Feminism in the Popular Mass Media

Abstract

This chapter investigates the politics of feminism when it reaches a wider audience, especially the compromises and achievements the mass media requires and facilitates, and also the tension between censorship and independence through popularity and high circulation numbers. The author analyses feminism’s ambivalent relationship to mass media, with an emphasis on the issue of sexism in the genres of women’s and men’s magazines and the discourse on pornography in socialist Yugoslavia. What was certainly achieved here, and not in the other media and forums, was the opening up towards the private, the everyday life of ordinary women, reading women’s magazines, watching TV and writing letters to editors. Various crucial topics, such as prostitution, pornography, women’s sexuality, violence against women and birth violence were put on the agenda of various public fora. Through these, basic messages about crucial social issues, and even theory, were transmitted.