Images of Women in Popular Media

Filmmakers are frequently criticized for ignoring and simplifying women in their quest to tell stories. This issue received some attention with the popularization of The Bechdel Test in 1985. The test created a simple way to measure a film’s gender representation onscreen. However, The Bechdel Test does not measure the importance of characters, the objectification of women, or explicit sexism, calling into question the effectiveness of the test itself. This study subjects the 100 top-grossing films from 2005-2014 to The Bechdel Test to determine the test’s validity as well as examine the progress of female roles over the course of a decade. Results: on average, fewer than 50% of the films passed the Bechdel Test in any given year. Closer examination of the films reveal some of the inaccuracies in the test’s simplicity.

One of the most significant social changes brought by feminist waves of the 1960s and beyond is the way people’s attitudes towards rape have evolved.  For example, marital rape, once conceived as an unchangeable sexual right of the husband, is now largely illegal in Western nations and is culturally stigmatized in the United States.  Within mass media and film, one might see the evolution of ideas about marital rape in Gone with the Wind (1939) and then later in Marnie (1964), to its entirely negative portrayals today (Ross 2015).

Molti sono gli studi condotti su Sivlio Berlusconi, ex primo ministro italiano, e sul Berlusconismo. Alcuni di questi indagano la peculiare relazione tra sesso e politica e gli elementi sessisti, che hanno caratterizzato tanto quel regime quanto i comportamenti, pubblici e privati, di Berlusconi. Tuttavia, la crescente attenzione per la cosiddetta «questione femminile», entro le analisi della fenomenologia e del successo del Berlusconismo, raramente si accompagnano ad un’attenzione per i modelli di genere e di relazione fra sessi promossi dai programmi della televisione generalista e da quella di Mediaset in particolare. Il saggio tenta di offrire un contributo in questa direzione, assumendo come punto di osservazione due fasi precise: l’esordio delle TV privata e la cosiddetta “makeover television”, una delle ultime e più seguite varianti del filone dei reality show, che ha trovato nelle reti Mediaset il principale veicolo di diffusione. Si mostra come queste due fasi rappresentino emblematicamente i trent’anni che le separano e condensino i tratti maschilisti, consumisti e neoliberisti dispiegati dalla tradizione televisiva che è andata costituendosi. Attraverso l’analisi dei casi di studio scelti, si mostra inoltre l’intrinseca coerenza, per logiche e risultati, tra l’attività di produzione simbolica realizzata dai programmi televisivi e quella messa in atto dall’apparato propagandistico di Berlusconi. Infine, lo sguardo si allarga alla  comunicazione mediatica, pubblicitaria, politica dell’Italia contemporanea, per sottolinearne la continuità con i modelli di femminilità, di virilità e di rapporto fra i sessi che le etiche e le estetiche del Berlusconismo hanno contribuito a plasmare. Per l’analisi si impiegano le chiavi di lettura fornite dagli studi  – culturali, filosofici, storici – su Berlusconi e sul Berlusconismo e i modelli interpretativi prodotti recentemente nell’ambito dei Cultural Media Studies e della Critica mediale femminista (Gill 2004; McRobbie 2004; Tasker et. al. 2007, Gill et. al. 2011).

This research aims to focus on eating behavior of adolescent women living in Azerbaijan. It aims to figure out what exactly shapes it and on which factors it depends in order to be able to consider the possibility of changing it to the better healthier side.
Data for the research is obtained from the deep interviews from experts: highly professional nutritioners, dietologists, trainers on one side and carefully caring about their nutrition women on the another. During the deep interview it was investigated that all these women has up-medium/ high income, at least bachelors degree and interest in sport from the very childhood, and this lead to an assumptions about the main factors shaping the Healthy Eating behavior as a key to a better quality of life.
On the basis of these assumptions and Three Factor Eating Questionnaire there was conducted an online survey amist the 426 azerbaijani women in the age of 20-53 with different lifestyle and body mass indexes, income and education levels, both married and single.
And all in all, the study also has a purpose of identifying the influence of media idols on women self-assessment, determination of outcomes of setting high beauty standards and figuring out whether this media tactic really works to make women better or just a rat race over the unattainable ideals which is ending up just with the stress  body dissatisfaction for an average woman?

