Introduction
In the final months of his tenure, the 44th President of the United States of America penned an essay in a popular magazine to publicly declare his support of feminism and encourage a broad conversation on improving gender equality around the world. Conversely, the next man voted into the same office, perhaps the most influential in the world, was elected despite the widespread circulation and condemnation of an audio recording in which he boasts about abusing his power as a celebrity to sexually assault women; interestingly, the opponent he defeated was arguably the most politically accomplished woman in American history.
In response to the inauguration of a man who has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 18 women, an estimated* 4.5 million people joined the Women’s March on Washington and its almost 700 sister marches around the world on January 21, 2017 to voice support for women’s rights and intersectional feminism. These events have been heavily examined in media.
A similarly turbulent and dichotomous debate occurred around the same time as the 2016 U.S. Presidential election and 2017 inauguration: Between January 2016 and February 2017, Playboy, the ubiquitous men’s lifestyle magazine, opted to eliminate and later reinstate the nude photographs of women that have been the cornerstone of the periodical and brand since its naissance in 1953.
The removal was said to reply to a desire to appeal to a younger male audience, but, confusingly, the mid-2016 appointment of 24-year-old Cooper Hefner (Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s son) as the brand’s chief creative officer spawned the reentrance of unclothed women to the publication’s pages in early 2017. Interestingly, the young Hefner asserted that Playboy nudity’s second chance aligns with feminist ideals, despite the decades-long tension between Playboy and the feminist movement. Perhaps even more interestingly, the same U.S. President that angered so many women has also long been associated with the Playboy brand, making a cameo in one of its soft-core pornography films and once appearing on the cover of the magazine.
Elsewhere, I have commented on the likely societal stimuli for Playboy’s nudity removal as a branding overhaul. In particular, the company’s executives explained the switch as influenced by the volume and accessibility of internet pornography, which is such that men no longer ‘need’ Playboy to fulfill their sexual pleasures. I also claimed that the possibility of newly acceptable femininities opening up mirrors the similarly new masculinities arising for millennial-generation men, as contended in Eric Anderson’s inclusive masculinity theory (2009). This theory suggests that younger men no longer conform to a hegemonic masculinity based on opposition to all things feminine. Anderson’s optimism (which mirrors second-wave feminism’s unfulfilled hope to encourage more acceptable feminine pursuits for men) has been challenged as premature (O’Neill, 2015b), as was Playboy’s non-nude rebranding.
Clearly, gender politics are very much still disputed in the West and worldwide. In particular, this theme continues its relevance due in no small part to its deliberation in mainstream media. Beyond the above examples, embedded in this online and offline conversation are notions of women’s reproductive rights (e.g., access to contraceptives and legal abortions), gender bias in professional settings, transgender rights (e.g, transgender individuals’ use of public restrooms), individuals who do not identify with the male/female binary, the legal ramifications of sexual assault, and, more basically, women’s ‘place’ in society in terms of marriage, motherhood, and domestic responsibilities. Media broadcasts focusing on both new and traditional gender configurations seem to occur with equal frequency, and thus this debate rages further.
New aspects of this millennia-old discussion continue to arise in the digital era, with examples including the legal grey area of rape threats in computer-mediated communication, whether sending unsolicited images of male genitalia (“dick pics”) is illegal exposure, and the consequences of spreading revenge porn. In fact, much of the discussion regarding gender politics today exists solely within and because of media (Gill 2016), and this trend may not have even yet reached its peak**.
The online world does not exist in a space entirely outside of offline norms and interactions. Internet users gather, influence, interpret, and reflect knowledge of the offline world and apply it to the online world, and vice versa; this relationship thus requires that both spaces be evaluated when discussing current media phenomena.
Indeed, social media users, for instance, use the platforms’ affordances to craft their offline selves into online profiles. The often archival and sometimes ephemeral mediated descriptions of the self open new areas for critique. This tangled web provides an offline foundation and vocabulary to online interactions while supplying an online basis for offline exchanges.
The Cases
Media canons coalesce into figures that exaggerate certain trends, stereotypes and slang phenomena. With the online media sphere as the primary object of focus in this thesis, the two chosen case studies reflect the interplay of on- and offline gendered behaviors and, in doing so, exemplify gender relations of the current age.
These two figures were chosen for their global popularity and their purported applicability (from both male and female perspectives) to broad audiences in (primarily Anglo-American) society. Both cases in this research represent a young, white, heterosexual masculinity, though this focus is not intended to be exclusionary; merely, it is an effect of hegemonic masculinity that these traits are today’s most visible.
Figure 1 Screengrab from the viral Fuckboy video.
The first case of analysis, the Fuckboy (see Figure 1), is a term for a young man who engages in practices of hypermasculinity through social media when interacting with women. The Fuckboy seems to seek sex above all else, and despite the level of derision this figure faces in online contexts, he is still seen as an attractive and inevitable misstep in the on- and offline dating lives of young women.
