Feminism and the media

I’ll keep this entry short and sweet because I kept going on and on in the last one. I feel like I need to talk about the media’s involvement with the feminist movement. We all know that the media is where most people get their information and they base their opinions on it. It is the media who ultimately decides what the people are going to agree or disagree with. For the feminist movement the media was divided on which side to take up; the feminist side or the people who were against it.

Back then only women who were acting out or breaking the traditional norms of femininity would be in the news. So as you can imagine the feminist movement would have been in the news quite a bit. The United States had 393 articles on the feminist movement. In a twist I didn’t see coming most of these articles were supporting the feminist movement or at least colouring it in a positive light. Some of these articles had called the movement effective, unified, liberating and even necessary for women. I wasn’t expecting the media to side more so with the movement, I was thinking more of these man run media outlets would be completely against the movement! It’s awesome to know, though, that the women who were part of the movement had enough support backing them up and that their cause wasn’t going unnoticed.

What I didn’t find shocking would be the fact that some of the media outlets were completely against the movement. These media outlets would call the women deviants and try to de-legitimize the movement in any way possible. The women were branded as “lebians, man-haters, bra-burners and aggressive women.” All of these traits go against the “middle- class notions of femininity”. The words were harsh and unrelenting because they were trying to send a message to the movement. These outlets didn’t want the movement to succeed and they held the old-fashioned views of women. Some of them even labelled the movement as “ineffective” or “unsupported” and that it was dying down or even dead, even though this wasn’t the case. These people were just insecure about the modernization of women and they didn’t want to wake up to reality.

So as you can tell the media both supported and opposed the feminist movement. Thankfully most agreed with the movement and applauded the work of the women who wanted to better their lives! I feel the need to thank the media for this because if the movement didn’t have so much public support who knows where I would be today. I might not have had this much freedom over my life if it wasn’t for the movement and the support of the media. So thank you!

Ken Kesey and feminism

So I decided to do the feminist movement in conjunction with “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. The novel is littered with hidden feminist movement hatred. I know it’s quite apparent that Ken Kesey was trying to get a message across about how much he disliked the movement; but I have no clue how far that hatred ran. While doing my research I found a really good academic journal about Ken Kesey and the novel and I was surprised at the information it gave me about him.

The novel pretty much argues that masculinity can’t deal with femininity, or in simpler terms , men can’t be men when women are in power. This isn’t surprising because anyone who reads the book can figure this out. What surprised me was that Kesey had struggled with feminism during his entire life; not just during the movement. Something must have happened to him as a child to distrust women as much as he did. The journal also goes on to explain how Kesey was disturbed when a feminist, Robin Morgan, held a lecture that ridiculed his work and argued that “to be a real Ken Kesey-type man, one should slap dumb women.”. She does have a point, and the character Randle P. McMurphy showcases this perfectly within the novel. I’ll talk more about the characters in a bit, but I would like to keep talking about Kesey for a tad bit longer. Kesey, and many other men, all shared the fear that if women graduated to more powerful positions and gained power, they would become emasculated. He incorporated this into the novel by adding nurse Ratched, electroshock therapy, lobotomy, and the asylum ward as the setting. Kesey must have thought long and hard as to how he was going to showcase his attitudes towards the feminist movement without stating it bluntly. I will applaud him for how he did this because it probably wasn’t easy. But being a woman, I can’t help but feel a bit of anger towards Kesey because of the female characters in the book and how he portrays the entire gender. He makes it look as though women will either over power the men and completely take away all of their masculine freedom, or that they are complete ditsy and easy to get.



There are two types of women with the novel as I stated above; either they are in power and vicious or they are easy and dumb. Nurse Ratched is symbolic of the feminists and what they are trying to do (in the eyes of Kesey of course). She is the mental castrator of the men and she represses her feminine sexuality which is symbolic of the women fighting for their rights. They would rather rebel against the social norm of women and be in a position of power instead of just being labeled as a woman. She also emasculates the men by chastising them and saying “ aren’t you ashamed” which mentally belittles them. Or she can be more severe and give them electroshock therapy or a lobotomy. Unlike nurse Ratched, Candy is a prostitute in the novel. She represents the way men would like the women to be; easy and non- argumentative. She is there to just occupy the men and have a good time. These two types of woman are juxtaposed so that Kesey can showcase how he feels about women. He doesn’t like if they are in control (he feels emasculated ), but if they are for his pleasure and he is smarter than them, he is perfectly okay with them. He doesn’t feel threatened by women who hold up to the societal demands of women back then. I want to believe that Randle P. McMurphy is a character that Kesey molded as a representation of himself.

Randle P. McMurphy (who I shall call R.P.M from now on) is a fictionalized Kesey. His views on women are the same as Kesey’s and he is the stereotypical macho man. He hates nurse Ratched with a passion, yet he likes the prostitutes. As I started above both types of women are symbolic of the feminist movement and the social norm. Again R.P.M upholds the same views as Kesey. When R.P.M has the lobotomy is a “succinct and powerful metaphor for Kesey’s vision of the masculine condition”. Kesey likens getting a lobotomy to losing masculinity to women who are in power. R.P.M ends up dying at the end of the book after is lobotomy. Having the book end so ambiguously it shows us that Kesey doesn’t feel that there will be a resolution to the feminist movement.


