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This article considers some of the recent controversies that have dominated popular debates about sexist advertising and media content. It argues that because of the longstanding suspicion of television and the representation of the visual, debates about the media by feminists tend to oversimplify the way that the media operates and the messages that are translated by various media audiences. Confronted with the volatile world of mass media, anti-media and pro-censorship feminists constantly reinvent simplistic binary divisions, continue to cast women as perpetual victims and mistake appearances for universal reality. In a society where roles and boundaries are becoming less and less determined, the desire to diagnose media images - to fix their meaning - must surely rate as the biggest fantasy of all.
Catharine Lumby (Sun,) studied this question.