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Kristen Coyne

            Throughout the 1970’s and 80’s, there was a lot of controversy about inequality between men and women, especially in the music industry. This controversy reached a whole new level in 1981 when a new platform for musicians to share their music with the public was launched.  It was called MTV and it changed the way the music industry was forever. It stood for Music Television, and when it first came out it was a lot different than it is today. It was not reality shows, but rather music videos. Prior to the debut of MTV, music videos were just recordings of live performances, but now with MTV, artists began making videos to tell the story of their song, and it often made an unpopular artist into a megastar. It was also had a positive impact on gender roles. Women such as Annie Lenox were with her flattop hairstyle and Annie Lenox with her suit and buzz hair cut, and men such as Prince and Adam Ant with their eyeliner and ruffled shirts were pushing the gender role boundaries by adopting traits typically considered of the opposite sex. This was a positive step toward gender equality because popular icons of this time were beginning to show that acting that there was no style that could not be worn by both sexes. Although MTV was an improvement from the way women were portrayed in the previous years, it still shifted into the tactics of showing women as sexual objects. “As the years past, MTV’s women increasingly became more notable for their roles as backup dancers and sex ornaments.” (Zeisler 85) Even though there was still the underlying stereotype of women being portrayed as sexual objects, there still remained powerful women on MTV who advocated for feminism and gender equality. As Zeisler mentions in Feminism and Pop Culture, “In the 1980’s and ‘90’s-decades which, for feminism, were filled with mixed cultural messages and a one-step-forward-two-steps-back sense of progress.” (Zeisler 87) Although there was a lot more progress toward gender equality then there was in the past, there was and still is a lot of work that needs to be done for us to be treated as equal.