My 12-and-a-half-year-old pre-teen son frequently stumps me with his questions. Our most recent debate revolves around male supremacy.
As a mother to a boy, I've actively tried to steer him clear of misogynistic ideas, so hearing him champion men utterly floors me.
So, when I pressed him on why he felt this way, his answer was clear. Every movie, TV show, or piece of content features male heroes as central characters, with women merely orbiting them. Even in sports, men dominate.
"What about women's football and cricket?" I countered.
My son just shrugged. "Nobody watches those," he said.
Why is it that, despite being raised by an aware, working mother, he's internalising this discriminatory narrative?
Before we dive into the "why", it's crucial to understand what a narrative actually is.
Simply put, a narrative is how a story is told, weaving together events, characters, and ideas.
Strategically, however, narratives are powerful tools used to sway public opinion and shape beliefs about how the world works. They are fundamental to power structures, serving as the most potent weapon for dominant groups to maintain their influence. And a major player in narrative construction is the mass media.
2.
According to Stuart Hall's theory of representation, meaning isn't an inherent quality of something. Instead, it's constructed within a social context through language, images, or symbols.
From this perspective, mass media don't just passively reflect reality.
The narratives they make often represent the dominant ideology, which eventually shapes the general people's viewpoints and gives rise to stereotypes.
For a long time, our society harboured the belief that women often can't do what men do.
But this isn't a simple process of idea formation. Hall explains that message transmission and reception occur through encoding and decoding.
Encoding is the act of producing the message, essentially a system of symbolic meaning. The sender must understand the receiver's worldview to create this meaning.
Yet, how a message is encoded can also depend heavily on its intended purpose.
Decoding, on the other hand, is how the message receiver interprets and understands it. The receiver attempts to assign their own meaning to the message's symbols, effectively reconstructing the original message with new meaning. Effective communication happens only when the message is received as intended and comprehended.
However, the receiver can also interpret the message in an entirely different way. According to Hall, this can lead to misunderstanding between the two parties.
3.
Let's turn to a hot topic: central student union elections at the universities.
From newspapers to TV channels, online portals to social media, we're seeing a constant stream of news, interviews, and opinions from the contestants.
Just last week, I watched a talk show on a leading national digital media platform featuring five general secretary candidates for the DUCSU (Dhaka University Central Students' Union).
Five men, representing the country's top university, are on the lush green campus of Dhaka University. The host, I might add, was also male. We won't speculate right now on what message the media outlet was trying to encode, but my son relies heavily on digital platforms for his understanding of the world.
What message will he get from this content? How will he decode it? Will he not simply accept the absence of women as normal? Will he not conclude that men are the dominant, powerful figures?
4.
"What is feminism?" In 1916, American writer and humanitarian Charlotte Perkins Gilman answered this by saying, "Feminism is the social awakening of the women of all the world. It is that great movement which is changing the centre of gravity in human life..... It is the movement for among other goals women's full economic independence Anti-feminists speak in their frantic fear of freedom for women."
She wrote of essential differences between women and men, including in motherhood and fatherhood, and that "feminists are women, plus: plus full human endowment and activity."
Yet, even after the fourth wave of feminism, women continue to be bound by the dominant, male-constructed narratives of this world.
This reality is now reflected in the coverage of the country's student elections. Despite constant calls for equality and non-discrimination, the tendency to portray women in a merely ornamental role is consistently evident.
In this context, actively building a counter-narrative of women's participation is crucial to challenge this long-standing narrative. But we're simply not seeing it.
5.
A review of the constitutions of the four universities' student parliaments reveals that only Jahangirnagar University Central Student Union (JUCSU) has separate positions reserved for women.
The Dhaka University Central Students' Union (DUCSU) does not have specific positions for female students, nor does it offer separate opportunities for them to contest.
Chittagong University Central Student Union and Rajshahi University Central Student Union (RUCSU) do have "women's affairs secretary" positions.
JUCSU, however, is the unique case, offering women a chance to contest one of the top three posts, the AGS (Assistant General Secretary) position. It has separate male and female AGSs.
There are also opportunities for separate competition between male and female students in a few other roles.
Yet, an analysis of candidate lists for student union elections to date shows a small number of female candidates, particularly for senior positions.
Regrettably, female university students themselves aren't very vocal about this issue; perhaps many aren't even aware of it.
But surely, civil society, along with the mass media, has a role to play here.
All things considered, the habit of viewing women in advanced or leadership roles as exceptions rather than the norm has kept the narrative of male supremacy firmly intact.
Isn't it time for a change in how the mass media encodes its messages to create a counter-narrative to this pervasive discrimination? Time, after all, waits for no one.
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