"Shit, I am a feminist!"

At the age of roughly 14 I became aware of Marxism. It was my Dad who taught me about it and it is a huge part of my personal beliefs about what the world should be like. I have spent my time since then within the left field of political thinking with my ideals of the world maturing and changing as I am exposed to more and more stories about the planet on which we live. Over the next three years, no doubt, those opinions and beliefs will be refined more and will continue to be so for the rest of my life. My Dad had always told me about equality within class and how the worker is oppressed by capitalism, I then took that viewpoint further when I started to form opinions based on issues regarding race and how white supremacy was still an active and dangerous part of our culture.

The biggest shift for me happened roughly a year ago when I came across two twitter accounts, the first being: @NoMorePage3 which as you'd expect, is a campaign to stop the objectification of women in tabloid newspapers and magazines such as the Sun. Although I knew about misrepresentation of women in the media and I was outraged by it, I didn't really think that it was something I could change. To find something that today is actually having a huge influence on the media industry and be part of a community of just under 200,000 people  who have signed the petition (as of 16/07/14) is an amazing thing. The second account was that of Laurie Penny who is a journalist, author and the contributing editor of the New Statesman. When I read Penny's work, I completely agreed with what she was saying about women and how they are treated by the world we live in. I watched her lectures and was amazed at how much she was speaking to me. Eventually, I finished a YouTube video of Laurie Penny talking at Oxford and thought "Shit, I am a feminist!".

As a girl who wants to enter the media industry, I feel it is important to understand it. I just went on a tour of MediaCityUK yesterday and also went to the tour around the BBC in London with school earlier this year. I travelled to Goldsmith College from Leicestershire after school one day last month to she both Laurie Penny and the No More Page Three Campaign talk about sexism in the media. I buy myself papers, watch the news, read books, anything I can to understand what the world I live in does and why it does it. At this point in my life, I want to consume as much knowledge about the world around me as I possibly can so that I can grow up to be a cultured individual that is breaking the mould of modern living. The reason I think Media Studies is such an important subject is because it lets me do that and as my Media teacher said to me recently, you can't do Media Studies and not be a feminist. 

When I first realised that I was a feminist I was confused because feminists were loud mouthed, militant women who didn't shave their armpits and hated men. Now I have friends who call me militant and at times I can shout about my point of view for hours but I didn't and still don't associate myself with that stereotype of "the feminist". I certainly don't hate men, a lot of my friends are men, I have a loving boyfriend, I am in a class where, apart from me, every member of it is a man. Currently I am reading Unspeakable Things by Laurie Penny and even one chapter in, the book is one of the most influential and important texts I have ever read. In the book she talks about how you don't need to be that stereotype, you don't need to not shave, not wear make up, not wear deodorant because with feminism comes individualism and we all have the right to be who want to be and believe what we want to believe.

I was inspired to write this after reading something a friend on Facebook said about the feminist movement. She was saying how we don't need feminism in this country and instead of British and American feminists focusing on equal pay and getting stuff handed to us on a plate, we should focus on "a country like India... when you get stoned to death because you didn't marry who your family wanted to.". Yes, the feminist movement does focus of Asian countries "like India" - only days ago the whole feminist movement celebrated  the first ever Malala Day (July 12th) which honours Malala Yousafzai who was shot in the head last year after she stood up against the Taliban for her right for an education in Pakistan. Having made a full recovery, Malala (now 17) is a key feminist figure with a worldwide best selling book about her experiences. Yes, women in middle-eastern culture do face worse problems than those in western culture but that's not to say that the issues aren't universal.

Forced marriage and female genital mutilation are huge issues abroad but they are hugely prominent in the U.K too. Equally, workers rights and gender stereotypes are huge issues abroad. The reason we don't see it abroad (ie: on the news and in newspapers) is because we don't see it here. Patriarchal media forbids coverage of such nature being the greedy, capitalist industry it is. Universally, all of these problems exist and the feminist movement is fighting all of them. If you come across a feminist who believes feminist issues are more important in the U.K than abroad, that is not a feminist, that is an elitist and a racist. The feminist movement is essentially a socialist one - as Laurie Penny says: "Socialism without feminism, after all, is no socialism worth having.".

The feminist movement is a collection of ALL WOMEN standing up to be counted. Just because you are a white girl of privilege doesn't mean you can't be outraged by the world we live in. Feminism isn't a hate movement that is necessarily militant. It isn't about men, it is about culture. Feminism is standing up for what is right.

