| The Chinese contemporary mass media not only neglect, shut their eyes to social psychology and phenomena of sex discriminations toward the female sex, but also add fuel to flames to this trend by communicating sex discriminations by themselves, which includes stereotyping women traditional roles as a wife, a mother,a sex object, a dependent and minor role in public sphere and a hostess in private sphere and an aesthetic object in the eyes of the male sex. These media phenomena lead to two objective results:the propaganda of being a virtuous wife and gentle mother as women only value enslaves female audience, while the propaganda of beautiful and sexual women being seen by men and being a sex partner aims to make commercial use of women to attract audience’s eyeballs. Such psychological stereotype exists in many advertisements, TV operas and news reports by persuasive discourses such as the woman quality being the top-charming, strong-willed and firm-handed women being lonely and unhappy, and beauty being evil. The Chinese mass media aim to maintain and strengthen the male-dominated social order and improve the audience receiving rate by flattering the audience.The Chinese contemporary female communicators are also sex-discriminated to some extent. First, they are mainly restrained to report soft news. Though there are many famous female communicators in hard news reporting, such as wars, disasters, and politics, because of their creativity, humanity, compatibility and professional spirits in their news reporting and writing, they do pay much more than male communicators and shoulder more pressures and biases inside and outside family. But it can do nothing to change the general tendency of non-mainstream and marginalization for female communicators. Maybe in the field of radio and TV, female communicators are outstanding from the male communicators. Less female communicators act as leaders or decision-makers than males, although a few females working as leaders or decision-makers, with more professional leadership thoughts rather than social genders.The media markets are becoming more and more competitive. In the face of globalization, some female communicators are being commercially made use of as a method to attract the eyeballs of audience by media agency, seen as "helpless, clear-headed, vague objects." The phenomena that female emcees in amusement programs become "low-aged, more beautiful, stupid-entertainment" and famous female reporters professional skills and spirits are neglected, on the contrary, their female status and beautiful appearance are emphasized by media immoderately. Although we can find several explanations for these phenomena, for example, "This is human being nature", "Audience is god","Contents are the top important factor","Pursuing profits is the character of market-oriented economy",the actual reasons are that mass media only pay attention to economic profits while ignoring social efficiencies. Mass media do not always take the social responsibilities of leading audience aesthetic interesting into consideration. Female communicators are excluded from the group of decision-makers. Even though a few female communicators can be decision-makers, they are always in vice-position, who are hopeless or unwilling to propaganda social gender consciousness and gender sensitivity.The main sources for the above-mentioned phenomenon lie in the following: Firstly, current Chinese mass-media maintain that media economy is eyeball-economy, attention-economy and its operation is more and more commercial. Secondly,"female communicators are more adaptable to soft news or private issues"; decision-makers are mostly male, female communicators can say nothing about sexual discrimination. Thirdly, female audience do not unite with each other to restrict or resist "male-dominated" media order. Fourthly, current Chinese females lack group consciousness. Sixthly, the social monitoring to mass media is not adequate or effective, with not too much media-literarily citizens.The consciousness of sex or gender was taken shape by cultural norms. Contemporary mass media control the contents and processes of communication, the patterns of language, achieving its ultimate object of controlling social cultural norms. The mass media has the ability to construct the gender pattern because of its publicity and influence. The mass media neglecting and even adding fuel to sex discrimination is a world-wide and populous media morbidity, which was strongly criticized by feminists in western countries since the 1970s, making it a particular perspective in media criticism gradually. Noticed in the late 1980s in China, with the rise of culture studies in the 1990s in China, it began to come to the area of media criticism.The perspectives and dimensionality are multiple. Criticizing the mass media cultural industrialization and anti- individuation is what the Frankfurt School focus on, among which the criticism in sex discrimination by feminists is most famous. As a kind of world-wide political thought trends, academic trends and criticism method, feminism historic basis, academic fundament, and specialized development, was deprived from the first and second storm of woman’s rights and the third storm by The Third Feminism Movement, developed in reflection, summary and research about women’s rights, flourished by the globalization push and multiple cultural theoretical supporting, specified in the cross-subjected trend of feminism and the fundament of interdisciplinary subject. Feminism not only spreads all over the world, but also infiltrates into many fields. Its theories and methods were introduced into Mass Communication, making it the strongest criticism, propelled the theory and practice’s double progress, under which the criticism in the media was born.Media criticism under the feminism perspective concerns about couples of subjects, areas, and research methods. This article refers to concepts such as "feminism and focus on women’s right", "media review and media criticism", "communicators and audience", "female journalists, female writers, female directors, female authors", "gender consciousness, gender sensitivity", "content analysis, case study, the research into focused group, and half-structure interview".Generally, feminism refers to the law, political points, and academic theory that appeal for