Commentaire de "La Torera" de Pilar Albarracin. Lorsque les cocottes-minute peuvent exploser en vol, les femmes pourraient bien inventer une autre souveraineté. Celle par exemple de faire virevolter les signes, de se jouer des polysémies aux contradictions insolubles, bref de nous obliger à penser ce que nous voyons plutôt qu’à dénoter des images figées. La fabrique d’une image sophistiquée et sobre par une artiste contemporaine engagée n’est pas la fabrique d’une signalétique. De quoi réfléchir l’engagement féministe d’aujourd’hui.

This study focuses on the mechanisms through which gender representation on the media (TV, advertising, news and new media) hampers the achievement of gender equality. It provides an overview of the main definitions, theories and studies and explores the regulatory acts existing in EU 27 Member States exploring the most interesting experiences (good practices) in order to present under what conditions they are more effective. A stakeholder mapping in the EU 27 Member states is also included.

"There is no chance of the welfare of the world unless the condition of women is improved. It is not possible for a bird to fly on one wing."-Swami Vivekananda Abstract: Nature of media industry is quite different from other industry. This industry demand more time, more work within deadline, field work, pressure of breaking news, qualitative work with rich content, whole hearted dedication for this profession. It is a challenging industry as one has to work in pressure. Pressure increases in proportion of designation. New comers and women journalists face several challenges in media industry. This study focuses on challenges and opportunities for women journalists in media industry. Qualitative research technique focus group has been opted for deeper understanding of the phenomenon. Study conclude that because of gender biasness, safety issues, odd working hours, more work in less time, high pressure and stress level, no job security, less maternity leaves as compare to government job, patriarchal mind set of family and society compel women journalists either to leave this profession or to switch over in other field.

“It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes.”

—Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag (2 series, 2016–2019) follows a young woman through comically endless sexual, familial, and personal struggles after the separate deaths of her mother and her best friend. She speaks directly to the camera (or to the audience in the stage play version) and lets us in on countless jokes at the expense of herself and others. Her glances become an archive of sorts that catalogues sorrow, triumph, anger, and hope. As the first season progresses, the comedy transforms into dramedy, with key moments in the show providing little humor at all and instead a truly affecting despair. The play was originally performed and written in 2013 and became a TV show in 2016, yet it was only with the explosion of the second season onto the scene in 2019 that Fleabag became wildly popular, especially among in-the-know millennials who felt that the show said something very contemporary, very relatable, and very feminist. Critical reception was equally laudatory, with Waller-Bridge winning multiple Emmy Awards and countless other accolades.

Available in this download: Table of Contents, forward by Linda Nochlin, and Introduction by Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco.

Published in hardback and paper, this book is also available for free in its entirety online at: http://www.digitalculture.org/books/the-new-woman-international/

The book contains essays by Jan Bardsley, Matthew Biro, Gianna Carotenuto, Melody Davis, Kristine Harris, Karla Huebner, Kristen Lubben, Maria Makela, Elizabeth Otto, Martha H. Patterson, Vanessa Rocco, Clare I. Rogan, Despina Stratigakos, Brett M. Van Hoesen, Kathleen M. Vernon, and Lisa Jaye Young.

Images of flappers, garçonnes, Modern Girls, neue Frauen, and trampky—all embodiments of the dashing New Woman—symbolized an expanded public role for women from the suffragist era through the dawn of 1960s feminism. Chronicling nearly a century of global challenges to gender norms, The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s is the first book to examine modern femininity's ongoing relationship with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' most influential new media: photography and film. This volume examines the ways in which novel ideas about women's roles in society and politics were disseminated through these technological media, and it probes the significance of radical changes in female fashion, appearance, and sexual identity. Additionally, these original essays explore the manner in which New Women artists used photography and film to respond creatively to gendered stereotypes and to reconceive of ways of being a woman in a rapidly modernizing world.

