As a consumer of
media, I can’t help but notice the appalling rate at which I am inundated with
sexualized images on a daily basis. As a female consumer, I find it
disheartening to be bombarded with the message on a daily basis that my worth
is largely determined by the number inside my blue jeans, my cup size, and how
well I’ve managed to mask the effects of that dreaded humidity on my hair. As a
human being, I (like so many others) have finally decided to take an active
stand against the belief that I somehow need to be tolerant of- or at least
pretend I’m blind to- the constant barrage of media messages that I can be
reduced to my physical attributes as an estimation of my worth.
In an attempt to
save money while I pursue my doctorate, my husband and I opted to forgo the
luxury of cable television in an attempt to save a little extra cash each
month. To be honest, I was never much of a TV fanatic anyway, save for my
secret obsession with the Food Network. (“Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives”, anyone?)
Anyway, I also am humbled to admit that I am incredibly technologically
challenged. It’s true, my Mac laptop is a portal to merely 3 things: Homework,
Email and Facebook. I don’t tweet or blog or read celebrity gossip on Buzzfeed.
I’m not a gamer, nor do I even know how to work the control that turns on our
X-Box at home. Despite my relatively limited awareness and use of screens
compared to others in my generation, I am nonetheless forced to admit that I
absorb media’s targeting messages about me and my fellow sisters on a
minute-to-minute basis. If I’m not hearing on the radio how I can be more
attractive with laser hair removal, then I’m accosted with 100 ways to “rock my
man’s world in the bedroom” in the check out line, all the while feeling sized
up by men who are complete strangers and hearing their cat-calls because I
dared to have a pair of breasts.
But it isn’t
limited to just me and my own experience, and that’s the problem. Although I am
mindful about my own media consumption, I’m not exempt from the stories of
other women who are constantly evaluating themselves based on the number of
“likes” a picture of them received on their social media outlet. As a training
clinical psychologist, I hear my female clients’ heartache every time they disclose
their unwanted sexual encounters and describe through tears the devaluation
they experience every time a new reality TV show makes yet another unrealistic
standard of what their ideal body type should be. Many of the college aged
women sitting in my office have suffered quietly with disordered eating
behaviors for years, silently agonized with self harm tendencies and violated
their own moral codes for sexual behavior in their pursuit of hearing just one
person tell them that they’re beautiful. We live in an age where the size of
our heels and the length of our skirts determine even our pursuit of
professionalism and being taken seriously in the work force in which we find
ourselves. I once heard a stand up comedian say that we live in a media-world that
preys on the insecurities of women, and then we blame them for it. And if you
ask my perspective, the very objectification that is sucking the lives out of
our female youth is fueled by our fear- the fear of not feeling accepted. We
have thus created a system designed to collapse on itself, and every
constituent that’s within it.
That being said,
I do have an incredible amount of hope. I have to, or else my pursuit of
education in this field would be meaningless and definitely not worth the 8 years
of graduate school it will have taken me to understand what our subscription to
these beliefs is doing to our psychology. I wholeheartedly believe that slowly
but surely, a new trend is beginning among our youth that is a forced to be
reckoned with. I see it in the growing number of women choosing to pursue
higher education. I see it in the gradual but sure growth of female members of
congress in this recent election. I see it every time a female celebrity makes
a statement that she’s exploring this word ‘feminism’ for the first time to see
how it fits. I am given hope every time a legislation is passed that puts power
back in the hands of women over their own right to reproductive and sexual
health. In a recent event I held in our department, I was amazed to see the
numbers of undergraduate and graduate students wanting to dialogue about all of
these issues and more. My hope is that we never stop this conversation; that we
never refrain from asking the difficult questions that are required for
effecting change. And if all that is accomplished through these conversations
is the deepening of our awareness, I am still honored to be a part of them.
-Written by Mae Adams
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