"Media Systems Reflect Our Social Environment and Specifically How It Reflects Each Gender"

In this essay I will be talking about how the media represents each gender and how they have changed over the years, the specific years I will be talking about are the 1960’s and the 2000’s. I will be comparing the two how each gender was portrayed in that timeline. The three films I will be using in the 1960’s era is Get Carter, Circus of Horrors and The Angel Wore Red. The three films I will be studying for the 2000’s will be, The Hunger Games, Harry Potter and lastly Lincoln.

Firstly, I would like to talk about Laura Mulvey’s essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Structure’, Mulvey says that “the way the film reflects, reveals, and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle” which according to Mulvey, women are always the objects of the gaze, never the holders of the gaze.  The camera is always in the male domain.

The first film I will talk about is Circus of Horrors, starring Anton Diffring and produced by Sidney Hayers, the film is about a British Horror story based on  1947 England, I thought this was a good film to choose because it is a good representation of Visual Pleasure and Narrative Structure as the girls are passive, dressed in tight short clothing, whilst the men are active and carry the narrative onwards. 

Women in the 1960's real life set up The Women's Liberation Front which was a social struggle which eliminated forms of oppression based on gender which gained women equal economic and social rights to determine their own lives. The contraceptive pill also came out in the 1960's and the men were not happy about it, women now had control over their sex lives and were able to use the pill so they could not become impregnated, because during that time sex before marriage was still unspoken of. 

The second film I will be discussing is The Angel Wore Red starring Ava Gardener, this is a film based in the Spanish Civil War, this also uses the Gaze as one of the main male characters (Dirk Bogarde) finds himself falling for Ava's character, who is a prostitute within the film. This shows again that women are passive, used as sexual objects where as men are active and the ones doing the 'gazing'