ABSTRACT
Before we consider the media’s role further, it is worth establishing the relative positions of women and men in modern Western democracies. If there is a ‘battle of the sexes’, who is winning nowadays? Women and men generally have equal rights – with a few exceptions within various laws, which we see being campaigned against and changed. The sexes today are generally thought to be ‘equal’, to the extent that the cover of Time magazine wondered if feminism was ‘dead’ in June 1998. There is even a noisy minority who argue that feminism has ‘gone too far’ and that it is now men who have the worst deal in society (Farrell, 2001).
