Advances in Social Science and Culture ISSN 2640-9682 (Print) ISSN 2640-9674 (Online) Vol. 4, No. 4, 2022 www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc 15 Original Paper Research on Construction of Female Image in the Media and Entertainment Industry Women—The Past, the Present and the Future Qiuyu. Deng 1 , Shuying. Yi 2 , Wanlu. She 3 (Alphabetically in ascending order) 1 Department of Foreign Languages, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China 2 Department of Foreign Languages, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China 3 Department of Management and Economics, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China Received: August 18, 2022 Accepted: September 9, 202 Online Published: September 15, 2022 doi:10.22158/assc.v4n4p15 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/assc.v4n4p15 Abstract The development of the Internet does not necessarily promote the harmonious development of gender in society. The focus and gaze of the Internet media on women’s bodies constructs the image of “being seen” on the Internet, which is a derogatory and distorted image of women. In the unequal relationship of “seeing and being seen”, the female body is an important carrier. The silence chosen by online audiences has further led to the online media’s eagerness to portray “being seen” women. News media and film and literature have not done enough to reflect and represent women in a fair, balanced, and consistent manner, and the number, perspective, and content of their works are not commensurate with the actual role women play in social production. This paper focuses on several images of women constructed by the news media and film and literature, analyzes their underlying causes and their impact on women, and tries to suggest possibilities for changing this phenomenon. Keywords female image, news media, film and literature, gender discrimination, gender equality 1. Introduction Feminists once had high hopes that the Internet’s popularity would provide new opportunities and platforms for the development of women. However, the combination of high technology and gender www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc Advances in Social Science and Culture Vol. 4, No. 4, 2022 16 Published by SCHOLINK INC. cannot be overly idealized, and there is both consistency and mutual tension between the mass media and the spread of gender equality values. While the Internet has given women a voice to express themselves, it has also reproduced and even reinforced real-life gender discrimination. Commercial interests and traditional gender concepts have contributed to the creation and development of this phenomenon on the Internet. The focus on the image of “being seen” women in online media and film and literature is a blatant challenge to gender equality and advanced gender culture. This paper explores the image of women in the media from three aspects: real-life events, film and television works, and Tanbi fiction literature, and analyzes the underlying causes and feasible measures to change this phenomenon, to make reasonable suggestions for the creation of an objective and fair image of women in social networks. 2. The Portrayal of Women “Women are deformed males”, so said Aristotle. “Women have long tongues, the order of the Vril. Chaotic bandits descend from the sky and are born from women”, as the poem says. For thousands of years, men in a dominant position have defined women in an othering way, disciplining and suppressing women in a marginalized and dwarfing way, building a patriarchal society, and making people in it suffer from “misogyny”. Misogyny refers to the contempt and disgust for women, mainly manifested in sexism, sexual objectification, and gender-based violence against women. It is important to note that misogyny is not only a form of male “female contempt” but also a form of female “self-loathing”. The American gender studies scholar Sedgwick refers to “the bond between men without sexual relations” as “male homosexual social desire”. In the book “Misogyny”, Japanese sociologist Chizuko Ueno further pointed out that men’s homosexual social desires are based on misogyny and are sustained by homophobia. Men in bonding relationships do not consider women to be their equals, confirming their own subjectivity by objectifying women, and then forming groups by identifying with each other as subjects. At the same time, men in bonding relationships view homosexuality as “men who look like women” out of the fear of becoming objects, and classify them as outside of men in order to ensure the subjectivity and homogeneity of the male group. In this process, “misogyny” is created. 2.1 Real-Life Events China is a country with thousands of years of patriarchal concepts, and the voyeurism of women’s bodies was once the sy imposed on women by the patriarchy. The interactive, virtual and hidden nature of the online media is a perfect match for the voyeuristic desires of some audiences who dare not think or act in the real world. The tensions and anxieties brought about by social transformation are also released in a distorted way through the “consumption of female images” on the Internet. The various forms of sexual advances, pornography and obscenity against women, and the resulting series of crimes are to a large extent closely related to the images of women presented on the Internet. In the June 10 Tangshan Barbecue Incident in China, for example, a group of gangster men sexually www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc Advances in Social Science and Culture Vol. 4, No. 4, 2022 17 Published by SCHOLINK INC. harassed several women who were eating late at night, and when they were rejected, they became angry and beat these women up with their accomplices, causing serious physical and psychological harm to these innocent women. After the