Mirror, Mirror – Who Is that Woman on TV?Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Communications/Media Studies, Media Archive, Social Science on 2013-11-04 05:03Z by Steven |
Mirror, Mirror – Who Is that Woman on TV?
Inter Press Service News Agency
2013-10-21
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 21 2013 (IPS) – Carla Vilas Boas is of mixed-race descent – African, European and indigenous – like a majority of the population of Brazil. But she spends hours straightening her hair, trying to look more like the blond, blue-eyed women she sees in the mirror of television.
The 32-year-old domestic worker acknowledges that Brazil’s popular telenovelas have started to include characters like her – people from the country’s favelas or shantytowns, who work long workdays for low wages.
But among the actors and the models shown in ads, “there are only a few darker-skinned people among all the blue-eyed blonds. And you wonder: if I buy that shampoo and go to the hairdresser, can I look like that?” she remarked to IPS.
But her hair “never looks that way,” even with the new shampoo or the visit to the hairstylist, and Vilas Boas said that makes her feel “really bad.”
More than half of the women in this country of 200 million people – where over 50 percent of the population identified themselves as black or “mulatto” in the last census – do not identify with the images they see on TV.
Experts say that because of the prejudices reflected in the choice of actors and models, advertisers potentially lose a large segment of consumers…
Read the entire article here.