Can we imagine a man being told that his only function in society was to be a father, a husband and homemaker? That at all times he must be toned and ‘beach body ready’, and that this body must be available for continued touching, commentary and objectification? That he must see how our media lust after him when he is younger, desperate for him to be ‘legal’ but once he passes the age of 25 he would pretty much disappear from view? While this might sound vaguely ridiculous, this is of course the mirror of mediated cultural assumptions that are made about women. These assumptions, about the roles that women should and should not play, are located in the ways in which, both historically and contemporarily, women are ‘disciplined’ into social expectations. We see women's bodies being disciplined by our mainstream media as to what a woman is supposed to look like (young, thin, white and blonde) and what role she is supposed to play in public life (home maker, and if she tries to ‘have it all’ it will inevitably go wrong, she will only find happiness in a good man) and we see the cultural disciplining of women in micro, everyday cultural norms. If we want to understand how and why there has been a sense of entitlement from the men exposed by the #MeToo phenomenon, then it is useful to explore the context in which we construct and regulate women in our media, public and cultural spaces.

The disciplining of women is not only confined to their bodies and expectations of the roles that they should play within society, but their views and contributions have been silenced through history (as noted in the previous chapter). The objective value of worth, contained in the meritocracy myth further reinforces the way in which our gendered roles are experienced and understood. The value that we afford women's voices and worth is also reinforced through the ways in which we socialize, discipline and regulate women. These processes are often so subtle, indeed, seen as ‘normal’ hegemonic common sense, that we do not even notice that they are happening. They impact upon women's and men's perceptions of the world.