The media IS our life. Music videos tell us to love the monster Hummers, sexy Porsches, fancy hotels, exclusive orgy parties, stacks of hundred-dollar bills, and other sources of so-called bling. Hip-hop and rap music videos are particularly well-known for their emphasis that women should show off the butt and breast canyons of their body through excessive jiggling. Women’s fashion magazines direct women to be anorexic, snag excellent boyfriends, and look like all the other females in the pictures. Video games tell kids to kill prostitutes and steal cars and use guns, swords, or fists to win the game. Movies say it’s cool to have sex with many different partners, hunt down serial killers, and seduce a person with wild, borderline-stalker tricks. TV shows virtually condone cheating on spouses. Some people can see the line between the extreme presented in the media, but most of the common people cannot. People eat up certain TV shows for a reason, and it’s not because the stories are so ridiculous. TV shows like Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy win Emmys because they attract people’s feelings. People are very spongy and absorb the supposed passions of the characters on the shows. They notice the messages in them, and they connect.
            A professor gave a strange assignment one day in my Intro to Psychology class in my freshman year of college. The assignment was to write a story for each sentence provided. The first sentence was that “Mary was at the top of her class in medical school.” Thinking that I could show how creative I was, I wrote a story about how everyone hated Mary because they were all jealous of her and that she was a big loser who only focused on academics, did not have a social life, and never dated. She would go on with her life miserably by herself, and drown her loneliness in all the money she made as a doctor. The next sentence said, “Anne was a teacher who was getting closer to Phil,” so again I made a story that I thought was very original—Anne was a teacher who was getting to know Phil, a janitor, very well. She was a rising teacher who wanted more in life than a janitor; she wanted to be a principal, but a principal certainly couldn’t be romantically associated with a janitor. So she gave him up for her career.
            When the class handed in responses, the professor explained the problem. She mentioned that many women in college have a view that they must take one path over another for the future. Many studies show that some women feel that they cannot be romantically involved if they want to be successful. Other studies of such stories show that some women are somewhat curbed from doing well because of the fear of being socially unaccepted. Apparently, most women respond to the first story of Mary in medical school with a response very similar to mine. David Tresemer wrote in a paper in 1976 that Matina Horner started this “fear of success” experiment in 1968; sixty-three percent of the young women she tested wrote stories that showed fear of success, while only nine percent of the males produced this kind of story. Horner theorized that aggression is repressed in girls at a young age through gender-biased socialization. She believes that aggressive behavior is regarded as unfeminine and that girls would avoid aggressive behavior in situations for successful socialization. In general, however, the experiments showed that women found that being feminine and being intellectual were equally desirable but mutually exclusive ideals. Tresemer included that Mirra Komarovsky also demonstrated this idea by showing that college women on dates pretended to be stupider than they really were. Komarovsky’s work shows that some college girls think that lack of intelligence promotes romantic relationships.
            What’s more disturbing is that this thought of career or family, but not both is put into action. Linda Hirshman reported in The American Prospect that Professor Hart of Harvard Business School studied women who graduated in the years 1981, 1986, and 1991. Professor Hart noted that only thirty-eight percent of the women in these classes were actually working full time. Hirshman also wrote that a Center for Work-Life Policy study in 2004 surveyed 2443 women with bachelor’s degrees from what are considered prestigious colleges and found that forty-three percent of the women were not working because they were taking care of the family. Daniel McGinn’s 2006 article, “Marriage by Numbers” in Newsweek mentions Andrea Quattrocchi, an ex-career-focused Boston Hotel executive turned stay-at-home-mom with three kids. Andrea was quoted as saying, “You can have it all today if you wait… enjoy your life when you’re single then find someone in your 30s.” Even she has been hit with the idea that you can have one or the other or both only in sequence.
            These research findings and my own responses to the experiments scare me. How can I, a student at a top-notch university, unconsciously think that I can’t have success and romance at once? Before that Intro to Psych class, I never realized that I thought relationships could get in the way of my academic or professional success. Of course, I naturally point at what makes people’s days go by—the media! Yes, we all blame the media for everything. I took a look at Vogue magazine to see if they had any subliminal messages—and they did! In Miles Aldrige’s April photo spread for leather goods this year, surprise, surprise… the theme was of a mother taking her baby out on errands. Maybe the Keds ad in that Vogue issue is right. Maybe “cool…is a damsel in distress” and also is a full-time fashionable mom.

