Feminist Critiques of Mass Media: Challenging Gender Norms

Mass media shapes how we see the world – and how we see ourselves. From the heroine waiting to be rescued in a Hindi film to the fairness cream ad promising a “perfect” bride, media constantly tells us what women and men are supposed to be. Feminist scholars have spent the last fifty years pulling apart these images, asking uncomfortable questions about who gets to speak, who gets looked at, and whose stories never make it to the screen at all.

Where it began: feminist media analysis in the 1970s 🔗

The 1970s gave us the first systematic feminist critique of mass media. Riding on the energy of the second-wave feminist movement, scholars in the US, UK and Europe started studying advertisements, films, news, and television with one central question: how does media represent women, and what does that representation do to society?

One of the earliest and most influential ideas came from sociologist Gaye Tuchman, who coined the term symbolic annihilation. She argued that media erases women through three tactics: omission (not showing them at all), trivialisation (treating their concerns as unimportant), and condemnation (punishing women who step outside traditional roles). When women appeared on screen, they were largely wives, mothers, or romantic interests – rarely scientists, leaders, or independent thinkers.

Laura Mulvey and the male gaze 🔗

In 1975, British film theorist Laura Mulvey published an essay called Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, which introduced a concept that would change media studies forever – the male gaze. Mulvey argued that mainstream cinema is structured around a heterosexual male viewpoint. The camera lingers on women’s bodies, frames them in close-ups, and presents them as objects of desire rather than active participants in the story. Men, in contrast, drive the plot forward. They look; women are looked at.

Mulvey’s framework has three layers – how the camera looks at women, how male characters look at female characters within the story, and how audiences are trained to look. Watching becomes a learned habit. We absorb the idea that women exist to be seen and judged, and women themselves internalise this gaze, evaluating their own bodies through imagined male eyes.

Patriarchal narratives and ideology 🔗

Early feminists also showed that mass media is not neutral entertainment – it carries ideology. The “happily ever after” of a romance, the punishment of the rebellious wife, the celebration of the self-sacrificing mother – these are not innocent storylines. They reinforce patriarchy by making certain gender arrangements feel natural, inevitable, and even desirable. Stuart Hall and other cultural theorists added that media works through repetition. The same images, told again and again across films, songs, and serials, slowly become common sense.

Stereotyping and misrepresentation of women 🔗

Once feminists started counting, the patterns became hard to ignore. Women were missing from news, missing from leadership roles on screen, and when present, they were squeezed into a handful of stock characters.

The domestic woman and the sexual object 🔗

Two dominant images shape women’s portrayal in mass media: the domestic woman and the sexual object. The domestic woman is the devoted wife, mother, or daughter-in-law – gentle, sacrificing, and rooted in family. The sexual object is her opposite – the glamorous, available, often morally suspect woman who exists to attract male attention. In Hindi cinema, scholars have called this the Madonna-whore dichotomy, where Bollywood films consistently frame women within the dual categories of the “good” heroine and the “bad” item girl, contributing to the moral policing of women’s identities.

Television serials reinforce this further. The endless saas-bahu dramas, with their conspiring mothers-in-law and weeping daughters-in-law, present women’s entire lives as bounded by the kitchen, the puja room, and the bedroom. Career, friendship, politics, intellectual life – these are simply absent.

Advertising and the perfect body 🔗

Advertising deserves special attention because it works directly on aspiration. Fairness creams, weight-loss products, hair-removal kits, and bridal jewellery all sell a version of the ideal woman – fair, slim, smooth, and ready for marriage. The Advertising Standards Council of India and activists have repeatedly pushed back, and rules now require advertisers to avoid derogatory references to darker skin tones, but the underlying message – that a woman’s worth lies in her appearance – has been deeply absorbed.

Men as authority, women as decoration 🔗

The flip side of women’s stereotyping is how men are shown. Male characters dominate as doctors, lawyers, scientists, police officers, politicians, and CEOs. Their voices carry authority in news broadcasts and voice-overs. They make decisions; women react to those decisions. This imbalance teaches audiences, especially children, that leadership and expertise belong to men by default, while women belong to support roles.

The Indian context: media, mythology, and modernity 🔗

Feminist critiques developed in the West, but they translate sharply to the Indian context – sometimes with added layers. Indian media draws on mythology, religion, and family tradition to construct womanhood. The ideal woman is often modelled on Sita: loyal, pure, and willing to undergo any test for her husband’s honour.

Bollywood’s evolving but uneven progress 🔗

Hindi cinema has changed since the 1950s, but the change is uneven. Films from the early decades celebrated the sacrificing mother and the devoted wife. The 1970s gave us the “angry young man” – but no equivalent space for an angry young woman. Item songs, where a glamorously dressed woman dances for a crowd of leering men, became a fixture from the 1990s onwards, reproducing the male gaze in its most concentrated form. Researchers studying Bollywood have noted that female characters are still often commodified and constrained, positioned as objects of spectacle rather than agents of action.

