Mass Media In Modern Society

We live in a society organized around a gender structure that emphasizes the differences between men and women as natural in order to construct a gender hierarchy. In doing so, society has constructed misconceptions and myths regarding gender, ultimately leading to the oppression of women by males, throughout time. Historically, wealthy white males have been the dominant class in Western societies, granting them unprecedented power to create and reinforce rules that only serve to benefit their needs. Such privilege and power is essential in providing support to act in demeaning, controlling, and abusive ways toward women. Unfortunately, this social system of patriarchy is nevertheless abundantly prevalent in modern society. Feminist scholarship

Mass media are varied types of media technologies intended for mass communication with a large audience. As Walton and Potvin (2009) suggest, media is a process of influence, and it’s effects are incremental, perpetual, and often vary (3). Most research on the effects of mass media in the perpetuation and normalization of VAW is based on the ideology and social theory of cultivation. Franiuk and Scherr (2013) describe cultivation as a process in which individuals construct a social reality through television. Furthermore, cultivation theory explores the long-term effects of television exposure by postulating that the more time an individual spends enraptured in the world of television, the more likely said individuals is to believe the social realities portrayed on television (15). Research shows that continual exposure to the fabricated representation of reality by the media, results in individuals overestimating the prevalence of violence, overestimating peer’s permissiveness about sex, and encouraging sexist views of women (Franiuk and Scherr 2013:15). The use of cultivation analysis is not necessarily limited to television, it can be applied to any form of mass media communication. There are several different platforms of mass media; movies, pornography, music, books, and video games. Extensive research has shown that each media platform has been found to have an effect or direct link associated with male sexual violence toward women. Additional research also suggests that the socially constructed realities by the media have extensive and lasting effects on individual’s behaviors who have been