The Daily Mail published more than 750 headlines in Nov 2019 that explicitly focused on the appearance of women’s bodies.
The fixation on women’s bodies and the presentation of them to the public as objects to gazed, judged or desired perpetuate outdated notions of a woman’s worth being primarily associated with her appearance.
Headlines by the Daily Mail fuel a culture that teach women to value themselves and each other by how they look. They fuel a culture that conditions young girls to believe that the pursuit of the ideal body is an endeavor worth obsessing over — after all, people are watching, commenting, sharing.
And some are. The publication is for-profit — these headlines fulfill a public demand. Words like ‘cleavage’, ‘busty’, and ‘racy’ get clicks. Celebrities in bikinis get clicks. Tabloids imply that their fame licenses our objectification of them. But there exists no license for dehumanizing anyone and we must stop clicking.
*The number 750 includes only headlines (body content not taken into consideration)
*Certain headlines which contain relevant keyword have been excluded based on context e.g. ‘Naked man arrested,’ or ‘[Celebrity] cuts a casual figure in denim.’
*Headlines extracted with GoogleNewsAPI
