THE FEMININE IN THE ROMANIAN WRITTEN PRESS. MYTHS AND REALITIES
Daniela Roventa FRUMUSANI
The international and regional media context
Appealing again to one’s identity becomes compulsory in moments of breaking, crisis, when the community goes back to its founding myths, to the vertical references of its collective memory in order to clarify the horizontal, sociological references of ‘hic et nunc’.
The individual and the community identify with what is said about them. In constructing the minority identity, placed in inferiority with respect to the majority, mass media plays an important role by broadcasting social representations as an instrument of personal and behavioral categorization (the model Margaret Thatcher will allow a joke of the following type in the British context: "Two children are playing about what they would like to do when they grow up. The little boy is very determined: ’I want to be a Prime Minister’. But the little girl contradicts him amused: ‘You can’t, you are not a girl’. This joke will not be heard in Bucharest).
Preparing the International Women’s Congress –Beijing 1995- Canada Media Watch prepared with UNESCO a world monitoring of the main mass media (press and audio-visual ones) on women’s presence as a subject (creator) and object of media information in a day chosen at random – January 18-th 1995. 80 countries from all continents participated. I would like to add that the information gathered and coded by an enthusiastic group of students and young academics of the Department of Journalism of the University of Bucharest was the most numerous in Eastern Europe.
The selection of materials was determined under the following criteria:
national and regional balance, public and private balance;
using the information given by a minimum of 2 radio stations, 2 TV stations and 2 newspapers in each country (We selected information from the public television, Antena 1 and Tele 7 ABC, Radio Romania Actualitati and Antena Bucurestilor, Romania Libera, Adevarul, Evenimentul Zilei and 2 regional newspapers: Adevarul de Arad and Opinia – Buzau).
Finally the results were given on regions: East Asia, South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, North America, Central America and the Caribbean Islands, South America, the Pacific Region.
As far as the women’s presence on the news is concerned, 2 significant mutations were registered: in the last 30 years the number of women journalists grew considerably (43 % in 1995), but as opposed to that the number of women interviewed in the news grew extremely slowly, almost imperceptibly. "The news bulletin is often presented by women, but rarely about women" (Global Media Monitoring Project 1995, page 10). In South Asia even though 68% of reporters are women, only 13 % of the interviewed persons are women. In Eastern and Western Europe 37% of the total number of journalists are women (more on the radio and the TV than the written press), but only 14 respectively 15 % of the interviewees are women.
This world investigation emphasized a gap between the women as news authors and women as news objects. If both sex reporters present the local, national and international news in a balanced way, there is a significant difference about the actors of the events: women appear less in local news, men in national ones, confirming the fact that in most countries politics is dominated by men.
The percentage of women journalists in Eastern Europe is subcategorized in the following way: 18 % for local news, 42% for national news and 41% for international news; women interviewed are 16% in local stories, 24 % in national news and 30% in international stories.
Topic focuses are different too: the arts, entertainment and social matters are feminine; the economy, sports, war, terrorism are permanently covered by men. Men also cover more central news (over 60 %): politics, disasters, and international crises.
The greatest number of interviewed women is in health and medicine, the social area, the arts, the problems of family and the household (30%), while the greatest number of interviewed men is in politics (93 %), the economy (91 %), war, terrorism (90 %), international crises (88 %).
Only 11 % of the news tackle women’s issues: 3 % changing the traditional role assigned to women, 2 % the portrait of women in the media, 2 % women’s health, 1 % education for women. It is interesting that 3 regions: North America (caused by the tradition and importance of the feminist movement), Africa (caused by the supremacy of women in the economy) and the Middle East relate numerous pieces of news on women in comparison with other world regions.
The jobs of women and men included in 3 occupational groups: politicians/other occupations/no specific occupation reflect a hard prejudice: for 28 % of women, but only for 9 % of the men their job is not mentioned. This difference either means the lack of importance of the feminine career (the famous Le deuxieme sexe by Simone de Beauvoir) or the absence of a socio-professional image in women’s existence.
If this gender difference is linked with influence and power, the media messages should enlarge both the area of importance and the expectance horizon of the readers, including all races, ages, sexes, occupational groups, or even practicing positive discrimination when it is necessary – the visibility of the feminine presence in business, politics, the economy, science.
In Romania very few women get to be in the media: the stars of sports, show business, the media and lastly political personalities ("due to their public function") –cf. Mihaela Miroiu, 1998:261.
