Gender, Violence, and Sex Work in British Media Studies

Introduction: Media, Gender, and Sex Work

This annotated bibliography brings together nine academic sources that collectively examine how gender shapes media representations of violence, how consumer culture has absorbed an obsession with serial killing, and how sex work is understood — and misunderstood — by police, lawmakers, and the public in the United Kingdom. The sources draw on sociology, criminology, cultural studies, and media studies, and together they provide a critical foundation for anyone approaching these interrelated topics.

Gender Bias in British Media Representations of Violence

Berrington, E., & Honkatukia, P. (2002). An evil monster and a poor thing: Female violence in media. Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention, 3(1): 50–72.

Berrington and Honkatukia examine patriarchal constructs in British news media, using the case of Rosemary West as an example and comparing it, by way of contrast, to Finnish reporting on Sanna Sillanpää, another female killer. The ways in which media representations of these two women differed suggest that the cultural societies in which they lived espoused different views regarding women and violence.

This article is interesting because it supports what the study by Naylor (2002) shows: that media representations are gender-skewed in the British press. Women who commit violent acts are described in monstrous terms, as though they were the epitome of evil, whereas in other countries there is more sympathy or sensitivity expressed in the media and therefore felt by the public. As far as Rosemary West is concerned, she is remembered in England as a monster because the murders committed are viewed as particularly unnatural when a woman is involved — at least according to the media representations this article examines.

The researchers assert that the reason for this gender bias is that England has a patriarchal culture that views women in a particular light, and any movement or activity outside of that light instantly casts them in a dubious gray area. Women are seen as less natural, as something wicked, whereas men are simply accepted as they are. What the researchers claim is that these representations say more about the culture that delivers them than the individuals they are reporting on. The Finnish example shows how a different culture can display greater gender sensitivity and responsibility in its treatment of female violence.

This article is recommended to anyone interested in how media representations foster bias in cultures, and how cultures in turn foster media bias. It is particularly relevant for gender studies and for students interested in the sociology of violence and media.

Emmers-Sommer, T., Pauley, P., Hanzal, A., & Triplett, L. (2006). Love, suspense, sex, and violence: Men's and women's film predilections, exposure to sexually violent media, and their relationship to rape myth acceptance. Sex Roles, 55: 311–320.

Emmers-Sommer et al. analyze the relationship between sex and violence in media, gender preferences, and rape myth acceptance. They find that men prefer films with more sex and violence than women do, while women prefer love stories more than men do. Men are also more accepting of the rape myth than women are. The researchers see a correlation between men's film preferences and rape myth acceptance, and between women's preferences and their lower rates of rape myth acceptance.

In many ways, the study arrives at conclusions that would seem obvious on the surface. However, the researchers offer "theoretical explanations for the findings" that are interesting in their own right (p. 311). They discuss the notion that men's attitudes toward women can be negatively affected by violent, sexually explicit, or sexually violent films, and argue that exposure to such media can shape the way men value women when that exposure coincides with other social factors. One notable finding is that women's attitudes toward rape myth acceptance fluctuated when the film they were viewing was based on a true story. For men, whether the events were real or fictional made no difference to their opinions.

In a sense, this study suggests that men are more insensitive to rape than women, that they tend to favor films which are violent and/or sexual in a non-romantic sense, while women tend toward more sensitive, romantically oriented films. The study may appear to support stereotypical findings regarding gender preferences, and for that reason it might be dismissed as conservative. The researchers do provide an extensive literature review to ground their findings in prior scholarship, so the conclusions are not without context.

Overall, the study does not offer a great deal that is entirely new beyond the observation that sexually violent films reinforce negative stereotypical ideas regarding rape myth acceptance in men, and that women's exposure to such films — particularly when based on a true story — can negatively influence their attitudes as well. The study might have benefitted from a more in-depth analysis of rape myth acceptance, as the researchers appear to assume that readers share a common understanding of the subject without fully defining it.

Naylor, B. (2002). Reporting violence in the British print media: Gendered stories. The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 40(2): 180–194.

Naylor's study focuses on the way that news media portrayals of violence do not reflect the reality of violence in Britain but are rather shaped for purposes other than conveying accurate accounts of actual events. For the study, Naylor examined half a year's worth of UK newspapers and the way each discussed gender in relation to violence. Naylor concludes that violent acts by men and women are reported in markedly different ways, with different narrative styles and differing emphases on motive.

