Women in media

The prominence of female photographers is extremely important to changing the prevalence of the male gaze in media. The male gaze, being that some male photographers show women as strictly sexual as opposed to strong or classy. I feel that the idea of the male gaze is one that’s dangerous for women and girls all over. When they see heavily photoshopped pictures of other women, that becomes their own standard for themselves, but those standards are highly unrealistic. It’s dangerous because it leaves impressionable women and girls with the idea that their value comes from whether or not they look like the woman on the cover of the magazine. The fact that female photographers such as Annie Leibovitz and Corrine Day are reclaiming female photography, photographing women without makeup or photoshop, is a promising sign to me. Young women and girls deserve to see natural representation in the media, to find a standard of beauty that can be obtainable by others. This standard of beauty is natural beauty. In the first article “How the Female Gaze is Changing Photographs of Women,” it talks about reclaiming female representation. Photographers like Corrine Day are reclaiming the idea of female representation by showing raw and candid moments of real women as opposed to posed and photoshopped images. This is encouraging to me as images in media get more and more realistic because I think it will help decrease the prominence of body dysmorphia and other things that young girls struggle with due to the photoshopped posed images.