A new shade of eyeliner doesn’t really do the trick. But the media began to make women ask themselves if they should go further? Perhaps changing everything? “New Looks” and phoniness were recommended. This helped women stuck lower on the economic ladder. Commercial Women’s Magazines trade on female insecurities offered them a temporary window into their future selves which were mostly rooted in male versions of sexuality. Thus, women were invited into the sexual revolution.
Class awareness is a social construct. A materialistic desire that so often overtake structures of feeling an a consumer oriented society where our class structure comes from.
Betty Friedan singled out mass media as a central culprit in reinforcing and promoting sexist ideas about women. By 1970, when Feminists protested in Ladies Home Journal to protest it’s backward depiction of women, Newsweek and Time Magazine actually sued them for sexual discrimination!
Hollywood is truly a skilled manipulator of visual pleasure, and Laura Mulvey told the world all about it. She psychoanalyzed the players as “a world ordered by sexual inbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female”.
She tells the tale of how psychoanalytic theory in the case of Hollywood is actually a political weapon. Easily showcasing the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.
One of my favorite lines from her short analysis is in regards to women, that we exist outside of the plot. “The presence of a woman is an indispensable element of normative narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a storyline” She points out that the fact alone that women are represented is a signal of castration.
