Wednesday, July 21, 2010

D. The Invisible Women



The fourth post in my feminism series. After I wrote it I started seeing even more invisibility, combined with the visibility of tits-n-ass and other gender markers.

I also realized that the television, movies and even journalism offer us one kind of false visibility: The few women who are major movers-and-shakers, for instance, are covered much more than the men at equal levels of power.

This makes powerful women seem more common than they really are. Like a group picture of a large group where the two women in the group are seated in the center front and wear red suits. (I saw one of those after a major meeting of government heads.) The less powerful women? They truly are invisible in the media.

I now think that the problem I describe in that post is even more complicated than the post allows, but an essential ingredient is the invisibility of women as individuals with their own personalities, characteristics and talents, combined with an odd visibility of women's sexual markers. These grow from the same root.