At the same time, there has been real progress. Films like Queen, Pink, Thappad, The Great Indian Kitchen, and Darlings have placed women’s interiority, anger, and autonomy at the centre. Heroine-led narratives are no longer rare, and they often grapple seriously with consent, domestic violence, and patriarchal customs.

News media and the gender gap 🔗

News media remains another site of feminist concern. The Global Media Monitoring Project tracks women’s presence in news every five years and has consistently found women under-represented as news subjects, sources, and reporters. The most recent reports show that only about a quarter of the people heard, read about, or seen in news are women, and they are far more likely to appear as victims or in personal-life stories than as experts or political voices. When violence against women is reported, the language often blames the victim, sensationalises the incident, or focuses on what she was wearing rather than the structural conditions that enabled the assault.

Recent feminist perspectives: beyond the woman question 🔗

Feminist media studies has not stood still. Newer generations of scholars have widened the lens significantly, recognising that the old framework – focused mainly on cis, heterosexual, urban, upper-caste women – left too much unsaid.

Examining masculinity 🔗

One major shift is the study of masculinity itself. Following the work of sociologist R.W. Connell, scholars have explored how media constructs hegemonic masculinity – a dominant ideal of manhood that valorises toughness, emotional restraint, sexual aggression, and dominance over women and weaker men. The Hindi film hero who beats up ten goons and “wins” the heroine despite her objections is a textbook case. This kind of masculinity is harmful to women, but also to men, who feel pressure to suppress vulnerability and prove themselves through aggression. Recent Indian films like Article 15, Masaan, and Kapoor & Sons have begun exploring softer, more conflicted male characters, opening up space for what some scholars call new masculinities.

LGBTQ+ representation 🔗

Another expansion concerns LGBTQ+ representation. For decades, queer characters in Indian media were either invisible or reduced to comic relief – the lisping, limp-wristed gay man, the predatory hijra, the lesbian subplot played for titillation. After the reading down of Section 377 in 2018 and growing awareness of trans rights, films like Aligarh, Margarita with a Straw, Badhaai Do, and the web series Made in Heaven have given queer characters depth, dignity, and ordinary lives. The shift is partial – most mainstream representation still centres urban, English-speaking, upper-class queer experiences – but it marks a real departure from earlier mockery.

Intersectionality and the missing women 🔗

Contemporary feminist media analysis also pays close attention to intersectionality, a concept developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. Indian media has historically been overwhelmingly urban, upper-caste, and Hindi/English-dominated. Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim, disabled, and rural women have been largely invisible, or shown only as victims. Independent platforms, regional cinema, and digital creators are slowly filling this gap, though the mainstream remains slow to change.

The digital turn 🔗

The arrival of OTT platforms, YouTube, and social media has reshaped the landscape. Streaming services have allowed more diverse stories – including queer narratives, working-class women, and complex female anti-heroes – that traditional cinema would not fund. Yet digital media has also amplified online harassment, with women journalists, activists, and ordinary users facing organised trolling, sexualised abuse, and threats. Feminist media critique today must therefore include not just what is on screen, but how digital spaces themselves are gendered.

Why this critique still matters 🔗

Some readers might wonder whether feminist media critique is outdated in an age of female superheroes and women-led franchises. The answer is that representation is improving in some pockets and stagnating or even regressing in others. Item songs continue to top the charts. News still tells us about powerful men and their wives. Advertisements still sell fairness, slimness, and marriage as the ultimate female goals. The patterns that 1970s feminists identified have not disappeared – they have shifted shape.

Understanding feminist critiques of mass media gives us tools to watch differently. It helps us notice the cuts, the camera angles, the silences, the punishment of women who step out of line, and the rewarding of those who conform. Once you see these patterns, it becomes harder to consume media passively – and easier to demand better stories.

What do you think? Think of the last film, advertisement, or web series you watched – whose gaze was the camera serving, and whose story was left untold? Do you believe Indian media is genuinely moving towards more equal representation, or are the changes mostly cosmetic?

References

1. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-the-male-gaze
2. https://media-studies.com/male-gaze/
3. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2025.1694300/full
4. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/asci-tightens-skin-care-advertising-norms-bars-derogatory-references-to-darker-tone/articleshow/86003540.cms
5. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/feature-story/2024/03/explainer-how-gender-stereotypes-in-the-media-are-derailing-the-fight-for-gender-equality
6. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12935684/
7. https://whomakesthenews.org/gmmp-2020-final-reports/
8. https://www.granthaalayahpublication.org/Arts-Journal/ShodhKosh/article/view/2573
9. https://prsindia.org/billtrack/the-transgender-persons-protection-of-rights-bill-2019