Media Text New Idea

Newspaper Article –

New idea

How to understand women

Plan

Include theories on language and gender in speech – e.g. that women use more politeness when speaking than men do, as well as less swear words and allofunctional implicature. Allofunctional implicature is when what is being said is not all what is being implied. The real meaning is something quite different to what is being said. I believe this will be an interesting topic for discussion in my newspaper article media text because I can inform the audience of an interesting area of language and gender study, but also entertain them through subtle humour and the essays subject.

Media Text

Newspaper Article –

How has the representation of women in the media changed in the last 50 years?

Many may say it hasn’t changed at all. Many may say it has changed dramatically. Some say for the better, some will say for the worst. But isn’t it now the case that women have equal rights to men and we, as a society, no longer have a dominant gender? This is always up for debate. Isn’t it widely believed that women are portrayed as far stronger and independent individuals. If that was the case, then why was Cindy Lauper skipping about gracefully like a school girl in the 1970s while Rihanna struts about stages as a sex object to men? These unanswered questions make sexism a difficult subject.

The Phonological Development of Children

All language learning begins with sounds. Grasping the concept of sound is the first step of language learning and is key for language to develop at a normal rate. This is often why parents subconsciously use 'babytalk' whilst speaking to their infants, making sounds and noises rather than saying whole words, and when they do say whole words, speaking them very slowly and emphasising each letter. But why do children learn language in the way they do?

- Children have to learn to distinguish different sounds and to segment the speech stream they are exposed to into units - which eventually become meaningful and useful to language development

- When you read, there are spaces between the words. No such spaces occur between spoken words. So, if an infant hears the sound sequence “thisisacup,” it has to learn to segment this stream into the distinct units “this”, “is”, “a”, and “cup.” This can be an extremely challenging aspect of language development.

- However, once a child assigns meaning to certain words language becomes easier to learn and more natural to use. Overgeneralisation is common here though, as sometimes a child can assign the wrong meaning to words. For example they may assign 'Daddy' to all men rather than just their father in particular.

Apparently, the acquisition of native language phonology begins in the womb and isn’t completely adult-like until the teenage years. Perceptual abilities (such as being able to segment “thisisacup” into four individual word units) usually precede production and thus aid the development of speech production.

 

Introduction

I predict that there was a lot of sexism in advertisements in the 1950s.

In the process of my English language investigation I will be looking into sexism in advertisements in the 1950s. I have created a hypothesis through theory which I have decided to test. It is a theory by feminist Pamela Morris - "Advertisements guide thinking, action and behaviour as people come to accept mainstream ideas through visuals. The most crucial of these is what it means to be a man or a woman. Ideas about how to feel, dress, look and behave, and how to interact with other men and women is the bedrock of the culture in which we live".

I will test this hypothesis by collecting advertisements rom the 1950s. I may also have to compare a few of the advertisements, but I will need to make this fair by only comparing them to modern day equivalents.

Media Text Activities

Choose an aspect of theory in your chosen area and write a paragraph or two about it in three different versions for the following APFs:

1. A men's or women's magazine e.g. Elle
2. A scientific magazine for well-educated non-English-specialists over 20 e.g. New Scientist
3. Another format of your choice

Another format of your choice - Newspaper Article

"Advertisements guide thinking, action and behaviour as people come to accept mainstream ideas through visuals. The most crucial of these is what it means to be a man or a woman. ideas about how to feel, dress, look and behave, and how to interact with other men and women is the bedrock of the culture in which we live" - Pamela Morris
Sound far-fetched or over-reaching? Think again. For many years now, advertising has been used to portray women and men as objects in order to attract buyers to products, but when do these innocent portrayls become sexist and degrading? And what is worse where women are concerned, the stay-at-home cooking/cleaning housewives they were portrayed to be in the 1950's, or the sex objects they are portrayed as nowadays?