The book brings together generations of scholars to analyze the New Woman from her inception in the later nineteenth century through her full development in the interwar period, and the expansion of her forms in subsequent decades. These essays show how controversial female ideals figured in discourses including those on gender norms, race, technology, sexuality, female agency, science, media representation, modernism, commercial culture, internationalism, colonialism, and transnational modernity. Inaugurating a new chapter in the scholarship of representation and New Womanhood and spanning North America, Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, and the colonial contexts of Africa and the Pacific, this volume reveals the ways in which a feminine ideal circled the globe to be translated into numerous visual languages.

Il contributo analizza la produzione di fiction domestica contemporanea, a dieci anni dal suo rilancio, adottando una prospettiva di tipo sincronico, orientata cioè al rapporto tra la fiction e il suo tempo. L’analisi viene condotta lungo due direzioni, una interna al medium, l’altra esterna. Nel primo caso si valuta il ruolo della fiction rispetto alla forma estetica e culturale della televisione di oggi, sostenendo che la fiction mantenga un ruolo di assoluta centralità nel contesto delle forme espressive e della produzione di senso della tv. Essa si carica anzi di un particolare valore “metalinguistico”, ponendosi come vero e proprio paradigma del funzionamento comunicativo del medium anche - e soprattutto - nell’epoca definita della reality television. La seconda parte del lavoro analizza in dettaglio il senso delle rappresentazioni offerte dalle storie del piccolo schermo ed il loro rapporto con la società e la cultura italiana contemporanea. Adottando le tesi di Horace Newcomb e Paul Hirsch, si guarda alla televisione come a un grande «forum culturale», individuando nella fiction il genere potenzialmente più in grado di esprimere questo valore e mantenere un profondo collegamento con la formazione del “pensiero pubblico” nonostante i conflitti che essa mette in scena siano radicati nella cornice non minacciosa e familiare del privato. Si analizzano le realtà umane, le tipologie sociali, le categorie professionali, i contesti istituzionali che ispirano le storie della fiction italiana, postulando che tanto più essi saranno vari, tanto più efficace la capacità della fiction di porsi come grande repertorio narrativo del nostro tempo. Si mira, per questa via, a valutare la “politica della rappresentazione” utilizzata dalla fiction domestica e a emettere un giudizio sulla qualità del prodotto, imprescindibilmente legata alla nozione di pluralismo

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Afbeeldingen van dunne modellen in de media zorgen voor een toename van de lichaamsontevredenheid, objectified body consciousness en sociale vergelijking van vrouwen. Deze negatieve effecten worden in verband gebracht met het ontstaan van extreem lijngedrag en eetstoornissymptomen. Het is daarom van belang deze effecten te reduceren. In dit onderzoek is gekeken of een informatief label deze effecten kan reduceren. Dit is getest door middel van een experimenteel post-test only design (N = 116) met drie condities (conditie 1 = neutraal, conditie 2 = normaliserend, conditie 3 = informatief label), waarbij naar het verschil op drie effecten werd gekeken (lichaamsontevredenheid, OBC en sociale vergelijking). Het neutrale label fungeerde hierbij als de controlegroep. Respondenten werden blootgesteld aan afbeeldingen van dunne modellen met één van de drie labels, waarbij een cover story het werkelijke doel van het onderzoek verhulde. Uit de resultaten van het onderzoek bleek echter dat een informatief label de negatieve effecten van afbeeldingen van dunne modellen niet kan reduceren.

