This police check through popular media — comparing women’s clothes, assessing their beach bodies, and speculating about how and why they were or were not pregnant — served as a warning to lesser-known women: Look what can happen when you leave the house? The subtext was that every woman who put herself out there asked for whatever she got. Contempt was the price a woman paid for fame. It didn’t seem to matter that not all of these women sought or desired fame.
Carolyn Chernoff, a sociologist who studies women and popular culture, said this media scrutiny seemed to deteriorate in the 1980s, perhaps in response to feminist gains. “More and more women are in the workplace, gaining more power, visibly working in powerful jobs,” she said. This led to what she called a “correction,” with the media chasing every woman seen as too famous, too powerful, too exposed.
Ironically, the feminist gains of the 80s and 90s weren’t even particularly solid. “Sally Ride went to space and Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer,” said Allison Yarrow, the author of “90s Bitch: Media, Culture and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality.” “But what I realize now is that it was one woman per industry who can succeed.”
According to Yarrow’s analysis, famous women who hit the headlines were the target of negative coverage. Worse, she said, the story became that women purposely created negative coverage for personal gain.
Cindi Leive, a former editor of the women’s magazines Self and Glamour, said that in the late ’90s there was “certainly a sense that celebrities watch sports like sports.” (The magazines she edited weren’t as brazen as the tabloids, but they did confirm some of the same biases.) “There’s an element of dehumanization that has crept into all of our coverage — the industry in general,” Leive said.
If you were to flip through certain magazines in this day and age, you might think there’s no right way to be a woman, only the wrong one – bimbo or frump, slut or prude, shrew or doormat. The line seemed impossible to walk, especially in heels — although pretty, white, thin, and rich usually gave you an edge. For women who violated the hegenomic norm in other ways, the challenges were much greater, though not necessarily public scrutiny.
