Cultural Anthropology: Post-Feminism in the Media of the Modern Era Introduction

In the wake of Weinstein scandal and the #MeToo movement that made women who speak out about sexual assault Time’s Person of the Year in 2017, a reassessment of the values (often contradictorily) displayed in the media in the modern era regarding sex and sexuality is in order. In the 20th century, the Women’s Movement launched the Feminist ideal, which argued that women had the right to be independent, treated as equals to men, work alongside men, and not be viewed as slavish homemakers or as sexualized fantasies for what Laura Mulvey called “the male gaze” (6). In the 21st century, the Feminist generation appears to have be replaced by a post-Feminist generation that, instead of resisting the male gaze, actively seeks to attract it and use it to its own advantage. For instance, the arrival of the Britney Spears in the 1990s ushered in an era of sirens in the video and music industry that is still continuing today, and getting more and more erotic (and often aggressively so) with every passing year. Britney was followed by Christina, Beyonce, J-Lo, Miley, and a host of other female performance artists as well as actresses who have used sexuality to sell their image. How does this aggressive use of sex and sexuality gel with the Feminist ideals and doctrines supposedly still promoted and upheld in the modern era? This paper will examine what cultural anthropologists have had to say about this idiosyncrasy in the history of Feminism and what it means in today’s culture.

Literature Review

The article by Rosalind Gill entitled “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility” examines the meaning of postfeminism and how the term itself means different and often contradictory things to different people. Gill looks at how media interpretations of strong womanhood range from women who are politically active and in public or corporate leadership positions (such as Hillary Clinton or Angelina Jolie) to women who are sexually empowered and use sex and sexuality to dominate and control the male-female relationship (such as Britney or Beyonce). The article discusses the inherent contradiction in the fitting of these two descriptions under the same label, especially as the latter depiction of feminism seems to undermine the former’s seriousness. The latter, after all, appears not to be a repudiation of the male gaze and the “phallocentric” social order...

Like the Western representations of sex and sexuality by women in the media, the Eastern representations also demonstrate an aggressive sexuality that appears to be about exploiting the “male gaze” to gain control in the male-female relationship. One artist known as CL surrounds herself with erotically-dressed women wearing dominatrix outfits while she dances and gyrates to a song called “Hello Bitches.” CL promotes an aggressive sexuality in the video that shows men being treated like slaves by women who clearly are in a position of sexual dominance. Unger asks whether the video is making commentary on the nature of male-female relationships by inverting the traditional roles (in the video, the females dominate the apparent mating ritual while the men are passive recipients of their decision to engage or withhold sex), or whether the video is undermining the Feminist notions of equality between the sexes that the forerunners of the Women’s Movement sought to achieve.
The article by Laura Holson entitled “A Blurred Lines Boomerang: Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke See a Reversal of Fortunes” for The New York Times poses the same questions: how is glaring, gratuitous sexual aggression on the one hand (as demonstrated by Miley in her co-performance alongside Robin) acceptable while sexual aggression on the other hand (as demonstrated by Robin in his infidelities) unacceptable? What does this dynamic say about the state of affairs between men and women, the norms that govern relationships, the push for equality by women during the Feminist Movement, and the demonstration of gratuitous hypersexuality by young women in the media in what is unclearly defined as the post-Feminist era?

The article by Laura Mulvey from 1975 entitled “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” attempted to answer some of these questions decades ago by identifying the culprit for hypersexualization: the phallocentric social order that deliberately invited male audiences to indulge their “male…