media madness

So...I'm taking this class at Cascadia (Gender Inc.: The Construction of Sex and Gender in a Media Rich Society) and today we watched this video about the media's portrayal of women. I've never really stopped and taken the time to deconstruct the images that we're being bombarded with. Advertising is so ubiquitous that you don't even realize it's there and that it's having an affect on you, whether you like it or not. Anywho, so we were talking about how all media tells a story and advertising doesn't just tell you a story about a pair of jeans or men's cologne, but what it really tells us is a story about ourselves. And we talked about all the messages that the media is sending about women and how it's created this norm dominated by women that comprise something like 5% of the female population. It just made me feel helpless because there isn't anything I can do about how my gender is portrayed. I dunno, I'm kind of going on a rant. But I think the thing I was really struck by was when we started discussing objectification of men, which isn't nearly as bad. But we were focusing on objectifying men as $$ basicallly and how it puts on the pressure of being financially stable. Then I realized, that even with this negative consequence for guys, women were still getting the short end of the stick because not only did it make men seem only useful for their money, it made women seem like they couldn't be stable with some rich man. I dunno. What to do, right?