德國女市長拍攝性感照片招致黨內不滿

Occasionally I like to get in touch with my Chinese side. I consider it a gift to be so fluent in both languages. It would be a waste to abandon any one of them. The title of my post, in English, means 'Germany’s Female Mayor's Posing for Sexy Photo Shoot Raises Complaints within the Party.' from news coverage like this, I've noticed the gender ideology embedded in the media, particularly mainstream news (Gabriele Pauli).

A female mayor in Germany, named Gabriele Pauli, recently showed her face in a German fashion magazine. Politicians of her party have made a huge deal out of such exposure and been massively filing complaints. The Chinese journalist specifically relates the female mayor to the word "trouble" in the very first sentence of the news piece. Apparently, the politicians, whom I would assume to be mostly male, think likewise, believing that Pauli should have never accepted such invitation from the fashion magazine. While many Germany politicians deem Pauli's behaviour inappropriate, Pauli was in fact very pleased when she was given the opportunity to pose as a model. Other politicians criticize that Pauli appeared to be "too sexy" in the magazine with those leather black gloves and stylish hairstyle with heavy, short bangs in front. However, Pauli disagrees and claims the photo-shoot to be purely a piece of art work.

I have always been highly critical of how women are portrayed in news media discourses. This news piece about Pauli is not the first news story that reveals and reinforces sexist judgments about women and their subordinate status within a male-dominated society. If the mayor who posed for Park Avenue fashion magazine had been male, the story would have been framed in a completely different way. There would have been fewer sexual implications drawn to his exposure in a mass consumer, or "low-art", magazine. References to inappropriateness would not have been made. Instead, there would have been positive remarks on the male mayor. He would have still been labelled as sexy except without the negative connotations. Nevertheless, today we have a 49-year-old female mayor, who is still able to hold on to the tail of her youth; yet somehow the news manages to find a means of expression to attack her, construct her as sexually available, and frame the story as if she were eager to expose her sexuality, when in fact, she shows very little of skin or flesh in the magazine.

Stuart Allan writes in his book "News Culture" that many journalists deploy such gender stereotypes just for a bit of fun, but they are often unaware that they are contributing to the ideological reproduction of patriarchal social relations. Many feminist critics have been making an effort to initiate and promote a conceptual shift of how women are being portrayed in news discourse. News framing like this piece about Pauli raises issues of representation in terms of the hegemonic gendering of news as a masculinized form of discourse.