Main Post to Enlightened Sexism 09/14/2010 by Xinke Liu

GET THE GIRLS, GET THE MONEY

Where is the money tree? In women’s purses!

Before launching Beverly Hills 90210, Fox Broadcast Company was merely an infant network. After Fox farsightedly set its eyes on teenagers, especially young girls, and released Melrose Place, MTV’s The Real, teen girl magazines like Cosmo Girl, Teen Vogue, and so on, Fox network had became the highest-rated broadcast network during 2004-2009. According to http://www.echo-media.com/mediadetail.asp?IDNumber=4539, Seventeen Magazine mails to over 2,350,000 subscribers each month, with the majority of these subscribers being teenage girls. And, as Newsweek reported, Sassy had 3 million readers.

Almost every major business company wants to gain a piece of cake of profits from the tremendous women’s consumption market. Interestingly, though there is always a huge pay gap existed between genders: “in 2008, working women earn on average 23% less than their male counterparts. In other words, for every dollar earned by a man, a woman working just as hard earns only 77 cents. Things are even worse for women of color. African American women earned 66.5 cents and Latina women earned 56.7 cents to every dollar earned by men” (http://www.bpwfoundation.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=4229), women have been the major consumption forces for decades and women are labeled as genetic shopaholic. As most major companies have found out, the best way to make money from women is to create a trend, an idea, or an illusion first, and make them to be crazy about everything in it. After Gossip Girl was premiered in 2007, it was seen that girls promised to do everything if their moms buy them the costumes and bags Serena and Blair wear on the screens.

While business companies make enormous profit by this tool, they have also caused many by effects to women. When Beverly Hills 90210 was first premiered, it was a time when both young and old women were alert to sexism. But media illusions like the affluent and careless life presented in Beverly Hills 90210 progressively wore away their feminism awareness, and impressed them that the best way to spend youth years is to always catch up with the newest fashion and to keep good-looking all the time. But it seems that these by effects help them to make further benefits from women. Of course they do, people are always more easily to be controlled when they lost their own judging ability.

Although, to me, Sassy is just another way of attract the girls’ attention and make profits from them, I do praise it for it did put something new to the women’s world and, more importantly, it addressed a wide range of issue and pushed girls to think more deeply and globally. While Seventeen suggested girls on diets and measures in attracting boys, Sassy discussed Iraq War and raised sharp opinions about it. How pitiful it is that Sassy was folded in 1996 while magazines like Seventeen still thrive in today’s society.

CASTRATION ANXIETY, EXAGGERATED FEAR OF FEMINISM

After reading many great feminists’ works and listening to fellow students’ opinions for days, I think I do have feminism awareness now. However, the truth is I was shocked when I first read the story that a Virginia woman, Lorena Bobbitt, cut her husband’s penis and threw it away. I was afraid that I may be that anti-male and extremely radical one day. As “Feminists like Kim Gandy, executive vice presidents of NOW, emphasized that every day women were beaten, mutilated, and killed by their partners and this never made the news, but one guy loses his penis and the country goes ballistic.”(Enlightened Sexism, Susan J. Douglas, P66).

WARRIOR WOMEN IN THONGS, NOTHING RIDICULOUS

Again, ‘warrior women in thongs’ are another kind of embodiment of fantasies of women’s power in media. But on this point, I think Douglas is uber-sensitive. As to me, there is not much difference between Charlie’s Angels who “may be physically adept and emotionally resilient but they also know their way around a make-up counter” (Enlightened Sexism, Susan J. Douglas, P76) and James Bond who skills in wielding various weapons while having a good taste.