Miss-represented

Time and time again, women have been portrayed as the crazy, irrational, emotional, inferior counterparts to men - which i find sickening. A newspaper article featuring an outraged man will often be accompanied by a righteous title and and language insinuating he conquered a battle, however an article featuring an outraged woman will have the goal of humiliating, villainising, and antagonising her. Women who have been wronged are often described as "hysterical" and the media portrays their feelings as irrational and unreasonable. However, it doesnt stop here: even when two people do the exact same thing, their gender still determines the public's verdict. For example, when a man dates and sleeps with multiple women, he is portrayed as a "lady's man" and is applauded by his friends: however, when a woman decides to do the same thing she is labelled as "easy" and people around her shun her and ridicule her. A devestating example of this is Caroline Flack, who, sadly, in 2020 committed suicide due to the harsh backlash which was thrown at her as a result of her dating One Direction member Harry Styles, who was ten years younger than her at the time.

Sadly, however, these prejudices and stereotypes surrounding women cannot be resolved overnight as history has never been on women's side, with witch trials, not being allowed to vote, and "imaginary female trouble" and "ill treatment by husband" being considered suitable grounds for admition into a psychiatric ward, women have never been favoured by society. One harrowing example is the lobotomy. A lobotomy would consist of a doctor removing a chunk of your brain through your eye sockets, and they were originally created to treat the mentally ill. However, as time went on, due to the criteria for being considered mentally ill were extremely loose regarding women, lobotomies shifted to mainly haplening to women as by 1951 roughly 60% of all lobotomies were prescribed to women. The worst thing is the media portrayed lobotmies as a god-send and the key to solving all problems.

For all of these reasons, and many more, i find it staggering and appalling that, to this day, women are still viewed the same ways they have been for centuries. I also find it abhorrent that in western countries the media depicts women as "more powerful and privileged" than men. Journalists have no problem handing this viewpoint to the public, despite the fact that women and girls in afghanistan have been forbidden from doing things as simple as going to a local shop without a male chaperone present - their privilege for education has now been stripped from them, prohibiting them from attending school.