fermentation of the incident, many people tried to set up the “victim blaming theory” again. Some of them started malicious rumors: the women who were beaten were karaoke bar girls and they knew the assailants before so they deserved to be beaten. In addition to the stigma, many people were committed to finding some imperfections in these almost “perfect” victims. Some accused “They are not good girls when they go out to eat late at night.” Many men were not only indifferent and unsympathetic but also rebuked the women who were concerned. They even irrelevantly published their flirtation, that the responsibility of this matter is to be divided between men and women because these women were not tolerant and instead of fighting back, they should have been considerate of those drunk men. There are always some voices when women are in the face of domestic violence, sexual harassment, and other gender violence issues in the workplace, in marriage, and in family, “Why are you exposed to violence?” “Why are you sexually harassed?” “Because you’re at fault.” On the one hand, these voices are excuses for the perpetrators of violence, and on the other hand, there is a real perception in public opinion. While “victim blaming” is often defined by unequal social norms and even male standards, there is an even more absurd perception in today’s society—that only a perfect victim deserves sympathy, and this standard is even harsher when it comes to women as victims. In her seminal work of modern feminism, The Second Sex, French existentialist philosopher Simone Beauvoir pointed out that patriarchy semi-openly recognizes male sexual freedom but requires women’s sexuality to be bound by marriage, and if a woman’s sexuality does not occur within marriage, it is considered a fault and a defect. If a woman fails to protect her chastity and reputation, she is disgraced, while accusations against her conqueror are mixed with envy. In reports about battered women, prostitutes, or “the other woman,” the authors often use terms that are more morally judgmental of the victims, such as “noble” and “pure.” These terms cause another spiritual damage to the victims. At the same time, these words and tone are not out of genuine concern and sympathy for the women victims, but also ignore the violations they have suffered and focus more on the vulgar issue of whether their chastity is gone. The reason why these reports are appearing is people’s subconscious feudal view of chastity. Obviously, after receiving modern education, some people still have the traditional notion that women are no longer pure if they lose their chastity, just like the women in the Tangshan incident who were rumored to be “KTV girls”. It was absurd that the trend of public opinion turned to blame these women for not deserving sympathy. It should be clear that women are forced to do things they don’t want to do by others using violence or other illegal means, which should be a disgrace to the perpetrators, but also society. www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc Advances in Social Science and Culture Vol. 4, No. 4, 2022 18 Published by SCHOLINK INC. 2.2 Film and Television Productions As a reflection of the real world, film and television productions are always closely linked with the real world, reflecting the state of mind of human beings in the real world. Additionally, they are also used as a medium to convey and amplify the message that the creators want to convey, to bring about changes to society, which eventually become part of the acceptable social culture. In a world where the mainstream environment is filled with misogyny type of thinking, the creation and dissemination of film and television works witness how people express their strong tendency to objectify women, either intentionally or unintentionally, under the underlying logic of the male-oriented society, which is manifested in the malice of society toward women. Since the male-oriented culture has penetrated nearly every aspect of life which has largely reformed people’s mindset, it is way too natural that people will produce many films and TV works that mostly attach importance to the male perspective and take women as the object of gaze in a social-cultural atmosphere with a misogynist theme, in which tendencies to objectify women can be noticed everywhere. The difficult status quo of women cannot be simply summarized by the oppression of the “first sex (for the current situation on a social level)” on the “second sex”, which is, instead, a combined result of the misogynistic tendencies of society as a whole, the oppression and violence of the male group, and the forced obedience and domestication that the female group itself is accustomed to in a patriarchal society with noteworthy misogyny tendencies. This is demonstrated in works of art that transcend reality but also derive from it, and many films and television productions reflect the surprisingly unified misogynistic tendencies of different social groups on this basis. 