¿El otoño del patriarcado? El aprendizaje de la masculinidad y de la feminidad en la cultura de masas y la igualdad entre hombres y mujeres

Abstract

This text shows how the inequality among men and women (and the different forms of violence associated with that inequality) is the effect of the influence of a series of personal, familiar, educational and sociocultural factors. These factors contribute to the social construction of a given way of understanding the masculine and feminine condition and, as a result, to the persistence of sexism in our societies. In this context, the impact of mass media communication and publicity by offering world visions as well as social and sexual archetypes is undeniable. Through their communicative omniscience, the mass culture texts show off the fallacy of being open windows to the world, and innocent mirrors of reality. Nevertheless, press, television and publicity continue to build the sociocultural inequality of women throughout the newspapers and the magazine pages, in the scenes of television programs and in the spots narratives (by underlying stereotypes, assigning to women the private and housekeeping domain, by promoting a masculine point of view on sexuality, and so on…). They also speak, in a subtle way —in the current days of the politically correctness and masculine metro sexual aesthetics— of a soft and postmodern version of traditional archetypes of virility and feminity. To investigate about the influence of mass culture texts in the construction of feminine and masculine identities is an ethic task, which we cannot avoid if we want to build a world where sexual differences do not result in the rough argument, used to justify the inequalities among men and women.