The Instagram Husband (see Figure 2), on the other hand, is depicted as a doting man who selflessly sacrifices his time to photograph his wife (or general female significant other) for her social media profiles, with particular reference to Instagram. The wives of Instagram Husbands tend to apply social media notoriety or marketing to their careers, but the Instagram Husbands seem more annoyed and self-pitying than supportive.
Both of these figures occupy spaces in what Rosalind Gill (2009a) has called mediated intimacy, or “the ways in which different kinds of intimate relationality are constructed in different media sites” (p. 346). The Fuckboy utilizes social media communication to construct intimate relationships, whereas the Instagram Husband demonstrates intimacy that has been interrupted by social media. The gender roles in these cases, both male and female, are embedded in postfeminist media culture, which Gill (2007a; 2007b) has crafted into a sensibility to characterize gender expressions in contemporary media.
Figure 2 Screengrab from the viral Instagram Husband video.
In the same manner as Gill (2009b) and Tyler (2008), I use the term “figure” for these masculinities to express how historical and cultural influences are manipulated into public representations, which supplies a foundation on which to base research.
Why Study This Topic?
Gender represents the juncture between public and private, political and personal; it pervades all. It is attached to every interaction, on every level, and within every sphere of existence. In recent years, gender has become one of the most visible societal conversations. Indeed, as the public sphere has transformed, gendered debates have entered the public eye, mainstream media, and now social media (Gill, 2016). Gender in media, as a topic of study, epitomizes the way we as humans view ourselves. With the growing presence of loud-and-proud feminism in media, it is essential to understand the impacts of this trend, which is necessitated on instigating critical transcendence of the status quo, as I attempt to do in this paper.
I am primarily interested in the abstraction that develops within the cyclical relationship of how real people and real experiences are translated into media and then reflected back into society. I have noticed a gap between the available gender constructions in media and those expressed by the people I know in ‘real life.’ I have seen men deflate into dejected insecurity trying to achieve an impossible prepackaged masculinity that stifles their uniqueness and creativity, just as women, and myself, have battled against unrealistic expectations of femininity and damaging stereotypes of what it means to be a woman. Rather than considering gender-related insecurities as the failure of individuals to live up to an ideal, I view it as a failure of culture to express the reality of society, and I hope to see this incongruence begin to be resolved.
I acknowledge that there is broad unfamiliarity with how gender roles are socialized and translated into media, and thus there is little understanding of how else to discuss gender without using the “just the way it is” debate. I have found that tensions arise when broad sweeping statements of gender (about “women’s things” or “the way men act”) are rationalized, especially in media. I aim to unpack the debate claiming, for example, that women are more naturally inclined toward social media connectivity; I find no utility in this statement, as “nature” and “social media” are inherently dissimilar.
Social media are chosen the platform on which to unravel the claims of inherent gendered tendencies because they so easily serve to disconnect what we take for granted in society and what is truly human nature. Breaking down gender in social media can serve to dismiss claims of nature and provide an evaluation of this misalignment between men and women in today’s world with the hope of eventually breaking down damaging biases in other realms of life.
Since the rise of social networking sites compounded only around the year 2005 (boyd and Ellison, 2008), this thesis updates existing scholarship on postfeminist media culture with the context of present-day social media domination. Social media offer laypeople the ability to freely broadcast, and thus many viewpoints emerge. Consequently, some men have pushed to reclaim what they may have been told is their rightful dominance over women; meanwhile, feminist messages abound, and one has even said, “society is not producing men who meet the desires of generations of women who thought they could have it all.”
There is a great deal of research on womanhood in society, but there has been comparably little effort in academia to address and improve damaging constructions of manhood (Gill, 2007b). I aim to unravel these figures to highlight aspects of societal expectations that hinder every man’s relations with himself and with women. The figures I address represent caricatures and stereotypes. Of course, as mentioned above, these discourses do appear to varying degrees in real-life human interactions, but there is no foundation in the thought that any singular person embodies the figures addressed in this work, nor any other mediated construction.
The gender canon persists in many societies as primarily male versus female, and the two case studies in this thesis are representative of this broad trend. I believe it is a necessary step toward more comprehensive gender inclusion to study how this duality still interacts in society today, and I do so with the hopes of using this knowledge to affect a more open and equality society in the future. I aim to add a piece to the whole of contemporary gender scholarship, one to build upon with more gender identities in the future.
The overall aims of these case analyses are to show how renewed feminisms and misogynies manifest in mediated presentations of gender and are expressed through the contradictions of postfeminist media culture. I thus hope to contribute to the forging of a new style of speaking about gender, one that does not spread blame but rather a dialog of understanding. We do not have a roadmap for how to create a truly gender equal contemporary society, nor do we know what such a society would ultimately encompass; as of now, we can only critically examine what currently exists to try to find a better model.
*An independent report estimated between 3.5 and 5.6 million attendees worldwide, with a “best guess” of approximately 4.5 million people.
**This thesis was written and completed before the rise of the #metoo movement, which has already had considerable sociocultural influence. This movement was born from social media and is thus inherently relevant to this research. However, due to the impossibility of timing, the hashtag movement is not included herein. I hope to address this important development and its progressions in later work.
JP 