gender equality, criticism of male hegemony, later emphasizing on women’s self-questioning and self-criticism, subjective consciousness,and the unique female perspectives. In the 1990s, the Chinese scholars used to translate "feminism" into "a tendency to focus on women’s rights". Seeing that the complexity and long-term struggle and difficulties in women’s rights, I am accustomed to using "a tendency to focus on women’s rights" instead of "feminism". "gender consciousness’ means acknowledgement about gender, coming from the social construction of gender consciousness, women and men should be equal though there is physiological differences. "gender sensitivity" concerns about keeping highly awake about sex discrimination in the whole society including media.The audience criticism under the feminism perspectives is based on the western feminism and mass media theories. By selecting, analyzing, interpreting and comprehending the concerned theories, I sorted these theories into liberal, radical, Marxism, post-structuralism and post-modern feminism.All these theories focus on "pursuit for the women’s rights" and "social sense and sensitivity of gender", and they criticize mass media’s salvation and commercial application on women audience and communicators. Post-modern feminism concentrates on overturning the difference between "mainstream and non-mainstream","elite and the common people" with optimism to some extent; while the other four theories carry on a kind of pessimism.Because of the different cultural backgrounds and different systems, there exist many differences between western and oriental audience. Western feminism audience theories are influenced by both globalization and localization nowadays, so all the theories introduced from the western countries can not exceed it. Referring to western feminism audience theories, studying the Chinese media’s particular ecosystem such as the weak sense of group of women, Chinese women’s complicated pressures from sex oppression and existence, I am going to discuss about western feminism audience theories under a Chinese perspective in order to rectify the errors made in the process of translation and transplantation.The communicator criticism under a feminism perspective mainly focuses on the Chinese female communicators. Firstly, the female audience’s right to interpret media content is often hurt by the mass media. As the casualty of sex discrimination of the male-dominated system, the male suffer much less than female (of course, the male audience are also the object of advertisement)..-Secondly,female communicators are the subject of the process of media. Whether women can escape from sex discrimination depend on themselves (this does not means we try to erase the efforts of some male to get rid of the sex discrimination).Thirdly, the Chinese female communicators are also the reinforced and oppressed objects in the male-centered media system. They are more sensitive to sex discrimination than most of common female, though they have not escaped the power of male in the field of mass media.Media contents criticism under the feminism perspectives take efforts to unmask and expose sex discriminations and commercial descriptions about female images in media contents. Media copy stereotyped sex impressions on purpose and exaggerate and emphasize women’s superficial values such as a beautiful face and a sexual figure while ignoring their inside and social values, depreciating female images in mass media. Women are often considered as the victims of violence or eroticism image in media.The media criticism under feminism perspectives use several research methods, including:document analysis, content analysis, case study, individual interview, group investigation on internet, semi-structured interview and so on. The media criticism under the feminism perspectives is cross-disciplined, three-dimensional, gradual-developing. It not only integrates feminism, journalism, sociology, psychology, economics and law together but also combined with the practice of media criticism. This not only provides a new thinking perspective for media criticism but also inspire feminism to widen its development in the areas of politics, the academics and practice. Feminism criticism is concerned with market economy, the national political system, cultural traditions, so this will avoid trapping in extreme, emotional, men and women of confrontation-struggle. Consequently, this will bring out some breakthrough and thought-provoking improvements in feminism, media criticism and cultural studies.The media criticism under feminism adopts gender theories and media criticism theories, provides some measures and suggestions under the practice perspective. Such measures include the following:strengthening female communicators’ comprehensive qualities, gender identity, gender awareness; strengthening female audience’s media literacy training; establishing media monitoring networks; restricting the mass media to belittle and make commercial use of women from system and law aspects; calling for women to make active use of new media technologies (web) to expand the space and strategy against sex discrimination.I proposed some arguments in this article:female audience may restrict the content concerning about sex discrimination, making the media balance or rebuild multiple descriptions about women. There are some premises:forming the consciousness of female subject and media consumers’ consciousness of rights; male audience can be persuaded to be supporters and researchers about gender equality; researchers should abandon the thinking model of gender-struggle, as well as forming the consciousness of gender equality among the male communicators, turning over the whole social sex prejudice; female news and news about gender should be included in the measurement of news value; women should be entitled to be among the media decision-makers, whether having the consciousness of gender and the sensitivity of gender should betaken into consideration as one of the important factors to promote communicators to a higher position; the inquisition by blog is trustworthy. There are many advantages of research methods like this:speediness, reciprocity, facility, and so on, "telling truth with a phony name" has been proved true in the blog’s reality. |
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