Media Treatment

If you perform an Internet search of people who buy and read glossy magazines, people who subscribe to the Oprah fan club, and people who are opinionated and up to date with celebrity gossip you will find that the majority of them are women. Women speak fondly of Oprah and all the wonderful charity work she has done for the children and women in Africa and the extraordinary educational projects she has accomplished in the United States. Very rarely do we find any begrudging complaints from viewers about Oprah’s diva behavior or plight for racial justice at any cost. Did you notice that most of the viewers in her audience are female? To be fair, there was a woman that filed a civil action recently claiming she was injured in her mad pursuit to grab a coveted, desirable chair when the doors were open to allow the audience in.Lets assume that the majority of celebrity news readers are female. Lets move on to whether it affects male and female differently.

Based on readership, men subscribe and read magazines along the lines of Forbes, Economics, and Wired. They are usually wired to be sensitive to market trends, business analysis, and anything that has to do with fronting a n economic edge. That’s just the tip of the entrepreneurial iceberg. Most men care about whether is affects them financially, while most women generally worry about the social norm it might impose on the sociala nd personal status quo. Therefore, it’s plausible to conclude that most men would not be the target audience for supermarket tabloids and junk news. Discontent with this sexist presumption, I decided to search the Internet and talk to some of my friends to placate my curiosity.

For the sake of research, I approached 5 nurses and asked them about this Anna Nicole Smith saga. They gasped in horror to learn of her demise (apparently they had not heard the breaking news on every media circuit because they were at work) and proceeded to discuss intimate details about the celebrity’s life prior to her death. I inquired with a few friends regarding their knowledge of the Oprah syndrome (something along the lines of raising her to virtual god status) and the a few of my friends agreed that Oprah should run for office. They would vote for her.

To be fair to women, entertainment news is not all that bad, albeit not substantative nor relevant either. It numbs the brain and replicate the process on a continual basis as to replace the ability to critically or logically have a meaningful discussion about anything. Personally, I’d like to use entertainment news as that, entertainment. It illustrates all the moronic behavior that people with pretty faces and skinny bodies will do in their Hollywood bubble. Once in a while, one of those pretty faces and skinny bodies will surprise you by doing something interesting and quasi altruistic – like promote Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth or the famine and AIDS epidemic in Africa. To be fair, you can hardly blame the celebrities as their images are involuntarily distorted and at the mercy of the media. They’re either portrayed as sexual objects, or scathing bitches or divas. It’s a no win situation.

The culprit is the media, obsessed with transforming the ridiculous lifestyle of the rich and famous into a fallacy that it can be achieved by the average women readers. They impose unrealistic expectations on what is considered beauty and success, and more importantly, reality. They lie and lie so they can sell their magazines, then they misrepresent and distort the truth so to make the story more enticing. They add sex and booze to each article, sprinkle in a bit of violence, and they have tabloid trash. What I find most interesting is that 7 times out of ten, these articles are about female celebrities. It confounds me that even in celebrity news that women are targeted and degraded as sexual objects. These media vultures circle the females and criticize their physique, promote the skinny bodies, and chastise them from their childrearing decisions to their personal decision in men. While I realize that they are public figures, not comprehensively protected by any privacy rights, but if you’re going to villify celebrities then bring in the men too! It’s a sexist media.

This disproportionate depth of negativity and hostility toward women is fundamentally unfair and cruel. Case in point, Anna Nicole Smith was villified in the media, but her boyfriend, Howard K. Stern, has barely been mentioned even though he has been with her for over a decade and as intimate in her personal affairs as any spouse. Only recently have they questioned his motives once they realized what caused her death. Nonetheless, the meaty criticism has been focused on her. It was her yo yo dieting, her drug induced lifestyle, or her disregard for her children that killed her. Like I said, it’s endless. Another case in point is the debacle surrounding Madonna’s adoption of an African child. In a search on Google, her conduct was apparently equivalent to a kidnapper, quasi-criminal, an indifferent shopper looking for her latest accessory, etc., while her husband was merely mentioned as an afterthought. Character assasination is the media’s mechanism to grease the wheel that keeps good women in the shadow.

The fact that women celebrities, just like any other woman, are subjected to a higher and more vicious level of criticism is despicable. There’s no sexual equality in the media, only financial interests and exploitation. Additionally, because the tabloids are focused on women readers, they are encouraging their target audience to be hostile to other women. This is the grease that keeps the hate wheel rolling. They set unrealistic standards of beauty and galvinize women to buy into the media hype of starving yourself thin. The media continue to reinforce this morbid notion that being famine thin is attractive and desirable, that women who have not achieved this level of thinness are not beautiful.

Women have spent too long in the shadow of men and should collectively boycott media outlets that perpetuate the oppression and further displacing women.