J103-Reading Analysis-7/10: The Politics of the Smile; 31st Oct 2006

In this essay Patricia Holland discusses the history of the feminisation and consequent sexualisation of the press. She begins with the changing nature of popular journalism in the 1970’s at the same time adding the original changes that occurred at the end of the 19th Century. Holland explains that this degradation of the quality of journalism “brought greater democratic freedoms-for women as well as for men.” She also says that the new mass production technology of the late 19th Century allowed the newspaper industry “to please a wider range of people, many of whom had little time and less inclination to plough through the convoluted metaphors…which characterised nineteenth century newspaper prose.”
As she continues Holland explains the socio-economic changes going on all over the country. At the turn of the 20th Century advertising and the “consumer-based, leisure economy began to get under way.” Holland says that this change was energised by this new female market that had it’s own personal wealth. This argument is well sustained and sheds light on what these stark changes meant to the industry and I agree with the points that Holland makes.
Holland explains the founding of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror with interest and verve, choosing to put emphasis on the sacking of the original female staff by Lord Northcliffe soon after they began. She describes Northcliffe’s actions as “symptomatic” which she explains in further detail in the next passage’s ideas of inferiority of women within the consciousness of a largely male society.
My biggest reservation with this essay is the lack of challenge to seemingly widely held beliefs. As a woman herself, Holland displays no willingness to call the beliefs held at the time into direct question. As with many of the essays that we have been given this semester, it goes through the motions of representing the facts and makes no effort to look for solutions to the acidic nature of the trivialisation of women. It disturbs me to find that I seem to be more militant a feminist than the author.
It is accepted that the ‘softening’ of the news today is described as “feminisation”; this doesn’t sit well with me at all. I believe that this does damage to any possibility to the further advancement of the feminist cause in the 21st Century. The sexualisation of the press is given credit for the changing “of alignments between public and private domains, and between masculine and feminine concerns”. This I believe is true, but it is almost as if the blame is placed squarely at the female readership and not at the oppressively natured dominant male industry.
I find this inequality that is starkly realised within this essay without reaction quite offensive. I believe that it is the duty of all women to realise that “the use of the female body as spectacle and as commodity” is a method of control that must be eradicated if true sexual equality is to become a reality. The acceptance of this, the “interplay between…‘information’ and entertainment” within the news media and the constant attempts of newspapers like The Sun to find “good news in contrast to the ‘gloomy and threatening’ news of the ‘serious’ broadsheets” as the norm is the most damaging thing to democracy and world harmony.
The connection between the female form and the trivialities of the modern world is something that should be broken and something that this essay makes no attempt to change.