Dans le cadre de cette thèse, nous nous intéressons aux représentations de la sorcière dans la littérature d’inspiration historique à partir des années 1970. Nous analysons la construction de cette figure protéiforme et les métamorphoses qu’elle connaît dans l’imaginaire social lors des dernières décennies du XXe siècle. Plus précisément, nous examinons les différentes facettes de la sorcière, telles qu’elles apparaissent dans quatre romans francophones d’inspiration historique, en relation avec les discours historiques, féministes et postcoloniaux, et les autres productions culturelles de la même période. En étudiant les interactions entre les représentations de la sorcière et d’autres œuvres, travaux et tendances de l’époque, notre thèse met en lumière les problématiques abordées à travers cette figure dans les textes littéraires. La figure de la sorcière reprend notamment des enjeux qui marquent les dernières décennies du XXe siècle, tels la place des femmes et des cultures minoritaires dans la société, la représentation du corps féminin, le recul des religions traditionnelles et l’écriture de l’Histoire. Au moyen des approches sociocritique et intertextuelle, nous explorons ces enjeux et analysons la façon dont les œuvres développent ou prolongent ces réflexions en abordant la figure de la sorcière.

De manière à pouvoir tracer l’évolution de la figure et des questions qui lui sont liées, la thèse est divisée en trois parties, représentant chacune une décennie distincte. Après un préambule brossant un tableau de l’imaginaire de la sorcière au début des années 1970, une première partie se concentre sur la construction de la figure de la sorcière dans les romans Les Enfants du sabbat d’Anne Hébert et La Fontaine obscure de Raymond Jean, parus lors de la décennie 1970. Une deuxième partie, centrée sur la décennie 1980, se penche sur le roman Moi, Tituba sorcière... de Maryse Condé. Enfin, une troisième partie s’intéresse au roman Instruments des ténèbres de Nancy Huston, publié pendant les années 1990. En combinant différentes approches, cette thèse tend à mieux comprendre la fonction de la sorcière dans la littérature et les idées qui lui sont associées dans l’imaginaire social à partir de 1970.

Il capitolo analizza le action heroines, figure femminili al centro di narrative action, che, a partire dagli anni '80, fanno la loro comparsa – e mietono successi - in generi e prodotti tradizionalmente connotati come maschili (fantascienza, horror, thriller, avventura, western), nelle diverse ri-mediazioni che hanno conosciuto nel tempo, tra fumetti e videogiochi. L’ipotesi sostenuta è che il repertorio dei generi action si sia nel tempo dotato di anticorpi, ovvero di dispositivi che hanno l’effetto di stemperare, a volte persino neutralizzare, la carica potenzialmente sovversiva delle loro protagoniste. Si compie dunque una ricognizione di tali dispositivi attraverso esempi tratti dalla tradizione cinematografica Hollywoodiana, dalla TV statunitense e soprattutto dalla fiction televisiva poliziesca, straniera e italiana: la vocazione generalista, l’ambientazione nella realtà sociale contemporanea e la relativa novità della presenza femminile tra le forze dell’ordine fanno del crime drama un terreno particolarmente fertile per analizzare la politica di rappresentazione di genere. L'apparato teorico-concettuale utilizzato per l’analisi proviene dalle due principali tradizioni all'interno dei Feminist Media Studies: la Feminist Film Theory e il Feminist Culturalist Television Criticism, che, pur nella diversità di impostazione, sono accomunate da una prospettiva costruttivista e forniscono utili strumenti per analizzare le costruzioni discorsive del femminile e del maschile proposte dai media.

I discuss how and why Mammy, Sapphire, and Jezebel images were created and how they have been replaced by corresponding contemporary images that serve a similar function, including the Strong Black Woman, the Angry Black Woman, and the Video Vixen. Specifically, I discuss how the Mammy image can contribute to role strain, which is the challenge of balancing multiple responsibilities, and concerns about physical features, including skin color, hair texture, and weight. Next, I explore how Black women's expression of anger is shaped by the Sapphire image. Finally, I discuss how the Jezebel image can influence perceptions of Black women's sexuality and victimization. I will conclude with some ways that Black women can develop more positive self-images.

