Last week, students representing post-secondary newspapers across Canada participated in NASH, the Canadian University Press’s annual event for networking, education, and celebration of Canadian student journalists.
I was lucky enough to go with The Peak to the event. On our third night, I saw key-note speaker Aliya-Jasmine Sovani, of MTV fame, give a speech predominantly about her career in journalism and body image in mainstream media.
This seemed like a promising topic. She seemed to want to address the problem of the strict definition of beauty in media as a journalist, and a model who has scars on her body from a terrible accident in her past.
Her speech served to perpetuate that same problem, though. She contradicted herself creating confusion about the meaning of beauty, confusion that perpetuates negative gender stereotypes, and that is apparently prominent in North American mainstream media.
Hopefully we’re more concerned about losing women to cancer, rather than just their boobs.
I’m disappointed now that I walked out of her speech halfway through, as I missed some highlights that others pointed out afterwards, such as this very conventionally beautiful woman calling herself a poster child for unconventional beauty, and her asking an audience of journalism students whether or not they keep up with the news.
But, a couple of parts from the portion of her speech that I saw stood out to me: her story about her breast-cancer awareness commercial, and an off-hand comment about straight men.
Her sentiments about the commercial perhaps best exemplify the problem with her speech. The commercial features a woman in a bikini — a role Sovani took on short notice — walking along a pool-side, at whom every person in the pool stares at or gestures towards.
It ends with the statement: “You know you like them, now it’s time to save the boobs.” It’s supposed to be a fun, sexy, and fresh way to look at breast cancer.
Of course, there are inherent problems with the commercial itself. As several other students at NASH brought up to me, hopefully we’re more concerned about losing women to cancer, rather than just their boobs. Hopefully our society sees women as more than boobs, and hopefully we can see a variety of body types as sexy. Hopefully.
But aside from this, Sovani also introduced the video by saying in an offhand comment that she wished she had taken a laxative and done sit-ups beforehand. Albeit in a joking manner, she effectively suggested not only the extreme importance of trying to achieve one strict type of beauty, but also justifyied adopting a disease to achieve it.
Later in her speech, she said, in another off-hand comment, that all straight men lie, mostly because they look at other girls while with their own girlfriends. In saying this, she effectively separates straight men from women and homosexual men, and underhandedly inserts into the public subconscious the idea that proud women consider men liars, and that to be a straight man is to be a liar.
Beyond these comments being offensive in themselves, they’re complicated in these circumstances. The fact that these sentiments are paired with a speech on respecting positive body images is what creates the confusion resulting in negative stereotypes being swallowed easily, being almost equated with positive ones.
Am I taking Sovani’s fun, off-handed comments too seriously? Maybe. But I can’t ignore what appear to be the symptoms of the deep-set problems of mainstream gender images. We need to ask questions when people with media power make uninformed comments such as these without blinking an eye.
Sovani has her heart in the right place. But her speech is a reminder that perpetuation of gender stereotypes is not okay, even and especially when done in a casual way by a person with influence in the media.