1998 saw the release of the controversial incest-themed film Lolita, which was adapted from a novel by Russian-American author Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. The basic storyline is about a middle-aged man’s “love affair” with his underage stepdaughter whose aim is to expose the filth of human desire. The film begins with a foreshadowing of morbid human desire: As a film adapted from literature, its music, lighting, and the details in many scenes all imply sexual metaphors of repression and suffocation, to be in line with the original work’s thorough atmosphere. There is no shortage of close-ups of Lolita’s body parts in numerous sexually suggestive scenes (The legs all wet by the fountain, her mouth chewing gum at all times, and sometimes the food in her mouth is a banana which indicates male genitalia), suggesting the audience that Lolita, as a teenage girl, initiates the action of seducing her stepfather, it is her sexual precocity and seduction that leads to the series of violations made by her stepfather Humbert afterward—she is by no means a perfect victim in a male-oriented world. In the tone of the film’s excessive male gaze, she exists as a lascivious sexual object from the male perspective. This is a hard reflection of the male-oriented ideology that exists in the film industry and its underlying infinite tolerance for men and infinite malice toward women, even when the main characters are a teenage girl and a middle-aged man who is also the underage girl’s stepfather. At the same time, the film goes to great lengths to explain where Humbert’s pedophilia comes from—his first teenage girlfriend died of an accidental illness in her teens and has been his issue ever since—leaving www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc Advances in Social Science and Culture Vol. 4, No. 4, 2022 19 Published by SCHOLINK INC. Humbert’s teenage experience and his mental illness reasonable excuses for him to choose underage girls as the object of his desire. The film unfolds the narrative from the first-person perspective of Humbert, the protagonist, allowing the audience to explore his mindset from the perspective of a pedophile man. Under this subjective narrative mode, the subject of the narrative takes use of the facade of love to hide his desire which hugely violates human nature and ethics. In the process of developing his narrative, Humbert draws analogies between his “love affair” with Lolita and the love stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Annabel Lee, thus categorizing himself as one of these literary giants such as Dante and Petrarch, making it possible to cover up the crimes he had committed against his stepdaughter using the word “love”. Moreover, Humbert tries to explain his personality with artistic distortion and surreality to convince the reader that his love story is indeed possible in the real world. As a result, Humbert’s love for his underage stepdaughter becomes a rationalization for adult men to commit sexual assault on underage women, therefore, the audience turns out to be extremely vulnerable to being misguided by the narrative subject and will possibly sympathize with the male subject who conducts sexual assault. However, this story should be classified in the category of sexual assault no matter how much the film’s narrative glorifies and rationalizes the male protagonist’s sexual relationship with his underage stepdaughter from a surreal art perspective, i.e., in a non-equivalent and deformed relationship, the adult male, as a social member, has an inherent power inequality when facing an underage girl, who has not officially stepped into society yet. Needless to say, when a relationship falls out of the realm of equality, the act imposed by the superior on the inferior becomes a unilateral infringement. Whether it is through Lolita’s precocious performance on camera to induce the audience to be prejudiced against her based on gender stereotypes, or through a monotonous first-person narrative perspective that permits the audience to sympathize with Humbert’s past, understand his abnormal behavior, and lament his Shakespearean “love tragedy” after comprehending Humbert’s story from his perspective, is treating the entire story with a thorough male-oriented state of mind. In the following years since the film’s release, countless viewers and readers have talked about the artistic glorification of Humbert’s image presentation from a male-oriented perspective, using love—which is a great deception inflicted by patriarchal culture, and at the core of which is still the filthy desire of human beings—as an entry point for the beauty of the film, but cooperatively stay silent on the harm caused by such sexual assaults in the real sense. It is hard to deny that as the first sex(socially in a patriarchal society), men enjoy relatively higher attention and a more authoritative voice than women because the social resources are greatly tilted in his favor, and the social environment is, therefore, more inclined to be tolerant and understanding of men. Contrary to this, women always exist as objects to be gazed at by the whole patriarchal society, whose morally eligible social resources are taken away from them to men, so women without enough social resources, social attention, and social respect are always surrounded by great malice from society. This is a disease that exists at the subconscious level of the social structure rather than a natural inheritance, and people need to be aware of this and consciously www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc Advances in Social Science and Culture Vol. 4, No. 4, 2022 20 Published by SCHOLINK INC. overcome the underlying logic of misogyny in male-oriented thinking mode. 2.3 Tanbi Fiction Literature The word “Tanbi” originated in Japan and means indulging in beautiful things. Initially, it was a generic term for Japanese literary works in the late 19th century that were mainly aimed at the pursuit of aesthetic beauty, and later specifically referred to works depicting pure love between beautiful men, whose audience was mainly young women. In the 1990s, Japanese Tanbi comics were introduced to China through the Internet, attracting a group of young female readers who mocked themselves as “fujoshi”. They established a Tanbi subculture group that loved the male-male romance and produced comic derivative works of homoerotic novels so that Tanbi culture took root in China and began to grow and develop. In 2003, Jinjiang Literary City was founded, and since then, Tanbi fiction has been rapidly localized and proliferated. During this period, the style of Tanbi fiction also changed dramatically, from which we can also glimpse the psychological