Information – as Simone de Beauvoir said- is the first step towards freedom. But the information regarding "the condition of women", "the feminine space" is cut, distorted, negated. It is so because Masculine experts so because the information is filtered by masculine models and decisions, elaborated by masculine actors, assessed by masculine experts.
The position of women in the public space and the media is significantly marked by this logic of raw information and show business, induced by the strong market place competition, in other words the unequal distribution of visibility and participation in the public space: a minority of leaders and over-informed and over-equipped mediators/vs./the silent minority, most certainly not informed, underrepresented, if not totally ignored.
The feminine in the Romanian written press. Myths and realities
An attentive look over the written and electronic media in Romania confirms the feminine actor visibility (journalist, editor, publishing managing director, etc.), but also perpetuating feminine invisibility as real identity. Monitoring the Romanian written press (18 January 1995 –Global Media Monitoring Project contains 80 countries from all continents for the Beijing congress), as well as further monitoring confirmed a relative acting balance (40 % of women journalists vs. 60 % male ones), but a severe reduction at the level of the persons involved in the news broadcastings (12 % of women vs. 88 % men) and a monotopicality of information regarding women.
The analysis of three large circulation dailies – Adevarul, Evenimentul Zilei and Romania Libera for three months (October, November, December 1995) emphasized a shocking disparity between men v. women actors, as well as a unilateral, distorted representations of the anonymous half. Analyzing three pages of each issue (first page, last page and the social page), 221 issues and 4280 articles (news, reportages, editorials), Cristina Ghetau in her graduation paper noticed that, if for journalist actors the situation is in a way balanced (60 % male journalists vs. 40 % women journalists), for the actors of the presented event the report is extremely unbalanced (88 % male actors vs. 12 % women actors, and those in stereotypical roles: victims of masculine domination –rape, brutal treatment – or stars of decorative appearance – top models or stars of showbusiness or of sports).
The disparity is obvious at the level of topics as well: men appear in political, economic, military, religious news, and women as victims of accidents, catastrophes, and crimes. 1.5% of all 4280 articles discuss issues essential for women and society and only one article is about equal opportunities.
Two years later (November 20-th – December 20-th 1997), after the changes created by the 1996 elections, the content analysis made on the dailies Adevarul and Evenimentul Zilei show the following acting and topical configuration:
ADEVARUL Out of 38 articles on women, in 26 women appear as victims (of sexual abuses, murder attempts and prostitution networks), in 5 as monsters (murderous mothers and wives), in 4 as delinquents ("a pimpish aunt", "prostitute niece", etc.), in 3 referred to as social status (women in the mining industry, in the fashion industry, etc.). The percentages were 70 %, 13 %, 10 %, and 7 %.
EVENIMENTUL ZILEI sums up a total of 47 articles on women, 20 regarding women as victims of domestic or street violence (special attention was given to the situation of a journalist attacked outside her house while she was working at a very important investigation), 10 articles on malefic beings (monster wives, prostitutes stealing from their clients, witches), 8 on women-objects (top models or beautiful gypsy women sold by their parents according to the customs of this ethnic group) and only 9 on career women (but only in the field of show-business). The percentages were 42 %, 21 %, 17 % and 19 %.
There is complete silence regarding women managers, women in the media (editors, editors-in-chief), women academics, women researchers, etc.
This negative unilateral, rejection, this placing of women in a position of inferiority for 51 % of the population is doubtlessly linked with:
the economic and political crisis placing women in a double dependence (towards her husband and towards the state in an evidently patriarchal society);
the masculinization of the public space (a reflex of the communist policy of "women’s emancipation") and the feminization of poverty;
"attentism", the passivity of women accepting Andrei Plesu’s diagnosis, according to which "the Romanians consider that the cause of their failures is the other; guilty for something is always somebody else’s").
Feminine solidarity and the women journalists’ activity could produce the erosion of these cliches and the gradual restructuring of the public sphere.
If in western media there is a new feminine personality (ironic, sophisticated, autonomous – the third woman mentioned by Gilles Lipovetsky), in the post communist countries, we are watching an under representation and under participation of women, a possible reflex of the police Stalinist woman, but also of a continuity with the communist ideology (including the rhetoric of feminine emancipation).
In the conditions in which the main criterion of media success is represented by the show, the market information, the feminine identity and problems have to face a handicap: that of the "deuxieme sexe" status, even 50 years after publishing the manifest work of Simone de Beauvoir; the invisibility syndrome, the absence or the reticence of women themselves to enter politics and the economy as leaders.