Ken Kesey was afraid of the modernizing of femininity; he was one of many men who saw this new movement as a threat to his way of life. He certainly voiced his opinion within the novel and his message came across loud and clear. Just because I disagree with his way of thinking doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the novel, I did. I just feel as though he was so misguided and chauvinistic, not all women in power turn out to be the mental castrator he has made them out to be. We are all entitled to our opinions and I respect his. I would still recommend this book to everyone because it is such a good read!

"The Bell Jar"

I want to talk about the dark side of the novel for a little bit. The novel has dark periods throughout when we wonder what is going through Esther’s head. One of the main things I would like to talk about would be how Esther constantly thinks if ways to commit suicide. I know it’s not a normal topic of conversation, But I feel it is necessary to talk about because it is so prevalent within the novel.

She thinks of committing suicide like it was a choice of picking between wearing shoes or heels. It doesn’t faze her at all which, while reading, makes you wonder what is going on in her head. At first she tried to slit her wrists in a bath while her mother is gone to work. She tried this way because an old Roman philosopher had said that’s the way he would want to commit suicide. She obviously didn’t go through with it because if she had the book would have ended there. She doesn’t because the skin of her wrists “looked so white and defenseless”. If you ask me, she likes the idea of committing suicide because she wants to escape, but when it comes to the actual deed she can’t imagine killing herself. She also goes on to try and drown herself but each time she tried to dive down she “popped up like a cork”. She said she knew when she was “beaten” but again, I think she was afraid. Then she tried to hang herself by putting her mother’s silk bathroom cord around her neck and pulling. Yet again, she didn’t go through it but this time she blamed her body because it “had all sorts of little tricks” that made her let go of the cord. She had one other final attempt that almost worked if her mother hadn’t found her. She decided to overdose on the pills that her mom would normally give her each night. She took them all and crawled into a small space in her basement and laid there. After a while it starts to get annoying to read about all of her attempts because we know she isn’t going to go through with it.

To me, I feel as though she really wants attention and trying to commit suicide seems like a quick attention seeking endeavor. Others might disagree with me, but I was thinking it throughout the whole novel. I know she is mentally ill and all, but to me she just kept making up excuses as to why she didn’t sacrifice her life. Deep down she knew she didn’t want to die she just wanted to escape and she picked the most deadly route. I believe that it was her subconscious preventing herself from doing it and not her body like she says. Don’t get me wrong either, I truly feel bad for Esther and everything she is going through, mental illness isn’t a minor issue. I also feel as though this was how Sylvia Plath felt before she committed suicide herself. This novel reads like her life and these were probably her thoughts and feelings on the subject of suicide. Esther trying to find a way to commit suicide could have been Sylvia trying to figure out what she was going to do.

Again, I know this is a morbid subject that I have discussed in this entry. I would like to end it off by saying that mental illness can strike anyone and suicide will most likely feel like the best route in escaping everything. This is clear in Esther’s suicide attempts and Sylvia Plath’s actual suicide.

"The Bell Jar"

The “Bell Jar” was another novel I enjoyed reading during this semester. Esther Greenwood is definitely a memorable character who gets captured in the throes of depression. She also has issues with her identity which are causing her grief. With the help of some foils we are able to see exactly what she doesn’t want to be, but figuring out who she wants to be becomes difficult.

Dodo represents everything that Esther is trying to be free from. Dodo is the typical religious woman who lives in the suburbs. She has a large family and is a stay at home mom and this is exactly what Esther is completely against. She doesn’t want to be controlled by a husband or children; she wants to be able to be free and do as she pleases. At one point Esther actually gets enraged by Dodo for the simple fact that she is walking her children by Esther’s house. I would like to think she got angry because Esther is still confused at what she wants, whereas Dodo isn’t and she is flaunting her life choice for all to see. So it is easy to understand why Dodo was added as a character; she is a foil for Esther in the sense that Dodo represents everything Esther doesn’t care for. It also shows us that she still doesn’t know where she fits in. Another foil for Esther would be Doreen.

Doreen is the rebellious city girl who Esther attaches to right away. Doreen is different from other people Esther knows. She is opinionated, independent, rash, and sexy (according to Esther), unlike Esther herself who is “gawky” and “morbid”. Esther wants to be able to let loose like Doreen and live life the way she wants, instead of the way that society wants her to. It’s as if Esther wants Doreen to teach her how to be like her, or that Esther thinks Doreen’s personality will rub off on her. Thankfully Esther comes to her sense though and decides she doesn’t want to be like Doreen at all. If she became to be like Doreen I feel that her depression would have been worse and it probably would have included substantial alcohol abuse. Instead, Esther wanted to be like Jay Cee.



Jay Cee is the editor of the “Ladies’ Day” magazine that Esther is interning for. Jay Cee is the professional woman who Esther would like to become. She is in a position of power and authority, which wasn’t the social norm back then. She also shows Esther that you don’t have to look good to be able to get ahead in life. Jay Cee “had brains, so her plug-ugly looks didn’t seem to matter”. This all made Esther feel like she could succeed with what she wants to do.

I could keep going and explaining all the foils for Esther and what they say about her, but you’d probably get bored sooner or later. Also there are so many characters that act as foils for this one confused young woman and so little time to discuss them properly. I’ll end this off by saying that Esther never really figured out who she was going to be, due to the ambiguity of the end we can only hope that she was released from the asylum and started off fresh!