Limiting Women/gender to A Category in the protection of Media

Media being the fourth pillar of our society plays an extremely pivotal role in today’s society. Amongst all the other mediums social media has come up as the most impactful medium among all age groups as well as social strata. The role of social media has been highly pervasive in terms of lifestyle, earning money, education, information and so forth. The digitalization of work, education, and livelihood opportunities broadened the space of social media even more. The situation post-pandemic brought a distinctive change in dealing with most media-related activities. As the perspective towards life and living changed, the reflection also took its turn accordingly. Social media provided a platform to many unemployed masses and became the solo mode for education whereas it opened many different doors for the young population irrespective of geographic boundaries.

It is said that media is a mirror of our society but so to say both media and society are reciprocal to each other. Media has multi-faceted aspects, influencing lifestyle, culture, education, food habits and most importantly livelihood. Out of all other aspects, the depiction of gender and the participation of women is the pertinent topic which needs attention. Gender representation in whichever kind of content, be it advertisements, films, songs, or social media, the scope for stereotypically preaching gender roles by segregating women into particular sections should be avoided.

Media, today,  treats gender as a weapon in vulnerability or vibration of women’s power. It is certainly a matter of fact of discussion on the era of a shifting culture situation. Different narratives are being raised and many of those seem to be biased towards our age-old socio-cultural practices. The women being shelved to a certain category and getting stereotyped to a limited sphere is nothing new from a perspective. As it is said and believed predominantly that women can or cannot do certain types of jobs either good or bad depending on the gender aspect attracted to them. The baggage is put on their shoulder by the male-dominant society which has been processing the stigma since time immemorial about roles depicted for women in society. It is high time that the media should stop showing women or gender as peripheral characters and sex objects. Now the horizon of content is so broad that there is no room for limiting or segregating any particular talent to a certain category. Every kind of skill or talent can get the opportunity to flourish on its own terms.

The responsibility of the new-age media should be more sensitive because it is, currently penetrating young minds from a very early period of their lives. So the media, today, has to be extremely careful and sensitized about what kinds of ideology it is painting on the future of society. Nowadays, children and the young population feel handicapped without coming in contact with the internet, and social media.  Then it becomes a grave responsibility of the media industry to be sensitive enough for the betterment of the society at large and make young India aware of their responsibility.