The study is interesting because it reveals how popular news media outlets approach the gender question in relation to violence: acts of violence committed by men are described in terms where the motive is rationally explained or attributed to some logical cause. However, acts of violence committed by women are usually framed in terms of how "emotional" the woman was being, or with a suggestion that she was acting irrationally or even out of sheer "wickedness" (p. 180).

This study is helpful in drawing attention to the ways that media shape gender perceptions and the biases that different outlets can carry in how they tell stories and relate newsworthy incidents. It is recommended to anyone interested in the subject, as it offers both quantitative and qualitative analysis that would appeal to sociology or gender studies students. Its insights are formative in the sense that they expose a dimension of everyday life that is often taken for granted — the assumed neutrality of news media reporting. What Naylor shows is that such neutrality, at least when it comes to gender and violence, is essentially non-existent in the British press.

Consumer Culture, Serial Killers, and Murderabilia

Jarvis, B. (2007). Monsters Inc.: Serial killers and consumer culture. Crime, Media, Culture, 3(3): 326–344.

Jarvis makes the claim that serial killing is "big business" (p. 327), best witnessed in the display of serial killing within consumer culture's entertainment industry. Jarvis tracks the sale of "murderabilia" and the depiction of serial killings in popular films and television — including Saw, American Psycho, CSI, Law & Order, and A Nightmare on Elm Street — to show how a culture of death permeates modern life.

Jarvis's overall point is that consumerism is a violent, materialistic ideology, and thus it is not surprising that it should become consumed by an obsession with violence. Art acts as a mirror, and audiences have always loved to see themselves represented on the stage. The depiction of grisly violence reflects consumer culture's thirst for violence as well as its acceptance of, and pleasure taken in, horror and bloodshed. He discusses works in which protagonists become mired in worlds of torture and killing and argues that this reflects modern culture's infatuation with murder stories — an infatuation that erupted in the 1990s, beginning with widespread coverage of Jeffrey Dahmer. Moreover, Bret Easton Ellis's title character in American Psycho "embodies a merger between ultra-violence and compulsive consumerism" (p. 330). Patrick Bateman is simultaneously a serial yuppie and a serial killer — the "gothic projection of consumer pathology" (p. 330). Jarvis's claim is that consumerism is an appetite that demands the death of something else in order to be momentarily filled, and that such an appetite is inherently related to the murderous impulse of the serial killer. The ultimate consumer tagline "obey your thirst" speaks to an animal-like passion to which the consumer is urged to submit — the same submission to an urge reflected in the psychology of the serial killer.

Jarvis also touches on the serial obsessions of serial killers, which in American Psycho is linked to serial consumption, and discusses the supernatural element of serial killing and the link between horror and the spiritual realm. George Romero's "living dead," for instance, are read as embodying the soullessness of modern materialism.

Mason, P. (2003). Criminal Visions. Cullompton, Devon: Willan. (Chapter 8).

Mason discusses the attractiveness of murderabilia in consumer culture and its appeal over the Internet, as long as the images of murder and violence "are relayed from a distance" (p. 166). However, the obsession with murderabilia hits close to home in a number of media portrayals of serial killing. The killers themselves demonstrate a fondness for murderabilia, drawing on popular culture or on some specialized nuance or skill that the protagonist alone possesses, thus identifying with the hero or serving as a wicked double or foil.

Mason's survey of films ranges from The Bone Collector to Fallen to Ghost in the Machine. Some touch on the supernatural association with murder, others on the specialized knowledge that serial killing is imagined to require. In any case, the act of serial murder as depicted in media is surrounded by highly specialized and conditional requirements. Part of its appeal is its exotic expertness: it takes a special kind of individual — either possessed or of some sort of genius — to carry out the types of crimes depicted. Thus, a cult-like following builds up around these figures, and more and more media representations depict this build-up and its inherent obsession with murderabilia.

The study is interesting because it connects the on-screen obsession with murderabilia to audiences' real-world obsession with serial killer films and memorabilia, which in turn feeds media production and so on. It is a self-reinforcing cycle in which films copy one another and the genre begets its own cult-like following.