Mexican Female Is Media

Women in Mexican Media

It is all too easy to dismiss the importance of the press because so much of it is unimportant. There are endless videos of car chases on local news programs. Skinheads throwing chairs at the hosts of what are putatively news programs. Endless stories of alien kidnapping in the tabloids. And all-too-frequent blurrings between advertising policy and editorial content.

But the news is, of course, more than this. Or at least it can be. No democratic nation can be run without a free press because no society can be run without giving more power to some people than to others. Without a free press to ensure that those with substantial amounts of power are not being corrupted by it is to have watchdogs alert to what they are doing. This is the role that the press serves, as a proxy for the people.

Most citizens have probably never been to a city council meeting or a water district board meeting or a county board of supervisors meeting - or to a Senate hearing. And yet what is decided at every level of governmental meeting has real and lasting affects upon each citizen or resident. Without responsible mass media the citizens of a society cannot do their work as citizens.

Mexican television news fails its viewers dramatically in this regard in no small part because of the ways in which larger cultural attitudes about women's role in society are reflected in and reinforced by the on-air personalities. Especially in border towns like Mexicali, the worst gender stereotypes of both nations are often acted out on the air. One of the results of this is that what serious journalism is done within the realm of broadcast journalism is done by men. This relegation of women to reporting about scandals and gossip and other forms of "yellow journalism" not only degrades the quality of the news in terms of informing citizens about the important issues of the moment but it also lowers the status of women in Mexican society. This engendering of news is certainly not new or unique to Mexican television (as Gans 1979 notes) but it remains fundamentally harmful both to the body politic and to women - both those on the air and those in the audience.

There are feminist protests against the ways in which Mexican women are depicted on the small screen, although these tend to be aimed primarily at images in advertising, such as a recent campaign by the Grupo de Educacion Popular con Mujeres, A.C. (Group of Popular Education for Women) and Themis designed to fight sexist stereotypes.

Even though advertising tends to be highly gender stereotyped worldwide, Latin American ads may break records for their misogyny, said Veronica Romero, an advertising professor and researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (National Autonomous University of Mexico). She noted that advertisements frequently portray women as perfect housekeepers literally obsessed with their family's well-being and having no other interests or abilities -- a representation that is not so recurrent in American or European advertising (http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/943/context/archive).

Many feminists argue that there is an intentional connection between the stupidity of women on the air and the their place in society: Presenting only dumbed-down images of women on television undercuts the efforts of women to make progress in terms of achieving political, economic and social equality.

But the problem isn't just that ads are sexist, Romero says. Citing Mexican ads in which women are portrayed as so stupid that they don't even know how to drive, she said, "This image doesn't come from the commercials. It comes from Mexican society in general." (http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/943/context/archive).

Men who feel challenged or threatened by the small gains that Mexican women have been able to make in society strike out against them by using the power of media images. Men on the air make fun of women while women are forced by male mangers to make fun of themselves.

Part of what is being mocked when women are forced into the role of the idiot on television is what many Mexican men perceive to be American values - as if equality could not be a value that Mexican women could have come to value on their own:

Social and economic changes in Mexico over the past three decades - from the increasing number of working women to the explosion of supermarkets, which cater to a rushed lifestyle - have transformed family culture here and left many men struggling to redefine their roles. Muzquiz's radio show is just one example of a country twitching as it witnesses a shift - some say the "Americanization" - of its family values (http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0218/p01s03-woam.html).

This backlash against women's increasing independence manifests itself across the airwaves, not just during news programs. Not only is there rampant sexism in ads and in newscasts, but also in magazines and newspapers. The sexist images of women that are promulgated might seem to be old-fashioned in the United States, where mainstream companies would not think of using such overtly sexist imagery because to do so would alienate far too many potential customers.

The backlash is apparent in popular TV shows, newspapers, magazines, and music. A nationwide ad campaign by the Monterrey-based bank Banorte, for instance, pictures a stretch of pavement littered with broken glass and a fallen lipstick. A message scratched below warns: "There are many women driving. Insure your car with Banorte!" (http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0218/p01s03-woam.html).

While American advertisers shy away from explicitly sexist messages for the most part, talk radio in the United States is laden with sexist and even misogynist imagery. This latter is true in Mexico as well, as can be seen by the fact that Monterrey shock jock Oscar Muzquiz spends a substantial amount of the time that he is on the are reviling women.

Meanwhile Brozo, the lewd clown who hosts the popular morning show "Early Riser," long maintained that his voluptuous and scantily clad "secretary," Isabel Madow, was the perfect woman - not just for her curvy frame, but also since she never uttered a word. (Ironically, she recently left the show to pursue a career on her own.) (http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0218/p01s03-woam.html).

A woman who used to work as a news-writer for Mexicali's XHBC said that she never considered working in front of the camera because of the way women were treated - and even working behind the scenes became too much for her. She now works for a newspaper in Southern California.

When we would get tips called in about stories they were always sorted right away into "real" stories and "girls stories." Anything that could involve the newscaster saying anything really lascivious - that went to a woman. Any chance possible to make it seem as if there were a legitimate reason for a woman to talk dirty in front of thousands of men.