An April 2006 photo spread from Vogue shows mommy couture

            Sex and the City is a really popular show—not just for the softcore sex scenes but also because of its witty commentary on society. In one episode, the main characters sit around for breakfast and talk about the Sunday section for wedding announcements in the New York Times. They point out that too many of the brides’ bios say that they had a career until they were married, almost as if they were just holding a career to kill time and their real careers were supposed to be as wives. They talk about how much they hate those kinds of women, but Charlotte, one of the main characters of the show, ends up being in the same position when she marries a neurosurgeon. She becomes like the “rest of the women” that the characters despise by deciding to quit her job as an art curator for a gallery to become a full-time wife and homemaker. Her friends criticize her for mastering dining table lighting, and she later regrets giving up her job. Linda Hirshman also came across these Sex and the City episodesand felt compelled to check the real stats of these Sunday Times brides. In 2003 and 2004, she tracked thirty-three women who announced their weddings in the New York Times in 1996. Sex and the City was true to its words; 90 percent of the once career-oriented women had babies and of those mothers, only five were working full-time. Eighty-five percent of the interviewed women weren’t working full-time.
            In an episode of Nip/Tuck, Julia McNamara, the forty-year-old wife of one of the protagonists of the show, goes back to college to finish her bachelor’s degree and attend medical school. She meets her old college friend in one of the lectures. Upon meeting Julia, her old friend remarks, “I thought you went to medical school,” to which Julia replies, “I got married instead.” Are these the only choices women think they have? Nip/Tuck is a very popular show. It had the highest ratings as a new series on American basic cable, nominated eleven times for an Emmy and eight times for a Golden Globe. Therefore, its messages, especially the recurring one about Julia and her choices, can affect a lot of people. Julia was in college with Sean and Christian, both protagonists of the show, but while they entered medical school, she became pregnant and dropped out of college to marry Sean. She frequently has trouble accepting that she gave up success for a family. In one episode, she watches an old home video of herself, taken at the time she was pregnant. In the video, she says that she wants to be a pediatrician someday and go to medical school after she has her baby and Sean starts his business. Tears well up in her eyes as she watches. At many points, Julia says that she chose Sean over her future as a doctor and Julia’s mother snubs her for giving it up. Perhaps the media tries to say that a career is a future, but homemaking isn’t. In an episode, Sean tells Julia he wants a change in his life by quitting his profession as cosmetic surgeon. Julia yells before she separates from Sean, “Do you think this is what I wanted? To be some Stepford doctor’s wife? How about my change to go back to college and get my doctorate when Annie starts school?” In the episode where Julia goes to school to take a midterm and has a miscarriage in the process, Sean bitterly remarks to her, “You didn’t love me or our child enough to sacrifice the midterm.” Why must this show continuously send out these horrible brainwashing ideas?
            Desperate Housewives is ABC network’s highest-rated show; I know very few young women who do not watch it. I finally decided to see what sparks its popularity a few days ago and went on a Desperate Housewives marathon. I stayed up until seven in the morning watching these episodes and I was appalled to see how the media once again portrays a woman who suffers for striving for career and family. In the episode “Bang,” Gabby, one of the housewives, goes through a divorce from her husband. In one of their arguments, she yells, “Do you know how much I was worth? When we met, I was on the cover of magazines. I had a career and I had a future! I gave that all up for you-- and what did I get in return?”
            Another housewife, Lynette, is constantly under pressure in every season because of her desire to work and support her family. Lynette used to be a big shot on the corporate ladder, but quits to raise four kids. She feels that housecleaning and chasing after her kids who suffer from ADD is nothing like her former wonderful job. In several episodes, she is portrayed as being aggressive and competitive even as a mother; she fights with other moms for power in setting up the school’s play and agrees to set a dinner for her husband’s co-workers with two days notice. She manages to throw a huge dinner party for many members of her husband’s corporation so that her husband can pitch his grand advertising campaign—of putting the ads on shopping carts. Lynette pitches for a different idea, which the group loves. Her husband is enraged that Lynette isn’t staying on her side of being only the bread baker and not the breadwinner. Desperate Housewives shows that corporate society does not look upon mothers very nicely. Lynette is grilled at her job interview for being a mother, and when she asks her boss to be allowed to come late to work to see her child off on the first day of school, her boss retorts that if she was given an excuse to tend to her family, single people with no children should also be allowed to go see a movie and show up late for work. Her boss says there is no excuse to be late and a job comes first. TV loves to present how women can’t handle many things at once and must sacrifice things.
            So after the really long and painful marathon of TV shows, what have I learned? People have too much time on their hands to watch this garbage, and I think TV is boring. Of course lots of people believe that women sacrifice love for career or vice versa. It’s in every hit TV show. Maybe people inherently believe women can pick one over the other and like the shows because they reflect their values. Maybe people are being influenced by TV and other types of media to accept these ideas. Either way, there is a link between the media and women’s thoughts on their futures. One of the playmates of The Girls Next Door got into a lot of trouble in the game/reality TV show because she was supposed to take nude pictures for a photo shoot but went to class (she was pursuing a master’s degree). Izzie, a character in Grey’s Anatomy, left her internship at the hospital to get married but realized that she wanted a career. She spends one entire episode standing in front of the hospital in fear of it; she worries that once she goes back to the hospital she will have trouble handling her marriage and family.
            It seems that there is a mix of how women choose to live their lives. There is that group of women who can handle the pressures of work and family by balancing between taking vacations and leaving microwave dinners for the kids, those educated women who dump their careers for family from the Sunday Times, and the singletons who choose their career over marriage. As Jillian Strauss pointed out in Psychology Today, about 50% of the US population is married. Of this married group, the women are split between trying to juggle both family and career and being a homemaker. The unmarried population is mainly split with women who chose a career over family and the divorced working mothers with kids. Either way you can look at it, women have choices – just not many appetizing ones.

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