Gender inequality remains prevalent in many aspects of Canadian society. The subtle way in which stereotyping and gender roles emerge in mainstream discussions, specifically through the media representation of women, exposes the disparity between genders that remains despite the various feminist movements of the 20th century. Yasmin Jiwani and Mary Lynn Young in their scholarly article “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse” discuss how murdered and missing women are addressed in the media. They reveal how missing and murdered women are only visible if they are mothers, daughters, wives, and sisters. They explain that missing and murdered women receive empathetic responses from the public only if they adopt the societal roles that are deemed respectable and “humanizing.” Anne Theriault, the blogger on The Belle Jar, argues on her blog post “I Am Not Your Wife, Sister, or Daughter” that women are not viewed as people, but exist only as possessions belonging to male counterparts when they are constantly outfitted with titles like “mother, daughter, wife, and sister” within the media.

In sociology class, I watched Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story.” In her discussion, Adichie describes how race can develop from a “single story,” or in other words from the adoption of a single, falsely “all-encompassing” perspective of one society within another society. She argues that people, countries, and cultures have multiple facets, and that to associate characteristics with people based on a single stereotype is an ineffective way of understanding the world. For example, she explains how the West tends to view Africans through a lens of pity that morphs Africans into impoverished and uncivilized beings completely separate from developed society. She explains that this is because Westerners only hear about the catastrophes surround the political, economic, and social realms of Africa.

The “single story” is, essentially, the product of stereotypes founded on single sources of information.  Aside from race, I wonder how the “single story” establishes how women are perceived today. I ask why women develop as beings with dimensionality only in context to their relationships with men, as highlighted in the blog post “I Am Not Your Wife, Sister, or Daughter.” I wonder how sex trade workers receive less attention as individual people than Robert Pickton and other serial killers, who are investigated as actual people through media systems centered on sensationalism.

If we focus on the media representation of women, as both Theriault’s blog post and Jiwani and Young do, there are various aspects of society that we can target as being detrimental to gender equality and producing a negative “single story” for women. In sociology class, we were introduced to the documentary Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising’s Image of Women, which featured Jean Kilbourne, an activist who has focused on the presentation of women in advertising since the 1970s. One explanation for the “single story” that infects society’s perception of women, based on Jean Kilbourne’s research, is the objectification of women within the advertising industry. Women are often presented as possessions of men in advertisements. It is not unusual for a woman to be presented as the actual bottle of alcohol or the actual car being advertised. By turning women into “things” and “objects” Kilbourne describes how a situation is created where women are stripped of character and subjective experience, hence promoting violence against women. She goes on to illustrate how ads feature women with their hands covering their mouths and how ads force women to adopt other passive and vulnerable poses that make it seem as though they exist only for men, that they need to be taken care of by men, and that they cannot be independent. This provides a possible explanation as to why society so often refers to women in context to men. Kilbourne also uncovers how the increased presentation of violent images within the media, presenting men as powerful and dominant, connects masculinity with violence and desensitizes society towards violence, influencing people to blame victims and sensationalize violent acts.

Ultimately, the “single story” that is produced and that characterizes women is one that reflects media’s representation of women, whether that be through advertising or other means. We live in a society that treats women as objects, which makes them possessions of men, which helps to create the constant refrain “mother, wife, daughter, sister” that Theriault is exhausted by. We live in a society that supports violence and victimization. Images in the media that present women as weak and helpless and men as powerful and intelligent makes it easy to blame women for their “mindless ways,” creating a culture that criticizes women for relying on prostitution as an occupation, without acknowledging that men are the ones supporting this lifestyle. This develops a sentiment for victim blaming that we see in Jiwani and Young’s article. The “single story” that classifies women in today’s society proves detrimental to current equality issues, for example, workplace equality. Women, viewed through a lens that declares them incapable, overly emotional, sensitive, and “eye candy” inhibits the ability of women to pursue high level positions within companies. The “single story” that detracts from the potential of women as contributing and important additions to society needs to be altered. Women are human beings who can establish identities of their own and do not need to adopt the lifestyles dictated to them by biased media representations.

Work Cited:

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. “The Danger of a Single Story.” TED: Ideas Worth Spreading, July 2009, https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en#t-9800. Accessed 6, November 2016.

Jhally, Sut, Jean Kilbourne, and David Rabinovitz. Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising’s Image of Women. Northampton, MA: Media Education Foundation, 2010.

Jiwani, Yasmin and Mary Lynn Young. “Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31.4 (2006): 895-917.

Theriault, Anne. “I Am Not Your Wife, Sister or Daughter.” The Belle Jar. https://bellejar.ca/2013/03/18/i-am-not-your-wife-sister-or-daughter. Accessed 6 November 2016.