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Why is Media Studies a subject worth keeping?

Rumour has it that the government aren't sure whether or not they will be keeping Media Studies as a qualification as of 2016 as a GCE qualification. As a student who has taken the GCSE and is currently studying A-Level Media (as well as it being my favourite subject), I am outraged that in the near future children won't be able to learn about the world via the media.

Firstly, lets get some misconceptions out of the way about GCE Media Studies:

• It is an easy subject - Nope, It is ridiculously academic. Although the subject is heavily coursework based, it is also heavily based on knowledge that you have obtained elsewhere about the outside world. "Good Media students", as one of my teachers would say, are having to constantly be looking out for things that could be used within the subject. What I have noticed about doing AS Media is that I can no longer just watch an advert and that be that, I have to analyse it as I watch it looking out for "mise-en-scene" and "representations" and whether or not "the advert is a cliché of every other advert ever". A couple of weeks ago we were given the "revision guide" for our Media exam this Friday and it was a sheet of A4 paper. Although we have less exams than other A-Levels (because we do coursework through out the year), we cannot revise because the exam specification is so broad, the questions could be on anything as well as the exam being 2h30 long making it (I think) the longest exam apart from Art. As I say to my friends, "the Media exam is hard because it isn't a memory test.". In subjects such as the sciences, the answers are determined from the guides the exam board release where as (like I said before) the Media exam can be on anything.
• It is a girl's subject - The same as the sciences are a boy's subject? Let us not forget that as close as 40 years ago, journalism was a form of MEDIA almost exclusively run by men. It has only been it the past few decades that we have seen strong and truly amazing women come into the profession. Yes, in my Media class there is probably one boy to every three girls but journalism is still predominantly a male profession and many of them are there out of privilege rather than the quality of what they are saying. Look at current journalists such as Owen Jones who is from a working class background standing up for the mis-representation of the working class in the media, he came from state funded education and now regularly writes for the Independent as well as being a successful author as a result of his books on the working class. He is one of the most intelligent people I can think of in today's media and he is a "normal bloke".

So with these two misconceptions straightened out why does our male-dominated, academic government feel that Media Studies isn't worth our time? Well, this is my theory: I believe that the media run the world. They can take a reasonably good politician and make him look bad as well as taking a reasonably bad politician look good. We do not listen to the government directly, we listen to the media's (already altered) view on what the government have told us and so (depending on what paper/channel we hear it from) we are going to take that view rather than the government's direct view. It isn't just politics, it is everything... two-step flow theory: the mass media (ie: everything that is going on in the world at present) is picked up by the media - called "the gatekeeper" (ie: newspapers, news channels, blogs etc) and give it to you. It could be a kind of soap or a film, anything! Media tycoons are some of the richest and most powerful in the world. Rupert Murdoch has more money than sense and has political influences not only in the U.K but in America also. Simon Cowell has dictated what kind of music the world listens to for about 20 years now. The media has tremendous power over the world we live in today.

To me, I think that politicians are seeing a form of aid for themselves (in order to increase voters or boost popularity etc) slowly begin to become more powerful and more influential than government itself. Social media, for example, has given everyone with internet access a voice to be heard by people across the world (even me, a 17-year old school girl) and with that people are able to see what is actually going on in the world without the aid of two-step flow and it has become much easier for people to question what the government are actually doing. Also, an increasing amount of young people from working backgrounds are coming into the media with left-wing views (many of which are women) threatens the Etonian, right-wing government that are currently in power. They want to decrease the power of left media before people actually begin to question the greedy policies that the "selfservatives" puke out upon the British public.

Of course, I am not saying that this is a feminist attack or that the sciences are any less important than the arts as Media Studies tends the reflect both and you can look at the media via both routes. I just cannot stand people bringing it down because it is a subject that they haven't bothered their time to partake in and won't because women do it. If there is such a push to get more women into sciences such as engineering and physics then surely shouldn't we also be trying to encourage more men into media? 

As someone who hopes to study Media at university, I, naturally, would say it is the best subject in the world but let me tell you one thing. When I chose Media as an opinion in year 9, I thought it would be the most boring piece of crap I'd ever experienced yet I now it is something that my life revolves around. 

I couldn't embed an extract lecture by Owen Jones on the working-class that we watched this year in Media into post so here is a link to it.

What do you think about Media Studies as a qualification? Please leave a comment!

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