ABSTRACT
The role the various media of communication play in conveying ideas about gender has been noted in earlier chapters. For example, children’s books and television programmes were argued to be heavily stereotyped by gender, thereby contributing to the marginalisation and disadvantage girls face within the education system (see Chapter 2). Leisure reading, in the form of girls’ magazines and women’s romantic novels, was argued to facilitate women’s greater ‘emotional literacy’ and therefore the gendered construction of emotion as ‘feminine’. In addition, shifts in sexual morality were noted to be reflected in the increased marketing of sexual cultural products (including men ‘dancers’ or strippers, erotic novels and pornography) to women consumers (Chapter 5). In the previous chapter, the media was said to exhort women to conform to particular ideals of femininity, as these are marked on the body: slim, youthful, sexually attractive. That the various media of communication are so often invoked in explanations of gender inequality is a reflection of their importance in contemporary society. For many sociologists, Britain, like other western, industrialised countries, is a ‘media-saturated’ society. Images and information are widely available on a mass scale, especially via television and printed media, assisted by advances in communication and computer technologies. The penetration of information and images is so extensive that it is ‘interwoven’ with everyday life (Abercrombie 1996: 1-3). Consequently, individuals who may wish to avoid the ‘media-saturated’ society have to try very hard to do so.
