Women getting raped, young girls getting sold into human trafficking, and gender stereotypes bombarding the minds of people in workplaces and in school. Gender discrimination has become an epidemic that delineates women as helpless beings being pulled around by the dominant forces of men.
Despite these grave cases, we cannot sidestep the glaring truth: as our world globalizes in a dizzying speed, feminism is sprouting its branches into a profound movement that is overturning the previously neglected history of women. The advances humanity has made in technology and entertainment are facilitators of this global change. Instagram and Twitter has allowed people to build a community that empowers women and so are movies or dramas that are beginning to portray women through different social lens. Against this backdrop, our entertainment industries enabled feminism to expand into a realm of cultural and political acceptance.
Social media connected through our computers and mobiles has also played a significant role in empowering women. Twitter has become a place where women consult each other and build a community of women’s rights. Zerlina Maxwell is a political writer who brought light to rape through Twitter. By creating the #rapecultureiswhen, she shared her traumatic experiences regarding rape and this hashtag trended quickly as women shared what they thought about rape culture. By advocating the claim that rape culture exists, Zerlina successfully showed that was a cultural force normalizing abuse and exploitation against women. She was driven by umbrage that many people neglected rape victims and only asked them what kind of clothes they wore that day. Zerlina realized that the attitude towards women victims were of indifference as if it was an accepted cultural norm. One of the tweets she posted was, “Rape culture is when too many people think consent to drinking means consent to everything else. Nope.” Others began to follow and used this hashtag to share their truths and bring spotlight to the problematic status quo.
Another hashtag that spread to support women was #EverydaySexism initiated by Laura Bates. Laura has come to realize that many women around her face situations everyday where men look at them and talk about them as if they were sexual objects but has come to accept these situations as if they are normal happenings or even compliments. Only she took it as a problem that needed more attention, and therefore encouraged people online to share stories of their daily confrontations with sexism. In honor of her Everyday Sexism Project, more than 50,000 people contributed to talk about situations in workplace to public transportation where they were sexually harassed or belittled for being a woman. Media has facilitated mass conversations where people could support, encourage, and understand each other’s issues and problems.
Some might claim to the contrary that media hinders the growth of feminism due to`the commodification of women. Instagram is inundated with pictures of Victoria Secret models in flamboyant dresses with photoshopped legs, enlarged eyes, slimmed cheeks, smoothened face, and a curved waist. They might insist that the media has fostered unrealistic societal expectations of women through airbrushing photos online.
Conversely, the social network sites have actually empowered women to respect their own body. All over instagram, there are hashtags that create an online movement for body confidence and positivity. Tess Holliday is a plus size model who created the #EffYourBeautyStandards to share selfies of her body and to encourage others to celebrate their curvy bodies that don’t fit under standards of “skinny”. Women all across the globe are posting selfies to maintain positive feelings about their bodies and tagging it under many hashtags like #CelebratemySize, #ImNoAngel, #AllBodiesAreGoodBodies, #BodyPositive, etc. Many women are breaking out of their comfort zone, past the conventional beauty standards, and into a world where they proudly accept their bodies just the way they are.
In the final analysis, the use of media and advancements in entertainment has empowered women in ways never explored before. Though there are those misogynistic people who make sexist, cynical remarks on the Internet, the media has still paved way for women to build a community and support one another. Social media has become a transformative place of discourse and expression for people to stand up for themselves and others.