changes of creators and audiences. Early Tanbi novels are characterized by the depiction of sadistic and torturous emotions. The story often starts with the top physically tormenting the bottom because of emotional conflict and ends with the top losing his soul when the situation is reversed. Such a plot direction fits women’s vulnerable position in society and provides them with a way to vent their grievances and anger about being oppressed. After the Internet clean-up campaign in 2014, the emotional character gradually turns warm, light-hearted, and sweet, as the creators leave out all the real problems faced by the gay community and only depict idealized love. Such love requires both parties to have equal status, while women are always at an unfair disadvantage in reality. Therefore, women project their expectations in Tanbi literature to satisfy their imagination of love. The projection of female equality consciousness is also reflected in the characterization of the protagonist. The protagonists of Tanbi fiction novels have developed from the initial “strong top and weak bottom” in line with traditional gender norms to a diversified scenario of “weak top and strong bottom” and “strong top and strong bottom” and “weak top and weak bottom”. The top as the “penetrator” in the process of sex can also be cute or feminine, and the bottom as the “penetrated” in the process of sex can also be strong or mature, which to a certain extent breaks the traditional heterosexual image of lovers, and also reflects the resistance and resistance of women to gender stereotypes. In addition, Tanbi fiction has also developed two settings that do not correspond to male physiology: childbearing and intersexuality. Both of them set up the Tanbi novel in which the bottom has both male and female reproductive organs and can reproduce. On the one hand, such a setting carries a female’s catharsis for the oppression of fertility in reality, and on the other hand, it also reflects the demand of “the pain I feel is the only way to understand my pain”. Contrary to this is the image of female supporting characters in Tanbi fiction. Some studies point out that in the majority of Tanbi novels, the image of women can be divided into vilified third parties, simplified female friends, and masculinized heroines. The third party often appears as the ex or fiancée www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc Advances in Social Science and Culture Vol. 4, No. 4, 2022 21 Published by SCHOLINK INC. of the top, who usually comes from a wealthy family and tries to break up the protagonist by all means. The creator tends to portray them as deep-rooted and ruthless so that they cannot gain the reader’s sympathy and forgiveness. The female friends act as the promoters of the protagonist’s relationship and witnesses of their love, and they are only depicted in terms of interactions with the protagonist, while their own lives and complete personalities are simplified or omitted. The less frequent heroines tend to have the traditional concept of masculinity, such as perseverance, boldness, and thundering, which can be seen as “more like a man’s woman”. To maintain the perfection of male love in creators’ hearts, they intentionally or unintentionally vilify, simplify or masculinize the women in the world of pure love, and the specific way of portrayal also fully indicates that the “misogyny” rooted in a patriarchal society is also affecting women. In recent years, more and more Tanbi novels have been adapted into TV series and movies as hit IPs, breaking through the circle culture to reach the public. In this process, the censor’s ambiguity and castration of homosexuality and the market capital’s modification of characters and plots to cater to the mainstream aesthetic today also weakened the original female energy to a large extent. The expansion of the influence of Tanbi fiction after it came out of the circle has gone hand in hand with the compromise of its content, and its impact on gender consciousness is still unknown today and in the future. On the whole, Tanbi fiction can be seen as a tool for women to give themselves the right to gaze at men. It breaks the traditional concept of men as the main body to gaze at women, and to a certain extent liberates women from the shackles of being oppressed and disciplined to achieve equality and even subversion of power. However, because the creators themselves bear the mark of “misogyny”, Tanbi novels also carry certain side effects in the shaping of female images. In addition, it should be clear that the rise and growth of Tanbi fiction are not enough to establish the awareness of gender equality, let alone the advancement of women and sexual minorities in reality. Instead, it is more like a paradise for women to enter a beautiful fantasy world and escape from the oppression and inequality in reality. 3. Countermeasures 3.1 Improve Network Legislation and Strengthen Legal Regulation The development of Internet technology not only makes the cost of using the Internet much lower and enhances the popularity and usage rate of the Internet but also drives the development of online self-media. Interaction on the Internet creates a certain social opinion, which has a wide coverage and great influence but lacks positive guidance and supervision. Some of the social opinions triggered by online news have positive impacts on society, but due to the invisibility of online comments, various negative comments will be magnified, and various bad and false information will be flooded, corrupting the online environment and affecting social morale, so they need to be regulated. In a patriarchal society with misogyny as the keynote, the image of women in the media is not always positive, and under the deliberate guidance of the stakeholders of the new online media, the www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc Advances in Social Science and Culture Vol. 4, No. 4, 2022 22 Published by SCHOLINK INC. unwarranted malice inflicted on women by netizens is always mind-boggling, and the orgy of gender violence is projected from reality to the Internet, and the widespread misogynistic thinking is infinitely magnified due to the concealment and anonymity of the Internet, which will eventually affect women’s This will eventually affect women’s legitimate interests, or in more serious cases, even squeeze women’s original living space in a multidimensional way. Therefore, like the real world, the Internet also needs to be purified, and this purification relies first and foremost on the regulation of the law. At present, China’s network legislation is lagging behind the rapid development of the network, and it is this unbalanced development that has led to repeated cases of network fraud. Network legislation has been in place for more than two decades since its inception, and this has only been a breakthrough in recent years with the dramatic increase in the number of Internet users in China, but the current laws and regulations are not enough to solve a series of network problems derived from the increase in the number of Internet users. Isis, the rapid development of the network, and the lag of network legislation that n makes a series of problems derived from the network. Therefore, the relevant legislative departments should accelerate the process of network legislation to adapt to the rapid development of the mobile Internet industry. 3.2 Take Advantage of the Public Opinion Guiding Role of Social Media As the Internet continues to assume the role of information dissemination, social media is gradually gaining more and more attention from the public, so the discourse is also greatly tilted toward social media, that is, social media growing up under the Internet has become the main position of information dissemination. A statistic published by Meta (formerly Facebook) in 2020 shows that in terms of access to information, more than two-thirds of people in America use the core sites Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, with one-third using Instagram and one-fifth using WhatsApp. This shows that the use of social media has become the main way for people of all ages to access information and has become one of the most important ways for people to connect with the world. On this basis, it has also been shown that social media has played a significant role in the fourth wave of feminist movements and has provided the main platform for this feminist movement. Thanks to the massive involvement of the Internet and social media, this feminist movement has reached a wider scope than the previous three, and the efficiency of its dissemination has increased geometrically at a visible rate, including the Delhi (Delhi) gang rape case in 2012, the Isla Vista murder case in 2014, the Jian Ghomeshi trial in 2016, the Harvey Weinstein (2017) allegations and the subsequent Weinstein effect, and the Westminster (2017) sex scandal, among others. According to Kira Cochrane, fourth-wave feminism is “defined by technology” and is characterized by the use of blogs such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and Feministing to challenge patriarchal culture’s misogyny and achieve gender equality. However, from what we have seen so far, there has been some resistance to the popularization of feminism in social media, and this resistance requires social media organizations to reflect on themselves and overcome their current shortcomings to provide a more objective and fair platform for www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc Advances in Social Science and Culture Vol. 4, No. 4, 2022 23 Published by SCHOLINK INC. women to speak out. Social media is somehow behind the phenomenon of stigmatizing women, which is mainly manifested in the following aspects: firstly, in terms of issue setting, some media tend to focus on negative issues to attract the attention of audiences; secondly, in terms of report content, the media emphasize timeliness, but do not report enough on the voices of the people responsible for the news, and often deliberately exaggerate some words to attract the audience’s attention. Therefore, online media needs to be regulated, and such regulation requires both supervisions from outside the industry and improvement of the quality of media practitioners. In today’s market-oriented development of network media, some network media practitioners have become impatient under the enticement of interests, more to cater to the public, which makes it difficult to be objective and impartial in news reporting while the vitality of the news relies on objective and impartial, true and reliable reporting. The first thing that network media should do is uphold an objective and impartial attitude when reporting news, not exaggerating deliberately. 3.3 Strengthen Women’s Awareness of Rights Protection Women’s rights are an important public issue that covers most of the countries in the world, especially the third world countries, and is one of the directions of social progress highlighted in the UN Declaration of Human Rights. The concept of women’s rights needs to be widely disseminated throughout society, especially in isolated rural areas. In the fact that social resources are tilted toward men, women’s rights are violated in several dimensions. To make more women aware that their legal rights are being violated by the patriarchal society, this article lists the following five directions for women’s rights protection to help open up the way for women to defend their rights. 