Theories

My original hypothesis will be difficult to test because it is based on common sense and kind of what I thi nk rather than actual evidence or theories. I realised it would be a good idea for me to research through the internet and books and try to find something relevant to sexism which I could add to my hypothesis. I came across a book called "The Equality Illusion - The Truth About Men and Women Today" written by feminist Kat Banyard. In looking briefly through the book I came across some useful quotes;

“The equality that so many people see existing between women and men is an illusion”.

“Throughout the world, men still hold a higher status in society than women.”

However, clearly neither of these are closely related enough to advertising. However, I dont believe this doesn't mean i can't still use them. In the mean time, though, I will still be looking for theories which are more specific and more closely-related to my topic.

Evaluation of Data

I definitely do not feel as though my data is a representation of the whole data pool of sexist and non-sexist advertisements, but I knew this all along as there are just too many. This is why it is going to be so hard to limit the variables and why I have been thinking about changing my idea. I am unsure of whether or not my data will be enough to test my hypothesis and write 1500 words on as my data is not particularly comparable. This is why I think it may be a good idea for me to find modern day equivalents to my research from the 1950s with modern day equivalents. 

Updated Methodology

In thinking of a way I could limit my variables to make my searches more fair, I decided it might be a good idea to look into different articles on feminism and sexism and look into other people's research which has been grouped together, so that my collection of research isn't so random. I found an online pinboard, which although has photos uploaded by lots of different people, I thought maybe good as it would help me to get an un-biased opinion on the adverts. However, the fact that they are all tagged and grouped as being sexist makes the data a little bit unfair. I realise I need to stop limiting my research to just internet sources and begin looking into womens magazines etc. and analysing the adverts. I need to collect three of the top womens magazines/cooking magazines and study the adverts they contain. I will also continue to search the internet for more reliable data and theories I can challenge and base my hypothesis on.

Methodology Draft

During choosing a subject I wanted to focus on I came up with the idea to investigate advertisements from the 1950s and compare them with adverts nowadays based on the level of sexism they contain. I chose to investigate this because I am very aware that sexism in advertising was a common thing in the 1950s and if it really has lessened as much as a lot of individuals think. I realised this may be too broad, so I limited the data I collected specifically to cooking advertisements. I collected my data from the 1950s by searching ‘1950s cooking advertisements’ into Google. I collected my newer data by searching ‘cooking advertisements’ into Google, although after assessing my findings I realised this probably wasn’t a very fair way of collecting information and I wasn’t limiting my variables particularly well. This is due to the individuals that have posted the images on Google. Because of the wide awareness of sexism in advertising in the 1950s, the word sexism is often tagged in amongst the words ‘1950s’ and ‘advertisements’. This means that during my search for 1950s cooking advertisements, I am bound to find the sexist adverts almost immediately. However, with newer cooking advertisements, I have had to type in ‘new sexist cooking advertisements’ in order to find more than just a few, which makes my search unfair. The reason for this is because cooking advertisements nowadays are not deemed as being so obviously sexist, although a lot do still come across as very sexist, just more subtly. In understanding that the research I have already done doesn’t really limit the variables, I have realised that I may have to find a more fair way to collect my data, or change what I am going to be investigating slightly. Another idea I could consider investigating if I don’t find a way to make my searches fair, is to instead investigate how women have been portrayed differently in the past to nowadays in advertising. I think there may be more data available for me to use if I do decide to switch to my plan B.

My Hypothesis

For my English language investigation I have decided to look at the sexism in cooking advertisements and cookbook pages and compare them to that of the 1970s, and again to the 2000s.

My Hypothesis: I predict that sexism in cooking advertisements will have dropped dramatically between the 1950s and the 1970s, and again between the 1970s and the 2000s.

I think that this will be an interesting hypothesis to investigate and discuss because in researching data, I have noticed that although advertisements nowadays are not as directly nor obviously as sexist as they were a while back, some are still subtly sexist without meaning to be, and some seem to portray women as sexual objects in order to draw (presumably male) customers in. This means I will be able to argue against my hypothesis during my essay and see it from both sides before finding out the truth.