Douglas, Susan J.

Susan J. Douglas is a feminist cultural critic and award-winning author and columnist. She serves as the Catherine Neafie Kellogg Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. Her book Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With the Mass Media, received critical acclaim from media scholars and was selected as a 1994 top ten book by National Public Radio, Entertainment Weekly, and The McLaughlin Group. In the book, Douglas uses historical and cultural criticism to point out the contradictions and schisms within mainstream media's depictions of feminism. Douglas's book The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women (with Meredith Michaels, 2004) describes how the media have pushed the ideology of “momism” in the wake of the women's movement by returning to postfeminist, conservative values and ideals. Her book Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message That Feminism's Work Is Done (2010) explains how contemporary mainstream media continue to marginalize feminist ideals and achievements through pseudo-empowerment fantasies of liberation and girl power.

A common theme within Douglas's work concerns the mainstream media's ambivalence toward feminist ideals across forms, channels, programming, and genres. While advertisers, editors, and producers seemingly champion women's gains and achievements in the culture at large, they also reify traditional sexist values and ideals, thereby perpetuating antifeminist ideologies. In her first book on women in media, Where the Girls Are, Douglas explains that historically, cultural critics and mass media have revered the impact of boys and men, honoring their achievements in rock music, popular film, and television, yet while men are held as the cultural exemplars of “transgressiveness” and revelry, history ignores the lasting impact of girls and women within mainstream media. Whereas male rock stars (Elvis, The Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix) have been canonized, female figures in rock (The Shirelles, Janice Joplin, Aretha Franklin) continue to be marginalized in a male-driven media culture. Likewise, Douglas argues that the impact of strong female protagonists in television and film (such as Lucy and Ethel in I Love Lucy) has been marginalized and replaced by programming and genres that pit women against each other through unrealistic expectations of body image and beauty.

In all realms, Douglas offers a complicated and comprehensive critique of the mainstream media's denouncement and exploitation of women's liberation. She documents how serious topics that came out of the feminist movement—such as equal pay, sexual freedom, abortion, family and marriage—are rarely prominently featured in media content and programming. Instead, the media entertain a pseudofeminism that seemingly empowers women while keeping them contained in traditional scripts and normative roles. For instance, feminist discourses around collective equality and power have been repackaged into the ideology of narcissism and capitalist selling campaigns. These new advertising strategies encourage women to associate liberation with issues within the beauty industry as a means to keep them preoccupied with beauty and individual needs over collective political empowerment. Douglas contends that today's pseudofeminism encourages women to take control of their bodies not for their own political or health reasons but to make themselves aesthetically pleasing for men. Media campaigns continue to depict women's equality inaccurately by patronizing the few women who enter the realm of politics or business. This kind of window dressing disguises the greater invisibility of women in male-centered realms. For young girls, Douglas argues that growing up with stereotypical [Page 71]images of femininity leads to a cultural schizophrenia whereby girls and women remain ambivalent toward femininity on one hand and feminism on the other. Females are told they are equal, yet they remain trapped by history and cultural depictions within popular media.

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