Compared to the western media, characterized by masculine domination in technical and decision-making jobs and feminine supremacy in the administrative and traditionally feminine sector: culture, education, Central and Eastern Europe are in the same tendency of feminine under representation at the creative agent level (of radio and television shows) and at the level of the message.
However the media content continues to be unbalanced about the topic hierarchy (politics, finances, sports as ‘hard’, subjects prioritarily with a masculine connotation), but less monothematic about the presented feminine images (unconventional roles next to traditional ones, a housewife obsessed by the brightness of the dishes, a mother preoccupied by the quality of the baby’s napkins, a wife/lover fascinated by perfumes and creams).
In the post communist countries however, after abolishing the taboo’s, we are watching the revival of the "old" stereotypes" the woman "sex object", promoted by the advertising inflation and the market economy pressures (cf. Roventa Frumusani 1995, "Images of women in the media", 1995).
Comparatively with men, women are younger, with an insecure social and occupational anchorage, important by their corporeality, presence, relational qualities, not in the least by authority or expertise.
Even in the situation of political personalities (women M.P.’s) the media visibility is reduced, a fact, which maintains the public gender representation as static and stereotypical and the offer of feminine models, reduced. For this reason the results of media research presenting the feminine public identification with models furnished by both sexes, but not of the masculine public with feminine models, do not seem surprising (cf. "Images of women in the media" 1999:17).
The making of women’s image unilateral in the public life and the media (feminine as support of the sensational, violence, pornography) involve on the one hand ignoring analysis journalism (of the reform, the transition, the market economy, etc) in favor of a punctual journalism, extremely profitable from a commercial point of view (the scoop, the catastrophe, the sensational). On the other hand it excludes an important category of women (editors-in-chief, managers, political leaders, researchers, academics –who are not asked to send their message, their expertise).
Western feminist strategies aiming at the creation of a counter-culture inside patriarchal dominant culture are not interiorized; thee are no action groups to assess the radio and television shows (on the British model "Women’s Media Action Group" or the Canadian "Media Watch") or to put pressure for non-discriminating access of women in mass media and the development of alternative media (from press agencies to groups of radio and television production, on-line publications, etc.)
In the media or not, the most worrying problems regarding the situation of women in Romania is:
the feminization of poverty and the loneliness of young mothers in single parent families;
unemployment and career interruption or even giving up professional satisfactions in adopting "survival strategies" ("Too much kitchen time and too little career interest", said Sorin Rosca Stanescu, the managing director of the daily "Ziua" or "We need more restaurants and laundries" –idem).
As opinion leaders, journalists were invited to express their perception on the feminine condition (cf. Antoaneta Niculescu in the graduation paper "Women in the Romanian public space", 1996. She interviewed 100 journalists from the written and the audio-visual press. The journalists –men and women between the ages of 25 and 45, the oldest refusing to answer the questionnaire- estimate that women are less involved in political life (40 % think women are very little involved in politics, and 28 % that they are only little involved). The majority of journalists support the idea that this image is convergent with reality (79 %). The explanation for the invisibility, the political inactivity was explained by the following factors: the absence of expertise (which does not prevent non-expert men from launching a career in politics, but which actualizes the feminist touch: women will be equal to men when aside a mediocre male minister or party leader will work a mediocre woman minister); the hostility of the masculine mentality; the lack of interest of women themselves; the lack of feminine models in politics (the only known model being The Iron Lady); the Elena Ceausescu syndrome who immediately starts a "Vade retro Satana".
Regarding the profile of women politicians, both male and female journalists identified as sore points: the lack of autonomy, the exaggerated modesty, the excessive subordination, the self-victimization and the lack of feminine solidarity.
As short time prediction (4 years) it is not uninteresting to mention that the majority of journalists don’t foresee a significant change (54 %), the others foresee a negative evolution (39 %) and very few are optimistic (8 % women and 19 % men).
All the content analyses of the Romanian written press confirm the visibility of women as social actors (managing directors of publications, editors, editors-in-chief, photographers, etc.), but their invisibility as actors of the news, interview reportage.
Feminine solidarity, conscientiousness of the professional, social and political roles of women done by the NGO’s, the media and women themselves will be able to contribute to the erosion of the stereotypes and to the restructuring of the post communist public space.
Conclusions
In the contemporary society of communication explosion, mass media plays an essential role in forming public images, of private interactions, maintaining or changing rules, representations, life styles, ideological presuppositions. That is why it is vital to sensitize the public opinion and the political designers on the stereotypes, distortions and prejudices in the media space. In the perspective of visibility and valuing the difference (ethnic, sexual, religious minorities), the triad women, mass media/society represents a challenge of post communist society.