89 Gender Mainstreaming protect themselves and their society from contamination by ugly women who do not induce a lustful desire to punish, violate, or destroy, though men manage to punish, violate, or destroy these women anyway.” Traditional media, and now, the social media boom, have all but fueled man's capacity to exploit and objectify women. With sexually suggestive images of specific body parts – the bloated lips, lustful eyes, enticing cleavage plastered everywhere from magazines, newspapers to the digital landscape subliminally put both men and women in hyper-drive. In his media coverage analysis titled “Objectification of women in media,” Jon Barber writes: “Sexual messages in the mass media can have both immediate and long-term effects. Viewing a television program may change a person's immediate state by inducing arousal, leading to inhibition of impulses, or activating thoughts or associations. It may also contribute to enduring learned patterns of behavior, cognitive scripts and schemas about sexual interactions, attitudes, and beliefs about the real world. The recurring message the media is sending is sticking over time lending to the negative effects on society. They have created stereotypes amongst society: that we as a society focus on permissive sexual attitudes, that men are primarily sex-driven, that women are objects of men's desires.” Another research article by Jennifer Stevens Aubery suggests: “Perhaps the most insidious way that the media emphasize physical attractiveness is by ob-
jectifying bodies (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997). Sexual objectification has been conceptualized as the separating of a person's body, body parts, or sexual functions from his or her person, reducing them to the status of mere instruments, or regarding them as if they were capable of representing him or her. Content analyses have operationally defined sexual objectification as instances in which the focus is on isolated body parts, such as a bare stomach, buttocks, cleavage, or a bare chest, in the absence of a focus on the rest of the person. A general conclusion from this content-analytic work is that the media often focus on bodies and appearance as the most important components of sexual desirability. However, there are gender differences in how the media use sexual objectification. Some research has suggested that the difference
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We are a species born in diversity, influenced by factors such as our genealogy, culture, biology, and geographical influences. Despite knowing these facts, mankind still remains enslaved to unyielding ideals of a patriarchal mindset which actually does nothing but oppress the society as a whole.
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in how the bodies of men and women are portrayed is by the face-to-body proportions. For men, a ‘face-ism' bias exists, whereby men's heads and faces are shown in greater detail than they are for women. The corresponding bias for women is ‘body-ism'; the focus is usually on women's bodies or body parts, sometimes eliminating their heads altogether.” Statistics reported by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS, 2009) show that there had been a 36 percent increase in breast augmentation surgery, 84 percent in abdominoplasty (tummy tuck), 4,184 percent in lower body lifts,4,191 percent in arm lifts,132 percent in buttock lifts, and 65 percent increase in breast lifts. And these are somewhat dated numbers. We are a species born in diversity, influenced by factors such as our genealogy, culture, biology, and geographical influences. Despite knowing these facts, mankind still remains enslaved to unyielding ideals of a patriarchal mindset which actually does nothing but oppress the society as a whole. From Zeus' creation of the first woman, Pandora, to be used as a weapon in the mythical tale of his contest against Prometheus, the epic Trojan battle that “burnt the topless towers of Ilium” in the name of Helen, the desecration of the empowered Hypatia on the streets of Alexandria to the dysmorphic sexualization of the modern “educated” woman; there exists a long protracted tale of power, domination and commodification of “woman” to be valued for “its” use.