Essay On How Women Are Represented In Horror Within The Media

Representations of women in the media are known for being stereotypical due to previous ways in which women were portrayed. Women were shown in the media on ashing up adverts and domestic roles where common for women to be seen doing on tv. But not all medias portray women in a stereotypical way.

The classic theoretical view of how women are represented in the media is that males are strong, independent, dominant, and authoritative where as females are seen as passive, submissive and having a focus on their own appearance. They are also often defined through their relationships to men, such as their father, partner etc. Research by Jeremy Tunstall (The media in Britain 1983) found that the women in the media were seen around the groupings of domestic, sexual, consumer and marital. this shows that women in the media are shown as objects and not real people. It is also thought that the media ignore women to a certain extent. Research carried out in 1992 saw that on screen men outnumbered women at a rate of two to one, this shows how women are invisible to the media. Their invisibility means that although women are shown in the media, not all kinds of women are seen, for example, Black women, Lesbian women and older women were practically unknown to be seen in the media. An example of when age can be depicted would be on a news tv programme. Nearly all the time the male newsreader is twice as old as the newsreader.

Women being shown as sexual objects has always been around in the media, from page 3 girls to figures such as Lara croft. Lara Croft breaks the stereotype of women but also reinforces the fact that women in the media are seen as sexual objects. She fights and uses a gun and could be seen as a bit masculine but she also has long hair and wears revealing clothes such as a small vest top and very short shorts. So overall she would be seen as a bad role model. Laura Mulvey sees that the media force the audience to look at women in a sexual way. She says that the use of close ups, point of views and reaction shots encourage the audience to relate the male as the subject and that the use of long shots, tilts up the body, fragmentation of body parts ( only seeing an arm or a leg etc) force the audience into looking at the women in a sexual way. Therefor Laura Mulvey and others argue that is it the medias fault for the objectification of women. But Carol Clover, who writes the text 'Women' sees that males (young males, teens) identify themselves with the female character in horror movies. Meaning that males don't want the female in a horror movie to die ending in the theory of the final girl. The final girl theory from Clover says that horror movies generally always have a survivor,which is almost likely to be a female. Sometimes the final girl doesnt necessarily die but is the last to die. Horror films that back the final girl theory are The Shinning, Carrie, Eden Lake and many more. In these films the final girl is actually seen to turn into the monster searching for revenge or seeking safety for loved ones. This would suggest that horror is not a part of the media that presents women in a negative way.

In conclusion the horror genre in the media doesn't objectify women as sexual objects, domestic, consumer or marital on purpose or in a bad way, as a majority.