Framing Feminism

My thesis is as follows: Although U.S. and French media differ due to ideologies of objectivity, which is represented by more concrete facts in shorter pieces by The New York Times and in more opinionated, exposition-style pieces in Le Monde, they have similarities in framing of news stories. Framing from a feminist perspective illustrates that the goals and agency frames are used the most in both countries’ stories, but there is a lack of a frame which addresses non-feminism, or masculinity, and men in men-centered stories covering both of these women’s movements.

The French stories tended to focus more on the power struggle between man and woman, boss and employee. Aside from larger word counts, these stories also had more editorial freedom. One story describing the passion of men, la pulsionnalité, contained blatant opinion and felt more like a philosophical work than a news story.

The effects of #BalanceTonPorc were emphasized, rather than the actual movement itself. And although it had been billed as France’s version of the #MeToo Movement, stories from Le Monde containing #MeToo were much more numerous than ones searched under #BalanceTonPorc. And perhaps the success of the movement in France was dulled by those claiming their jokes were a form of seduction, not sexual harassment.  

In comparison, stories from The New York Times took more of a formulaic approach which most of the time centered the accusers in its coverage of #MeToo. Often it started out with a famous name being dropped, whether victim or perpetrator, and then firsthand accounts from the victims themselves, which was uncommon in Le Monde.

The two most popular frames in both publications, agency and goals, align with the outcome of the study done by Bronstein (2005) which looked at the media’s representation of third wave feminism. When framing feminism in the most recent international movements of women exposing their sexual predators, it would appear to be that most women come forward with the intention of generating change in their industry.

However, both publications would sometimes choose to center men in their stories. The gray zones of sexual harassment were explored among a group of young men sitting around a café table in France, just as they were in white collar workplaces around the U.S. This type of story would feature men questioning whether they had ever gone too far with a joke, or accidentally sexually harassed someone at the “boozy Christmas work party.”

And then both publications also had at least one story in which the very opposite end of the spectrum was illuminated. Le Monde had a story covering a French masculinist group through a Q&A with an anthropologist who studied them. The New York Times followed a psychologist who studied men with sexually violent behaviors, rapists, and tried to figure out their motives.

To deal with this male-centric, anti-feminism coverage which does not fall under any of the six frames of feminism, I propose a new frame which responds to the complexity of these stories which center both the accusers and accused within an international social movement which can also be classified as a feminist one. A Meninist frame, defined as focusing on the motives and stories of men who don’t exactly subscribe to feminist framing, would better solve the issue of not knowing where to group these other subjects in a story.  

Bronstein (2005) invented a new frame herself when she was researching third wave feminism, dubbed Feminism Lite, for “friendly and approachable feminism.” Similarly, my creation of the Meninist frame would be for, quite simply, abrupt toxic masculinism.