Women and the Media: BFF's or Fiesty Foes?

When I was a kid, I wanted to be that girl on the cover of Cosmo, big tits falling out of a low top, glossy lips pouting seductively. The I had my first sip of the femitini- a cocktail of feminism. One dash of education and a shot of empowerment later, I want to be that women fighting for a more realistic and representative portrayal of women in the media. Who am I trying to kid? I hate cocktails, I much prefer an ice-cold zamalek, straight out of the bottle, but you never see a woman in Cosmo drinking beer, neither do the gals on Sex and the City (the supposedly sexually liberated and ultra-empowered gals decked out in their Gucci who-haa and Dolce what-what). The media is STILL objectifying woman, stereotyping them and reinforcing certain expectations of what a woman should be. Yes, certainly, the media does cover all 'herstories', ranging from the lesbian who made it in a heterosexual man's world, to the rape victim who forgave her attacker, but are these women's stories really being told how they want them to be told? Is the media really a platform for women to express their stories in the forms they wish to, or is the media merely taking an individual, with her unique story and applying it to their ratings-increasing mould? That feel-good, "women-have-finally-made-it, yay-for-the-vagina-kind-of-story", you all know what I am talking about. I kind of think that maybe the media is engaging in a form of facade-feminism, portraying just enough stories in just the right manner in order to pacify those who would otherwise speak out. Really the media is just another tool of patriarchy, objectifying women,telling us how we SHOULD look, how we SHOULD act, how we SHOULD be. One glance at a newsstand tells me just how inferior I am with regards to media's perfect woman. I'm a white girl with Ghetto-booty, not in the awesome J-lo sense of Ghetto-booty, but in the I-have-a-juicy ass kind of way. This means that I'm never gonna be on the cover on Cosmo, despite my many achievements, the media is never gonna show me as a Wonder Woman. Media could be a platform for Woman to stand on and shout "hey look at me! I'm freaking awesome!" or even "You bastards raped me, but I'm still alive and I'm gonna tell everyone EXACTLY what happened", but instead it is merely a white man, looking down at Woman and saying "You aren't what you should be". The double standards of the media become all too apparent when one publication reports a story on how a woman's husband beat her up ("thanks magazine for telling herstory") and then filling the rest of the pages with images reinforcing exactly how and why we do not conform to the standards of woman. The media have stolen our identity, and also our right to have our own unique, identity. Bombarded with Billboards of the Wonder Woman (Did I explain my concept of the Wonder Woman? It goes something like this: "I wonder if ANYBODY actually looks like that!"), the media is constantly violating our sense of self. Tell me something, how do you think the media would tell YOURSTORY