“Representations in the media are often simplistic and reinforce dominant ideologies so that audiences can make sense of them”. To what extent is this true of the social group you have studied?

Throughout different forms of media, there is a number of representations of women. These representations often feed the preconceived stereotypes that we have of women. Magazines, TV dramas and films reinforce dominant ideologies on different types of women, for example the career women and the housewives, and the idea of beauty.

Adverts often reinforce the ideals of beauty and shape the idea of what we as consumers believe beauty is. Adverts in magazines, particularly adverts for beauty products, often reinforce the ideas of what a beautiful woman looks like. Cheryl Cole’s adverts for L’Oreal show a slim woman, with long glossy hair and perfect skin. This representation of women is found across media texts, but in particular in adverts for beauty and hair products, which all seem to reinforce the same ideologies of what it means to be beautiful. For example the same representation that is present in the L’Oreal advert is also presented to us in Anna Firel’s adverts for Pantene and Zooey Deschanel for Rimmel. These Images help reinforce feminist writer Germain Greer’s theory that “every woman knows that regardless f her achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful” because “magazines financed by the beauty industry teach little girls that they need make up and train them to use it, so establishing their lifelong reliance on beauty products”. These representations of women are fairly simplistic as they only offer one model for how they believe women should look or at least want to look. Whilst this simplistic representation of women could help an audience make sense of what our belief a beautiful woman is, it offers very little alternative and encourages women to look all one way and not express individualism.

The character of Bree in ‘Desperate Housewives’ also conforms to a simplistic and well established representation of women. She is a typical housewife, who we believe enjoys cooking and cleaning and this seems to be the only role that she has. She does not have a job. This is a very traditional view of women, and this idea of her being a step ford wife is something that TV dramas are beginning to step away from. This character however shows that this stereotypical woman is still present on our screens. This stereotype perhaps helps us understand the character better as we feel that we already know a lot about her as we have already judged her on what her role is within a family. It does however feed the stereotypical role and notion of what a housewife is like, which supports Stuart Prices assessment that “ideologies of gender promote sexist representations of women”.

In the same programme, the character of Lynette shows a perhaps more contemporary view of what a working mother is. Whilst Bree is a character in a modern drama, many of her characteristics would be seen as being very traditional. Lynette on the other hand is a woman who shows the struggles of being a stay at home mum. She shows that it is hard to be at home constantly with your children and shows a woman, who was once a very successful business woman, struggling to come to terms with the fact she no longer holds the same status in the work place and her feeling that she is losing her identity. This is a far less simplistic view of women, then the one that is presented to us of Bree and may be more difficult for us as an audience to understand because of this. However this is still a woman who represents what is the lives of far more women then the character of Bree does and perhaps women are able to relate to her more so and understand her better because of this.

There is signs of there being more complex characters present in the media, such as Lynette from Desperate Housewives, however more simplistic and conventional representations of women are still present, highlighted by the presence of the ‘step ford wife’ like figure of Bree in the same drama. Adverts also seem to be a clear indication of just how simplistic some of the dominant ideologies pushed on us by the media are, as they only seem to present one ideal of beauty. Whilst there is some alternatives such as the Dove adverts for real women, these are very rare, and often they use this as their selling point rather then the product itself.