3.3.1 Right to Live As the default second sex in a patriarchal society, women’s right to live is constantly violated due to the deliberate guidance of the misogynistic cultural climate. China is the country with the most serious, longest-lasting, and most affected gender imbalance at birth in the world, as people used to use ultrasound to distinguish the sex of a fetus and choose whether to terminate the pregnancy accordingly, due to a patriarchal belief in the importance of sons over daughters. For this reason, Chinese law prohibits any non-medically necessary fetal sex diagnosis, which is one of the arguments for the socio-cultural threat to women’s right to live from the embryonic stage. 3.3.2 Implicit Discrimination in the Workplace While nature has endowed women with a sacred womb to produce life, women’s fertility is seen as a liability in the workplace, because possible maternity leave for future births of unmarried women who haven’t had a child might cause loss to the company. In addition, there is biased discrimination against women in the types of work they are skilled in, such as the fact that many companies have men in top management, and women are excluded from this power structure unless there is a “glass cliff effect”. Kristin J. Anderson, a professor of psychology at the University of Houston, said companies may offer women “glass cliff” positions because they believe women are “more expendable and better suited to be scapegoats. She said organizations that offer “glass cliff” jobs to women believe they will win no www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc Advances in Social Science and Culture Vol. 4, No. 4, 2022 24 Published by SCHOLINK INC. matter what: If the woman succeeds, the company will be better off. If she fails, the company will be no worse off, she will be blamed, but the company will be praised for equality and progress, and the former practice of appointing men as top management staff can be restored. 3.3.3 The Right to Education The level of education is positively correlated with a person’s future economic level and the potential for survival and development. In China, the inequality between men’s and women’s right to education is mainly shown in the non-developed areas. Many rural families, who are lacking sufficient funds for education, give preference to boys for higher education and even require girls to become migrant workers to pay for the boys’ tuition. 3.3.4 Sexual Rights Women have independent ownership and dominion over their bodies, and obviously, it has become common sense in modern society that women’s sexual intercourse is not dominated by men. The concept of chastity imposed on women is a manifestation of the violation of women’s human rights in a patriarchal society. There is a deviation between the sexual morality standard for men and that for women. Men’s sexual needs are socially justified, while women are expected to be sexually ignorant and proud to know nothing about sex, and when faced with a woman who knows everything about sex, society labels her as a “prostitute”. This is the deprivation of women’s sexual rights in a patriarchal society. 3.3.5 Domestic Violence Due to the faultiness of China’s legal system, the rights and interests of Chinese women who suffer from domestic violence are always being violated, and the lack of public attention to victims of domestic violence makes it very difficult for victims of domestic violence to defend their rights. According to the Third Survey on the Social Status of Chinese Women conducted by the All-China Women’s Federation and National Bureau of Statistics in 2011, 24.7% of women had suffered different forms of domestic violence throughout the marriage, such as insulting, abusing, beating, restricting personal freedom, economic control and forced sex by their spouses, among which 5.5% explicitly said they had been beaten by their spouses, 7.8% in rural areas and 3.1% in urban areas respectively. The number of women whose personal rights have been violated by domestic violence is extremely large, but the road to defending the rights of domestic violence victims is also full of thorns due to the shackles of social opinion. With the development of Internet technology, the way people communicate and exchange with the outside world has gradually become public. The appearance of public social platforms such as Weibo and Douban and the rise of self-media allow every ordinary person to be the object of being told and listened to and provide the best place for the dissemination of symbolic signs. The identity and image of women currently active in the public eye are generally associated with abstract and generalized conceptual descriptions, such as housewives who depend on men, older leftover women and single women, and so on. The root of this phenomenon is that we tend to classify women when we point the www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc Advances in Social Science and Culture Vol. 4, No. 4, 2022 25 Published by SCHOLINK INC. camera at them, and then label them into words that can be easily referred to and disseminated. In this process, individual differences are ignored. A woman who is also a victim of domestic violence may choose to divorce if she is in the middle class and has a stable job, while she may have to put up with it if she is at the bottom and cannot support herself. When the camera only wants to talk about the group of women who are victims of domestic violence, we cannot see the impact of other realistic factors on different individuals. We should focus the camera on each case and each woman, listen to their stories, and give practical help or form empirical summaries in the context of their individual experiences and situations. Defending one’s legal rights is not only a basic human right but also a necessary foundation for world peace, prosperity, and sustainable development. The first step is to defend women’s rights through legal means. Women should arm themselves with legal knowledge and dare to defend their rights through legal intervention, and women should unite to defend their rights according to the law; secondly, they should use the mass media platform to speak out for themselves, use the effect of public opinion to attract public attention to their rights defense process, and not just keep silent when facing the news of stigmatizing women. They should be brave enough to stand up for themselves and speak out, and they should be brave enough to fight and defend their rights against media that publish stories that smear women’s images. However, women’s groups should pay attention to the ways and means of communication with the media, and should not just confront the media blindly, but should also strengthen the cooperation between them, and make more use of the media to promote the good qualities of women, to create a win-win situation. 