In earlier times media was known as the mirror of social realities when we were totally dependent on the Radio / Transistor and the print media. In course of time television entered as one of the most effective means of audiovisual communication and was thoroughly exploited by media houses for their commercial gains only. This prominent and the most powerful media tool is capable of converging and motivating the masses forcefully and effectively to the benefit of profit oriented media companies. This has polluted the spirit of art and true art which has become just ephimeral entertainment making the artists a bunch of brand promoters. The aim of the television shows has never been to shape or influence the women's image. The "reality shows" the "soap operas" or the advertisements that we watch normally do not intend to distort or highlight the image of a woman. Yet they do affect the women's image unconsciously. The attempt of this sudy is to create an atmosphere of positive criticism which would hopefully inspire the T V channels in particular, to fore think the image of the women which their programmes might affect in due course. In the backdrop of above let us examine the various classes of the T V programmes. Advertisements Advertisements have damaged the women's image the most. And they are least to be blamed as they openly advertise their brands. Their intentions are overt, not hidden. Women who accept to do anything and to go to any extent for the so called fame and easy money, are mainly to be blamed. They not only disgrace themselves but shatter the dignity of women as a whole. Advertisements like "press the call bell to stop domestic violence" sometimes bring us a positive surprise but they are rare. Likewise there are serials like 'Balika Vadhu' on Colors and'Stree Teri Kahani' on DDI that contribute towards a positive and purposeful image of woman. A few live shows like 'Aapki Kutchery' by Kiran Bedi are definitely contributing towards appositive and healthy image. However, if we make an analysis, we find that the media's influence on the image of women is mostly negative and distorting and rarely otherwise. This is happening not only in India, but around the globe. As we reach the completion of the first decade of twenty first century, there is little evidence that the world's communication media have a great deal of commitment to advancing the cause of women in their communities. Although the presence of women working within the media has increased in the past two decades, real power is still very much a male monopoly (see Gallagher 1995). And while it is relatively easy to make proposals for the implementation of equality in the area of employment-and to measure progress-the

(In special reference to women of Delhi and Ghaziabad) Anugya This research paper explored how Hindi women magazines contributed to women's lives and helped them widening their public sphere. For the study, the researcher selected two popular Hindi women magazines Anokhi (The Hindustan Times Pvt. Limited) and Sakhi (Jagran Group). The former is known for setting up physical clubs at several cities and towns across the Hindi speaking areas of India to provide a physical platform for women to interact and debate on their concern issues, while the latter has its presence on a digital platform (Facebook) that offers a virtual public sphere for women from different background. The researcher interviewed altogether 15 women, including some renowned women writers, editors of both the magazines, women activists, as well as readers of the magazines. Moreover, three focus group discussions of the readers were also observed that comprises 13 women. Based on interviews and focus group discussions, the researcher assessed that these magazines had a significant role in readers' lives in widening the horizons of their individual, personal, social, and professional lives. Furthermore, the authorship provided by these magazines gave them a sense of pride and a social identity too. The findings quantified two theories, including Public Sphere Theory and Social Identity Theory, which emphasized that, on the one hand, the magazines helped women broadened their public sphere. On the other hand, the clubs aided to obtain their social identities.

This paper focuses on Bakhrom Yakubov’s comedy Supebride (2008)  - a particularly successful example of an Uzbek fiction film - which promotes the desirable portrayal of an ideal female based on a patriarchal mentality.

Published in "V The international book publication of the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States "BEST YOUNG SCIENTIST - 2022" ("Scientists - CIS")". It is a unique project aimed at promoting the science and personal success of young scientists from all over the CIS and Europe.

During the onslaught of the Islamic caliphate on Kobanî, Syria, media outlets across the globe broadcast pictures of brave and often unveiled Kurdish women fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), a quintessentially male force of destruction. The images of women fighting Islamist male aggressors aroused outrage, admiration, and pity among observers. But had all Kurdish fighters been male or had women fought for ISIS, viewers might have reacted differently. To examine some of the most widely disseminated gendered pictures and videos of the Syrian uprising in the media, this article draws on Mohja Kahf’s three categories, which typify how Muslim women, Arab women, or both are perceived by the Anglophone reading and viewing public: the first is victims; the second, escapees; and the third, pawns of patriarchy and male power. While this typology helps in examining gendered images of the Syrian uprising, it also obscures the socioeconomic realities on the ground.

