Responding to Feedback: Other Book Sources

Book: Ugly Is Only Skin-Deep : The Story of Ads That Changed the World - Dominik Imseng

• "All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarise that society. We can brutalise it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level." - Bill Bernbach 

Book: The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf

• We are in the midst of a violent backlash against feminism that uses images of female beauty as a political weapon against women's advancement: the beauty myth. It is the modern version of a social reflex that has been in force since the Industrial Revolution.
• The contemporary backlash is so violent because the ideology of beauty is the last one remaining of the old feminine ideologies that still has the power to control those women whom second wave feminism would have otherwise made relatively uncontrollable.
• Feminists, inspired by Frieden, broke the stranglehold on the women's popular press of advertisers for household products, who were promoting the feminine mystique; at once, the diet and skin care industries became the new cultural censors of women's intellectual space, and because of their pressure, the gaunt, youthful model supplanted the happy housewife as the arbiter of successful women-hood.
• "Femininity" is code for femaleness plus whatever a society happens to be selling. If "femininity" means female sexuality and its loveliness, women never lost it and do not need to buy it back. 

Book: Media, Gender & Identity, David Gauntlett

• Theodor Adorno, felt that the power of mass media over the population was enormous and very damaging.
• John Fiske argues that it is the audience not the media, which has the most power. 
• The passivity which media consumption brings to people's lives is Adorno's main concern. In addition there is a belief that the medias's content encourages conformity.
• The concepts of order which (the culture industry) hammers into human beings are always those of the status quo...It proclaims: you shall conform, with no instruction as to what; conform to that exists anyway, and to that which everyone thinks anyway as a result of its power and omnipresence. The power of the culture industry's ideologies such that conformity has replaced consciousness. (1991:90)
• He further argues that the culture industry 'impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves' (1991:92) Critical thinking is closed off by mass produced popular culture. 
• Media effects studies support conservative and right-wing ideologies, even if that is not necessarily the conscious intention of the people producing them. The studies typically suggest that social problems are not rooted in the organisation of society, and inequalities, but are actually the evil magic products of popular culture.
• In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects in phantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. (1975:10)