The Source of Misogyny in Mainstream Media

I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to the sources of misogyny in mainstream media and the motivations that are driving it. At first I came up with a thought that maybe this is somehow related to beliefs about women held by men in the American Jewish community, since much of what we see on TV and in film is created by executive producers, studio management and writers who are Jewish. But in the course of beginning my research into any correlation there, I came up with an even deeper insight into what might be going on, what is driving male writers and producers to create media that continually refers to women as bitches and whores. Two TV shows on ABC actually reference the word "bitch" in the title of the show. ("GCB" and "The B--- in Apt. 23"). It has gotten to the point in media, and in society, that the words "bitch" and "whore" are now just everyday synonyms when referring to women.

My new hypothesis is this:

Ever since the beginning of “the world’s oldest profession,” men have held two very distinct views of female-classifying categories:  “good girl” (i.e., marrying type, mother) and “whore” (bad girl, deserves what she gets, available as a necessary vice for men but not requiring or deserving of respect in the way “respectable” women are).  It used to always be that women were one or the other – and men marry the frigid, asexual, society-behaved women to start a family with, while often continuing to lurk around the other gals– the barmaids, the prostitutes (extending to Internet porn gals, phone chat-line gals and online sex in modern times), as some sort of hobby, vice, obsession, curiosity, thrill, entitlement, or whatever.  But typically, to male thinking, those women are still in the category of “not the marrying type”. In other words, they are the “whores”, even if they are nice, friendly girls down at the local pub, working their way through college just as barmaids, not hookers.

The reason is this:  women used to be dependents of men and that is why we would get married.  To be cared and provided for and to raise a family and live a God-fearing life.  But once women started working out of the home, they became a different animal. Suddenly they want rights. They want equality of respect in the home and outside the home. They want to wear what they want and go to bars on their own free will, without an escort if they want. In other words, they want to take over the same spheres that men have had control over for a long time. Men don’t necessarily want to relinquish all that to women, and there is always resistance to change.

Perhaps when it comes to male attitudes toward women, women who go to college and want careers are, by default, in the “other” group of women, since there are only two categories of women historically and psychologically, at a very deep human/sexual level.  Good girls marry and have families, obey their husbands, and don’t try to change the world.  Independent women of today are akin to the olden-days when “independent” women worked in saloons and brothels. By default or maybe by definition, independent women fall into the overall category of 'bitches and whores', when there are only two categories of women (good girl/bad girl), because we all know that the original “working girl” was a prostitute. Labels and scarlet stigmas die hard.

I am only suggesting this hypothesis as a scientific observer, not as a moral judge.  I believe that men have thought about women in these two distinct ways for a very long time:  good girls, traditional girls who behave and acquiesce to the male household authority and sex roles, and bad girls who are independent and want to go out into the world and experience things their own way.  Those girls used to be hookers and saloon girls because that was the only choice. Now women have lots of choices, but the net attitude among men may still be the same:  independent women are perhaps still seen by men as being in the 'bitches and whores' category, not the traditional marrying good-girl category. Another way to look at these two categories–for modern applications–might be as “simple” girls (good) versus “too complicated” women (bad).

Now here’s where it gets interesting as far as TV images of women are concerned.  I believe that a large majority of men–particularly conservative men or perhaps the power elite men–want traditional women. They don’t want the type of women who go to college and try to rise in the ranks of business. Some men want to keep that for themselves and keep women in the support-role to their husbands. Therefore, perhaps showing all the women on TV wearing skimpy clothes and tight, short dresses, while simultaneously making literally thousands of references to women as "bitches" and "whores" on TV, is a way of “warning” women of the perils that will befall them if they go the “independent” or “bad girl” route. That men won’t respect them or want them as life-partners, only as boy-toys.

Where I once thought that calling women Bitches on TV and always depicting such a homogenous, narrow image of what young women are was because a bunch of misogynists were acting out their contempt of women in the programs they produce, I now think it might be a less sinister motivation. They may be actually trying to encourage women to simply NOT be like that, lest they be considered a bitch and a whore.

The images are confusing to women, though, because the very prevalence of these images of women on TV implicitly tells women and young girls that this is what men want, that this is what is expected of women. It is not inherently obvious that this may be  a dire warning that men are trying to send to women, trying to show them that independence leads to slutty outfits, which leads to multiple dating partners, which leads to humiliation, personal troubles and even death by violent sexual assault (how many shows on TV have that as the story line? They are on every single day).

By showing the same type of woman over and over again – young, attractive, sexy clothes, party lifestyle, independent woman living alone, dating multiple men – and then making references to her as a bitch or a whore, often having her end up dead in the show or divorced or beat up – these may be ways that men are trying to warn women that this is not the type of women guys want.

They want traditional women, women who aren’t bitches and whores, women who are not in the ‘bad girl’ category.  And to drive that point home to women, they continually show women being punished, degraded, humiliated, or killed for going outside the “good girl” mode of what women ‘should’ be, in a perfect world where men rule and women stay home and tend to the home and family.

It's a thought, anyway. This is why we need more sociological research on the topic of male attitudes about women and the influences that lead to formation of those attitudes–which as near as I can tell, does not appear to be studied much at all in academic research.