The Classical Theoretical View of how Women are Represented in the Media

Carol Clover wrote about the 'final girl', this featured in her book 'Men, Women and Chainsaws' published in 1992. Three traits which she identified with the 'final girl' in horror movies, was she was virginal, contained masculine traits as well as her fighting back to her attacker making her more androgynous. Jeremy Tunstall wrote about the existing research on women's roles in media texts in 1983, the 4 roles that he identified with females in 1983 was consumer, sexual, domestic and marital.

In 1992 research demonstrated that men dominated women on-screen by two to one, the only genre which represented males to females more equally was Prime Time TV adverts however the ratio not being quite as equal. One of the three problems with these findings was men were more likely to be shown their occupation, they were also shown outdoors more than women and lastly men displayed more authority in contrast to women which were displayed as the consumers. 

The reading suggests that Ripley is 'more progressive' than Lara Croft, this is due to her being displayed as a sexual item rather than person. The three C's that portrayed women in some lifestyle magazines were cooking, cleaning and caring, displaying women are more domestic than logical. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema was written by Laura Mulrey discussing how the media and camera portrayed and identified women in films, she done this by adopting technical camera strategies which presented women as objects to be viewed at and men as subjects who do the looking. The 'Male Gaze' is mean't by how the camera perceives women, for example the use of camera angles displaying only body parts of women such as their legs and bum's to please the audience targeted for these types of scenes. In the 1980's Cosmopolitan removed the male centerfold, this was due to women finding the images amusing rather than a sexual approach.