Course Description: An introduction to the subject of women in popular/mass media. Emphases include: images of women in the media; women as producers and consumers of media; the intersections of gender, race, and class in the media; comparative global images and issues; and feminist approaches to media study.

In this special issue of Taboo, the authors use Beyoncé's album, Lemonade, to introduce the concept of the Bad Bitch Barbie, a term used to identify a woman who embraces her body while simultaneously using it as a commodity. Representing a Black body ideal in Lemonade, Beyoncé uses images of Black women's bodies to express empowerment, boldness, and resilience as Black women struggle to live in a racist and sexist society. There has been recent interest in the ways Black women have been portrayed in current media and popular culture, and many individuals have taken the opportunity to honor Black women's beauty, power, and resilience in the era of #BlackGirlMagic by paying homage to women who use music, sound, and the arts to tell their stories (Wilson, 2016; also see Jessica Care Moore's website, " Black Women Rock " [http://www.blackwomenrock.com]). In this article, our aim is twofold: first, we offer a historical review of the ways Black women and their bodies have been portrayed in music as well as in the political, cultural, and social spaces associated with Black women's worldviews. Second, we review songs from Lemonade to describe the Bad Bitch Barbie, who welcomes glamorization and embraces the profitability associated with the racialization, sexualization, and subjugation of Black women's bodies. This information is vital in discussions about how young African American girls emulate the likes of Beyoncé, and represent themselves in a mainstream culture whose beliefs are informed by socio-historical experiences concerning sexual imagery. The Bad Bitch Barbie figure recognizes—and, to some

Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen coined the term ‘supernormal stimulus’ after discovering that birds who lay small, pale blue eggs speckled with grey prefer to sit on larger, bright blue eggs with black polka-dots. He found that he could exaggerate the key qualities of any natural stimulus to produce a stronger reaction yet--be it nurturance, courtship, fear or aggression.
    Animals encounter supernormal stimuli mostly when experimenters build them.  Humans can generate their own and media are awash with them: friendly smiling faces more consistently welcoming than ones own friends, animated cartoon characters with wider eyes than any real child’s, seductive bodies exceeding any proportions found in nature, and a huge array of supernatural menaces.
    This chapter examines film, television, spectator sports, video games, and social websites as well as more traditional media such as print and musical performance in terms of the concept of supernormal stimuli.

In questa relazione si intende analizzare il modo in cui vengono rappresentate le ragazze americane nella prima stagione del serial televisivo Girls , prodotto da HBO e trasmesso negli Stati Uniti a partire dal 2012. Girls segna l’esordio nel campo delle serie tv di Lena Dunham, che figura come regista, produttrice e attrice protagonista.

Over the past two decades the commercial music magazine industry has lapsed into a deepening cycle of continuous decline. The demise of the widely popular UK pop music magazine, Smash Hits, in 2006 and the announcement of the final print issue of NME in 2018 has been accompanied by music magazines worldwide re-porting year-on-year declines in sales and readership. Meanwhile research has found that portrayals of gender on music magazine covers are largely unrepre-sentative and unreflective of social heterogeneity – yet the gendered media histo-ries of the industry’s enduring and iconic music magazines remain largely under researched. In order to explore this, this feminist media research adopts a cross-cultural, longitudinal design to track and compare the gendered media histories on the covers of two music magazines; Rolling Stone (USA) and Hot Press (Ireland). This is timely as cross-cultural research into the evolution of media representation within these spaces is non-existent, despite the commercial importance placed on magazine covers by both academics and industry experts. The results demonstrate that, increasingly over time, these music magazine covers have become gendered spaces. The images of women and of men in these spaces are being shaped by a perpetual, intensifying narrowing process which has become embedded in media practices over several decades and shared across continents. This paper argues that this shared ‘crisis’ of representation demonstrates a strengthened relation-ship between branding, identity, and music media space.

