Media: Defining Roles

``Mostly, violence against women is actually reinforced by the image of the strong, virile, honorable man, the man who will not accept the woman as his equal (probably due to some ‘misconceived notion of masculinity). Does this image have any negative consequences? Yes! And the loser here is again the woman``

I differ here, dear. How do you come to the conclusion that the loser here is again the woman. You are not to blame as the man seldom gives vent to the suffering he has to undergo due to the atrocities committed by the woman just to keep up his image of an honourable man. The result is the violence in a few cases which the provocation and the physical prowess of the man generally enables him and which gets much publicity in the media. When a man commits violence, he is reported in the Urdu media as `Saffak khawand` but when a woman gets her husband murdered throuhg her paramour the media does not call her `Saffak`. The man has to suffer for his violence but the woman goes scot free.

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Samina,

I can believe that! This thinking business is what`s done us in, I tell ya.

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HetHeret:

…But is the mother the only person the child has any contact with?
of course not…but she has a primary influence on the newborn…

… We spend too many years exerting too much control over ourselves for us to blame parents exclusively for the way we turned out.
agreed…I was merely exploring the irony, if true…if the child acquires the major personality traits in the first few years that sustain him for the rest of his adult life…then the irony should not be lost upon the mother of mullah omar or mullah diesel when their likes show such scant respect for women…honour killings, satta watta, marrying the qur’an and other fallacies and blasphemies that afflict the men in our country...


t

HetHeret,

Since you bring up these angle, I`ll throw this one in: Many behaviorists contend that wolve packs raise their young in a more supportive and nurturing environment than humans do...

Temporal:

Nature-nurture...I was watching a program on Discovery the other day about feral children (children raised by animals or kept in extreme isolation from infancy). Kids raised by dogs (a four-year old boy, an eight-year old boy, and a sixteen-year-old girl--all individual cases) behaved like dogs, a child who spent one year of his early infancy with a chimp of the same age as an experiment (his father wanted to see what would happen to the chimp, not to the kid) started adopting the mannerisms and vocalization of the chimpanzee. Most of these were reversed to some extent. The younger the child, the easier it was to change its behavior and teach it language--something you begin to gradually lose the ability to do if you don`t hear language from early infancy. By about 18, you lose the ability to learn meaningful language altogether.

All this indicates, as you said, that early influence is vital to a child`s development. But is the mother the only person the child has any contact with? The mother may be the primary caregiver, but it is extremely unusual for the child to not come into contact with other people as well, and isolated experiences can sometimes cause a more extreme reaction than something that is constant. Phobias that haunt us in our adult life can often have their roots in such trauma.

But this happens when we are unable to exert any control on our environment. After a point, we can exert better control on our own environment and can choose what to believe and see. We are programmed both genetically and by our early experiences, but only to an extent. Our capacity for growth is stunning and while we cannot ignore what is instilled in us at an early age, we can actively choose to grow past it. That`s the great thing about this lump of greasy gray mush we`ve got behind our eyes.

So are the mothers responsible? They probably laid the groundwork at some point that made such further development possible, but, ultimately, no. We spend too many years exerting too much control over ourselves for us to blame parents exclusively for the way we turned out.

T-bhai,

I dont know. Shouldnt we take into account personality disorders, biochemistry, trauma, entitlement, etc.?

Zebunnisa,

Looking forward to reading your research.

wanderer: yes -- true, globalisation, inequities due to power play of economies, they all add to and are a cause of such inequality and irresponsibility on the part of media houses. HOWEVER, one cannot ignore individual journalists and advertiesers who have made THIs very system even more entrenched. Then again, I realise that it sounds like a bit of a contradiction, does media SHAPE society or REFLECT it...it really does both...at times, media can bring a revolution in the thinking of the people and at other times (such as these...in Pakistan), it just reinforces set ideas.

Saminasha: thank you ...im sort of in the middle of a research on gender portrayals and their effect on children....talkign to kids at the moment....shall post it once done.

teshah: i didnt get your point. I hope you had one.

Zebunnisa:

welcome to chowk and hope you will continue to contribute and inter act…

have a digressionary query for sammi but you or others can answer it also…

those who study human behavior tell us cultural transference takes place mostly in the first few years of a child’s growth…and the closest person a child sees in those formative years is his mother…the impressions and values acquired in those years influence the child’s psyche as an adult…

does this mean it is primarily the mother that creates hitlers, mullah omars, osama bin bushes, narendra modis, bal thackerays, fazloo diesels and sami ul haqs of this world?

lve

t

ps to #4: you are cruel sammi;)

Yes. Domestic violence is committed predominantly by women. The stats of reported rapes show women as the overwhelming perpetrating gender. Our media is filled with images of men as either sex objects or irreproachable saints, corrollaries to their wives, daughters and mothers. In fact, Afghanistan was a brilliant ruse on behave of women who raped themselves, banned themselves from school, shot and beat themselves, threatened themselves with acid and jail if they did not burqa, removed themselves from public service, separated themselves from ``male`` spheres of influence so they could make men look bad. Yes, why didnt we see that all along?

This `gender issue` is like sectarian issue. The question is what is meant by `man` and `woman`. Can we see man and woman only sex parteners? They are fathers , mothers; brothers, sisters; sons, daughters; `bharuaas` and `daashtaas`; slaves and masters, etc., etc.. Tradition tells us that the first attempt at rape was comitted by a woman named Zulekha of a beautiful man named Yousaf. Failing in her attempt she got him sent to jail. Our media is full these days about the exploits of women doing horrible things to their husbands and vice versa. So it is very sensitive issue either to be generalised or to give it a partisan tinge. Of necessity we will have sterotype roles assigned to either gender to ensure reliability in social relations beyod sex. As Shakespear had said about the woman, `` She stoops to conquer`` it would be better for her to adopt a role viz-a-viz man which is in cosonance with her nature and prowess and not to adopt a challenging stance against her opposite gender.

Interesting article...even more interesting are the first two sentences of your essay.

First sentence: ``The media, in all forms, SHAPES our perception of what it means to be male or female.``

Second sentence: ``It is a REFLECTION of the society and..REINFORCES certain traditional representations...`` ..and therein lies the quandry. Which is it - does the `media` (a nebulous term) affect or reflect our views of gender development ?

It is tempting to villify the media as propagating patriarchal ideology and engaging in negative stereotyping, but is that the whole story ? Yes, concentrated ownership of the media is an issue, but so are the inequities of a global socio-economic system that promotes the need for an exploited underclass of workers including both women and men. Are not educational opportunities (and the potential for emancipation) constrained by economics (at a global level) and theocratic thugs (at a regional/local level) ?

Is there anything that so-called progressive countries like Sweden, Norway and Canada have anything that we could draw upon (eg. childcare, employment law, education) and extend to South Asia ? Or are we beyond hope ?

Ms. Burki,

Several insightful observations. Your comments on the portrayal of the ``embedded`` woman; the woman who is shown in only interdependent familial roles are particularly astute, as is your ``good/bad`` dichotomy.

In addition, the point that both women AND men are afflicted by a stereotypical media is one too often overlooked.

Hope to read more about these initiatives.