Why is it that women are continually depicted as being inferior to men? Society is a simple, yet valid answer to this question. Society can easily shape how people think of themselves relative to others, especially women to men. For as long as television has been around, women have been portrayed to be less significant in the professional world and more significant in the kitchen. Try to think of a movie made before 1990 where a woman had a high-power executive position over a man in a business setting. Nothing much comes to mind.
Feminism is the want for equality between genders. Many movements have occurred throughout the 20th century from the women’s liberation movement in the 1960’s to women’s suffrage. So much has occurred that the term post-feminism came about in the 1980s, because many people believed that feminism was no longer a pertinent idea in the world, while others believed nothing has changed.
As Susan J. Douglas says in “Girls Gone Anti-Feminist”, media is not helping to make sexual equality issue any better; it is almost giving false hope of “fantasies of power”. Women having upper level positions of authority on television may be a different story from real life. Douglas says, if a woman being decorative is the highest form of power, then “Dick Cheney would have gone to work every day in a sequined tutu.” The reality however, is that after all of the years of advocating equality, women still make only 69 percent of what men make ten years out of college.
I believe that women deserve equality, but at the same time our duties are not always going to be the same. Women are women, and men are men. Simple as that. Our bodies are not wired the same anatomically and therefore our chemical makeups naturally differentiate the functionality of our lives. A prime example of this prospect is women’s ability to carry children for 9 months and go through labor and still have the strength to love and nurture something that caused them such intrinsic pain. Nevertheless, men and women have distinctive components that make them strong and classify their specific genders. Therefore those various specifications should be recognized, but never should a woman’s attributes be belittled to that of a man’s.