Argumentative Essay On Media Empowerment

Empowerment for Who? Media has become the very air we breathe. With constant media exposure consumers are often left numb, resulting in many companies going for the shock-factor to break through the clutter. In doing so, bold statements are made and whole communities are effected. Media gives messages of what it means to be powerful, beautiful, and respected; however, this comes at the expense of women. With the rise of media has also come a rise in traditional gender roles, sexualization of women, and narrow beauty standards. These tendencies leave overwhelmingly negative effects on the empowerment of women in the United States and the world as a whole. One solution to this media trend is enforcing media literacy courses in school systems

While this article does expose the warped “empowerment” of women, it fails to acknowledge emotion, race, sexual orientation, and class implications within the argument, making the article’s argument weaken and only apply to white, middle-class, heterosexual women . The article “College Women’s Reflections on Media Representation of Empowerment” by Britney G. Brinkman, Aliya Khan, Alison Jedinak, and Lauren Vetere walks the reader through their study conducted at an all-women’s college. Empowerment and media literacy are first defined and examined in the beginning of the article. Empowerment in the media is described as a double-edged sword, where a female character may appear to be empowered but is really playing into the same gender stereotypes: if she’s not in a traditional gender role then she’s sexualized and vice versa. Although some women may feel empowered by these characters, empowerment for one woman may not be empowerment for another. The question then

The main question: “how do college women who have been exposed to media literacy describe the impact of media messages on girls’/women’s empowerment.” The participants were all undergraduate students at an all-women’s college in the eastern United States, they were all predominantly white and heterosexual, and they were all in the same media representation course. The course itself focused on media messages and empowerment of women and introduced basic media literacy skills within the first week of classes. On the first day of class all students were invited to participate, 18 out of 19 agreed. As required by they course, they had to write a series of reflection papers that were one to two pages long. The second reflection paper was the focus of the study with the prompt: “In what ways does media influence girls’/women’s perception of being empowered. What reaction do you have about this influence?” A team then analyzed the results of the written responses; the team consisted of a principal investigator (course instructor) and three psychology graduate research