science of communication, mass media, including advertising management are aware of this female's vulnerability given their needs for gender emancipation.

“Advertisers are really conscious of their role and do not hesitate to take advantage of the insecurity and anxiety of young female people, usually in the guise of offering solutions. According to Jean Kilbourne in the article: “The more you subtract, the more you add”, all young people are vulnerable to these messages as adolescence is thus a difficult time for most people, mainly for women owing to their gender, considered a social role shaping, and to cross-gender behavior. Furthermore, adolescent girls are generally impressionable in their transitional stage during which they are the receptive audience of images transmitted through the media. They see in media reflections of society's attitudes and ideas often in extreme and caricatured fashion. They may arrive at their views of themselves and their values, and their relationships with the rest of the world through these images. Recent research from Canada and the United States has pointed to the negative impact mass media can have on the self-image or body image in adolescent girls (Kurz, M.K. and Prather, C.J., Improving the Quality of Life of Girls, Association for Women in Development, D.C.) and the United Nations Children's Fund (New York, 1995).

Nowadays, advertisement is one of the most potent messengers in a culture, what that can be toxic for girls' self-esteem. Moreover, in the “Seventeen” magazine, we've found the following statement: “She is the one you want. She's the one we got. She pursues beauty and fashion at every turn.” The advertisement conclude: “It's more than a magazine. It's her life,” (assumed-similarity bias, as the author of the article tries to have the female reader consider herself like the model in the Magazine).

In another ad, “Seventeen” magazine has referred to itself as a girl's “Bible” (Halo-effect [2], as everything related to the Bible is good). Indeed, many girls consider this magazine as such, because they take its advices seriously, inasmuch as they are told what is more important about them is their perfume, their clothing and their beauty. Their “essence” is their underwear.

Thus, many girls spend enormous amount of time and energy attempting to achieve something that is not only trivial but also completely unattainable as they are not told that the glossy images of flawlessly beautiful and extremely thin women would not have the impact they do if they do not live in a culture that encourages them to believe in what they can and to remake their body into perfect commodities to strive performing dramaturgy and impression management to achieve social success to realize their high potential.

However, Anna Becker pointed out in the article of Jean Kilbourne that this belief is universal because in many other cultures, people may admire a particular body shape without seeking to emulate it.

Women are especially vulnerable in a given society because human body have been objectified and commoditized for long through fitness and cosmetic advertisements. And young women are the most vulnerable, especially those who have experienced early deprivation, sexual abuse, family violence, or other trauma, owing to the fact that cultivating thinner body offers some hope of control and success to young women with a poor self-image and overwhelming personal problems that have no easy solutions.

Young girls are so afraid of being humiliated by pressure of ominous peer groups [3] that they become deeply vulnerable to ad messages. Of course, the seeking for public image to meet public standard requirements undeniably may lead to anxiety and stress when these women are unable to fulfill such requirements. “Magazine and ads, while creating expectation on gender equality through femininity, beauty and guitar-like body exaggeration, may provoke anxiety about weight and ugliness. Besides, they enriched by increasing their revenue because good and image promotion is profitable,” i.e. the main focus of ads if profit rather than promotion itself. Moreover, Catherine Steiner-Adair, within Jean Kilbourne's article, suggests that perhaps eating disorders emerge at adolescence because it is at this point that “females experience themselves to be at a crossroad [4] in their lives where they must shift from a rational approach to life to an autonomous one.

Preoccupation for public image takes a toll on mental health as well. “The tendency to see one's body from the outside regarding physical attractiveness, sex appeal, measurements, and weight more focused on achieving identity _and success_ rather than health, strength, energy level of coordination or healthy fitness, has many harmful effects such as diminished mental performance, increased feeling of shame and anxiety, depression, sexual dysfunction, and the development of eating disorders”.

In reality, according to this article, cultural concerns and conflicts about girls' social worries are reflected in it. However, according to Jean Kilbourne's article, it is not only girls themselves who see these “undermining” but necessary images because their parents, teachers and doctors see them as well, and these latter influence vulnerable human females' sense of how they should be.

Lower status of women in many cultures is often directly linked to gender bias in girls. Empowerment of women throughout their life development must be encouraged. Methodological strategies aiming at creating a shared environment in which adolescent girls feel respected and encouraged to pursue their dream and high full potential are needed to help develop women in the future. Mass media and ads, as agent of socialization, handled and guided with caution, must be aware of women' needs for growth and happiness to play an important and better role in this social emancipation process.

These agents of socialization, means with which women could put aside absurd psycho-social barriers, would then help these human females attaint such high potential while they would keep on being attractive, sexy and fashionably updated, without, however, disregarding their capacity of procreation.

Cristine after

1_ Dramaturgy is a micro-sociological approach pioneered by Erving Goffman in which social life is analyzed in terms of drama or the stage. He said that social life is like a drama or stage play. Birth ushers us onto the stage of everyday life, and that our socialization consists of learning to perform on that stage where the “self” lies at the center of our performance. We have ideas of how we want the others to think about us, and we use our role in everyday life to communicate those ideas. Impression management means that we must effort to control, manage or alter the impression that others have about us.
2_ Halo-effect: when we consider a person good (or bad) in one category, we are likely to make a similar evaluation in other categories regarding the same person. Ex: “She is so pretty that it is hard to believe that she has AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome)”, or “He is so kind that it's hard to believe he's a child molester”, or “Be careful with Muslims people (guilt by association)!”

Guilt by association is the logical fallacy of claiming that something must be false because of their characteristics or features. For example: Some charities have been fraudulent. Therefore, charities must be frauds. The opposite of “Guilt by association” is “Honor by association”. Ex: Magazine is good because is like a “Bible”. Accordingly, attractive people are often judged as having a more desirable personality and more skills than someone of average appearance.

3_ a peer group is conceived as a small group of similarity aged, fairly close friends, sharing the same activities (Kirchler et al., 1993). Adolescents spend much of their time in these groups. According to Bradford Brown (1990), high school students spend twice as much of their time with peers as with parents or other adults. Thus, the role played by peers in adolescence is very critical.

4_ Adolescence is a crossroad because it is crucial period on people's growth. It is a time of profound changes and, occasionally, turmoil. Considerable biological change occurs as adolescence attaints sexual and physical maturity. At the same time, and rivaling with these physiological changes, important social, emotional and cognitive changes occur as adolescents strive for independence while they move towards adulthood. Adolescents face a period of rapid physical, cognitive and social change that affects them for the rest of their lives. Moreover, adolescents spend less time with their parents and more time with their peers. Dramatic changes in society also affect adolescents' development. Ethnic and cultural diversity of adolescents as a group increase dramatically.



Main source of information:

Jean Kilbourne's article

Robert S. Feldman: Essential of Understanding Psychology

James M. Henslin: Essential of Sociology, sixth edition