3.4 Break the Moral Shackles of Patriarchal Culture In the unspoken fixed framework of patriarchal culture, women’s every move is monitored by patriarchal rules, so women’s value is severely dichotomized under the influence of mainstream misogyny, either as “saints” or “sluts”, and all intermediate values are ignored. Therefore, countless women are domesticated by male-oriented thinking into women who conform to patriarchal norms. Why have high heels, short skirts, and lipstick become the fixed labels for women today? The male-oriented ideology that alienates and objectifies women pervasively penetrates social life and is solidified into a stereotypical mindset at the subconscious level of this social mechanism. The norm of a “good woman” is defined not only by men but also by women who have been domesticated by a patriarchal society. The spread of social media around the world has made it easier for people to use the Internet to discriminate against and shame women who do not conform to patriarchal norms of behavior, or who try to resist them. People try to use this pejorative concept to control the functioning of a patriarchal society within its established trajectory. To break out of this trap, modern women need to break out of the traditional logic of male dominance. For example, the word “slut” is a threat that can limit a woman’s behavior within the norms, but it is the brainwashing and mental manipulation of women by a patriarchal society. When women stop classifying “slut” as a term full of pejorative tendencies, women will take the first step to break free from the mental manipulation www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc Advances in Social Science and Culture Vol. 4, No. 4, 2022 26 Published by SCHOLINK INC. of patriarchal society and escape from the weird circle of misogynistic thinking. Discourse is power. In this Internet era, where the concept of the Metaverse is gradually emerging and information resources are well developed, women can make use of the abundant feminist resources on the Internet and social media to tap into women’s discourse, build a discourse system independent of patriarchal culture and unique to women’s groups together with like-minded women. Women can break away from the logical flaws and ideological manipulation of patriarchal culture, escape from the fate of being a second gender parasite in a patriarchal society, and redefine their connotation and wisdom with female power. In the face of the dominant patriarchal culture’s powerful intimidation of women, it’s rare and commendable for many women who insist on resisting patriarchal oppression to be able to persist in the path of emancipating women despite the opposition and abuse of numerous vested interests and overcome the ubiquitous misogynistic culture to build a women’s cultural circle independent of patriarchal culture. 4. Conclusion The media should focus on the other half of the population living under the same sky, rather than fueling feudal patriarchal ideology. The media always seems to place women in a specific position in the imaging system as objects of the gaze, images that men appreciate and want men to appreciate from a gender perspective. As a result, women as viewers are absent and expelled. There is no necessary distance between the female spectators and the image to “look back”. The image is the carrier of culture, and the sexist message carried by the female image is not expressed in modern media in the form of destruction and repression, but in the construction of a new standard that oppresses women in search of diversity. Images of women are often the product of economic interests rather than the pursuit of female ideals, and certain parts of the female body are used as selling points, exaggerating female sexuality and generics to the detriment of women. Gender is a dynamic process that accompanies social change, and the audience is a mirror of the media. The media is expected to look at the “looking-glass self” and seek change. Acknowledgement Prof. Drummond and Teaching Assistant Zhe Wu have offered us valuable help in our thesis writing, we would like to give our sincere gratitude to Prof. Drummond and Teaching Assistant Zhe Wu, with extraordinary patience and consistent encouragement, gave us great help by providing us with necessary materials, advice of great value and inspiration of new ideas on class. Without their strong support, this thesis could not been the present form. Our heartfelt thanks go to Prof. Drummond and Teaching Assistant Zhe Wu. www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/assc Advances in Social Science and Culture Vol. 4, No. 4, 2022 27 Published by SCHOLINK INC. References Brinkman, B. G. et al. (2015). College women’s reflections on media representations of empowerment. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 4(1), 2. https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000043 Collins, R. L. (2011). Content analysis of gender roles in media: Where are we now and where should we go? 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