Challenging stereotypes
According to the producers of The Famine Within, a US documentary film to be released in Australia this month, the average 5 foot 8 inch Miss America contestant weighed 132 pounds in 1954 and 117 in 1980. The producers point out that the average North American woman is about 5 foot 4 inches tall and weighs 144 pounds.
What are North American women to do about this sort of pressure? Laugh it off? Sexism in popular culture, magnifying and universalising traditional stereotypes, is more insidious than that. It can drive women crazy. The film cites surveys showing that alarming numbers of women fear being fat more than they fear death, and that 80% of fourth-grade girls have already been on their first diets.
That's beauty. Then there's the question of brains. Again, women can't win. Having brains is unattractive. Disguising the fact that you have them means you'll be treated like a twit. The recent bout of blonde jokes (some of which are actually recycled Irish jokes) was a crass attempt to rehabilitate the 1950s stereotype.
And it goes on. Margarine advertisements which tell women how to be the sort of Mum who deserves to be congratulated. Car exhaust ads use women's bodies to make the product seem more exciting than it is. Male voice-overs to imply authority, women's voices to coo in admiration or burble ecstatically over the wonders of Product X.
It's sick, and seems to be getting sicker, despite the occasional concessions to feminism in some of the more enlightened ads.
What to do? The feminist response has involved consciousness raising on the issue (if you feel inadequate it's not you, it's the system), the creation of an alternative feminist culture (women's studies courses, a feast of feminist books, art, film) and campaigns against sexist representation. This last has generated important, ongoing debates about notions of censorship, free speech and choice.
In the meantime, a modest but significant contribution has come from the federal government's Office of the Status of Women: a brochure giving women a clear run-down on what they can do when they see something that makes them want to throw a brick at the television set.
The brochure was put together by the federal government's National Working Party on the Portrayal of Women in the Media and launched by Labor MP Wendy Fatin at the Women's Electoral Lobby National Conference in Canberra on January 27.
The idea is that a volley of complaints from consumers might force advertisers and program makers to think twice before opting for the easy, well-trodden path of sex-discrimination. With interest in the issue so intense — as a workshop on this theme at the WEL howed — this initiative could well lay the basis for further discussions and campaigns.
The brochure gives pointers on how to express a complaint, and sets out the addresses of organisations overseeing voluntary ethical codes. For a copy of the brochure, ring the Office of the Status of Women on (06) 271 5722.
By Tracy Sorensen