INTRODUCTION
WHY EXPLORE THE relationship between media, gender and identity? Media and communications are a central element of modern life, whilst gender and sexuality remain at the core of how we think about our identities. With the media containing so many images of women and men, and messages about men, women and sexuality today, it is highly unlikely that these ideas would have no impact on our own sense of identity. At the same time, though, it’s just as unlikely that the media has a direct and straightforward effect on its audiences. It’s unsatisfactory to just assume that people somehow copy or borrow their identities from the media. To complicate things further, we live in changing times. What we learned in the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s about media and gender might not be so relevant today, because the media has changed, and people’s attitudes have changed. The ‘role models’ of times gone by might be rather laughable and embarrassing now.

This book sets out to establish what messages the media sends to contemporary audiences about gender, and what the impact of those messages might be. We will consider some of the previous writings on media and identity, but rather than dwell on the same set of works that textbooks have covered in the past - a set of concepts and ideas which I will suggest are not always so helpful today - this book seeks to introduce the reader to particular social theorists (such as Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler) whose ideas about identity give us more to work with when considering the role of the media in the formation and negotiation of gender and sexual identities.

WHY MEDIA INFLUENCES ARE IMPORT
ANT In modern societies, people typically consume many hours of television each week, look at magazines and other publications, surf the Internet, pass billboards, go to the movies, and are generally unable to avoid popular culture and advertising. In the most obvious example, people in Europe and the USA typically spend three or four hours per day watching TV. That’s a lot of information going into people’s heads - even if they don’t see it as ‘information’, and even if they say they’re not really paying much attention to it. (For statistics on leisure activities and media consumption, see www.worldopinion.com, www.statistics.gov.uk.) It seems obvious and inevitable, then, that we will be affected by these experiences somehow. The media shows us situations and relationships from other people’s points of view - indeed, it is part of the eternal fascination of drama that we can see ‘how the world works’ in lives other than our own. This could hardly fail to affect our own way of conducting ourselves, and our expectations of other people’s behaviour. For example: • domestic or romantic dramas (including soap operas) show us how neighbours, friends and lovers interact. When a person has a lover for the first time in their lives, how do they know how to behave? And where do we learn the typical shape and content of friendships? Our main reference points are surely films and TV.
• magazines aimed at women, and increasingly those for men, contain all kinds of advice on how to live, look and interact. Even if we only read these items in an ironic state of mind, it must all sink in somewhere.
• movie heroes, female or male, are almost uniformly assertive and single-minded. The attractive toughness of these stars, whilst not necessarily a problem, is ‘advertised’ to us continuously, and therefore should have some impact on our own style and preferences.
• images of ‘attractive people’ abound. This may have absolutely no influence on how we rate our own appearance, and that of others - but that’s improbable. So it is imperative that, as students of contemporary culture, we try to investigate the ways in which everyday popular media material affects people’s lives. Researchers have tried to do this before, of course - not always with great success, as we will see in the next chapter.

MEN AND WOMEN TODAY
Before we consider the media’s role further, it is worth establishing the relative positions of women and men in modern Western democracies. If there is a ‘battle of the sexes’, who is winning nowadays? Women and men generally have equal rights - with a few exceptions within various laws, which we see being campaigned against and changed. The sexes today are generally thought to be ‘equal’, to the extent that the cover of Time magazine wondered if feminism was ‘dead’ in June 1998. There is even a noisy minority who argue that feminism has ‘gone too far’ and that it is now men who have the worst deal in society (Farrell, 2001)...