I don't find it very strange that fewer women reads newspapers today, when the frames for many newspapers (tabloids in particular) are what they are. I started making this visualization of a tabloid newspaper in a moment where I was sick of stress, and dead-tired of the debate in Norwegian media on womens sick leave. I had to avoid news, in order to keep as sane as possible, during a challenging time of my life. I was so provoked by the condecending gendered content, that avoiding was better. I found the gendering of the debate on womens sick-leave as patronizing, and always accepting the man as the standard women were measured up against. So in this visualization I tried to shape an expression of women being what men are measured up against. E.g. mens choices of going to the doctor too late, and not getting help for e.g stress or depressions. Or in other fields; sports, ideals of life, at work, in debates, on society, on bodies, relationships, health and home. This visualization is not what I wished was the standard – quite the contrary, I wished we managed to balance all these various perspectives (this visualization only shows one perspective) in a better way than we do today. I mean to criticize the rhetorics of gender in todays newspapers. And I wish to lift up the design and presentation of news as a means of power, similarily with journalism itself. Various combination of images and words can imply values (such as examples here showing patronizing and condecending attitudes). But sometimes we don't even notice them, because we're used to it.
I try to show that what we ridicule, what we idealize, what we patronize about through images and words - all comes from a world view. How we seek to engage and provoke people, what we select as important news, are part of a world view. Whereas each article may be different depending on who wrote it, this presented combination of articles also implies something about who governs the space.
There is probably too little politics in the visualization, I should have added some environmental political stuff, as women tend to rule that area. Or I could have patronized some business political suggestions or something as irrelevant (though I don't mean that…). But I also want to add that the lack of something also says a lot about what one group regards as important and not. Notice the lack of sexualized female bodies. In this scenario of a society, the man is the one that needs to adjust to women – he is there to please her (very heteronormative, though).