This paper aims to investigate the role of lifestyle media in the construction of a national sexual discourse in Italy, from the late 1950s to the end of the 1960s, a period that witnessed the ‘detraditionalization’ of society and a significant development of the domestic cultural industries. In particular, the presentation will focus on women’s weekly magazine “Annabella” as a site for the public discourses over intimacy and sexuality in the 1960s an '70s, and as a reflection of the anxieties that surrounded femininity and morality at the time. "Annabella" will be investiagated also as one of the main vehicles for self-help and self-care culture in the Italian context, through a strongly gendered discourse. In the second part, the paper will focus on the birth of the market of erotica, in particular with the foundation of the first Italian adult only magazine, “Men” – an upmarket Italian soft-porn magazine and the Italian edition of "Playboy". The creation of a market based on the bond between cultural consumption and sexuality aimed to a new specific group of consumers, mainly the urban middle-class male, designating them as the privileged subjects of the ‘sexual revolution’.
In the first case, the attempt of the magazines to disseminate normative values and models of femininity eventually clashed with the increasing need for emancipation that characterised the 1960s, while proposing a new model of femininity based on introspection and self-policing. In the second part, the transgression of the traditional moral values that appealed to readers of adult only magazines ultimately affirmed, through a sexualized discourse, the privileged role of the middle-class and middle-aged man in the public sphere, creating a reassuring comfortable space for masculinity by means of the life-stylization of soft-porn consumption.

Cosmetic surgery is a highly gendered medical practice in which the majority of patients are women and surgeons are men,  and the manner in which surgical stories are told differs depending on one’s location at the operating table. Examining the ways that cosmetic surgeons narrate their profession in popular media such as newspapers, women’s magazines, and the internet reveals that surgeons generally conceive of their role as either what I call “surgeon-artist” or “surgeon-scientist.” However, patients’ narratives of cosmetic surgery differ dramatically from those of surgeons. Focusing on one narrative of cosmetic surgery through the words of Melinda,  a woman I interviewed, I argue that the way Melinda tells her story demonstrates an acute awareness of how surgeons narrate their practice but also challenges these surgeon-narratives insofar as Melinda narrates her surgery as an emotional history of her body, rather than as a feat of art or science.

In the summer of 2014, the Israeli media became fixated on reports that a 38-year-old woman was raping hundreds of boys in the southern town of Kiryat Gat, possibly infecting them with HIV. Portrayed as a deviant, child-endangering monster on the loose, the story both fascinated and outraged the public. The legal system played into the moral panic in two ways. Adopting an irrational interpretation of the criminal code, the prosecution accused the woman of sodomy (despite the fact that she was the one penetrated) and a conservative MK introduced a highly controversial bill that expanded the definition of rape to include unwelcome seduction of a man by a woman.  The sensationalist preoccupation with what was construed as monstrous child molestation disguised the true reality: dozens if not hundreds of adolescents were systematically taking advantage of a mentally- and socially-challenged woman as parents, teachers, and social workers turned a blind eye.
Immediately after this affair had faded into obscurity, another “monstrous Other” aroused public righteous indignation—Haneen Zoabi, an Israeli-Palestinian MK.  As Israel’s Jewish public held its breath in the hope of discovering three youngsters who disappeared from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank alive, Zoabi refused to refer to those responsible as “terrorists.” Her instant vilification in the Israeli media as a sick, monstrous figure diverted attention from her claim that the conditions of Israeli occupation might have driven desperate Palestinians to commit such an act.
The “Lilith moral panic” these events encapsulated, generated by patriarchal distress, metamorphosed into a national-based witch-hunt, eventually merging with public anxiety and fervor over the Israeli military operation against Gaza that took place in the summer of 2014.