Hegemonic Gaze: Tyranny, Media Chauvinism and the Image of Women - Based on Chinese Mainstream Media's News Coverage of Ailing Gu's Winter Olympics Victory

. During the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing, Chinese freeskier Ailing Gu received much media attention. Past literature and journalistic practice on the media and sport suggest that sport has been an area of absolute male hegemony since ancient times and that the media is constructed around hegemonic male values that help to reinforce 'historical gender norms. This paper examines the construction of Ailing Gu's image of the 'other' in the media frameworks and discourses based on news stories about her in the official and commercial media. The study finds that the deconstruction of Ailing Gu's image as an athlete in the news coverage, which appears to reinforce the discourse of female athletes, still serves the ultimate goal of male domination and remains, in essence, a chauvinistic and hegemonic gaze.


Introduction
The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics has received widespread attention at home and abroad.As a rising sports star of domestic and international attention and the most famous athlete on social media during the Winter Olympics, Ailing Gu has become the focus of media coverage.By the end of the 2022 Winter Olympics, Ailing Gu's Weibo super talk had been read by more than 9 billion people and was widely discussed and followed by netizens.
At the same time, the media coverage agenda in the Chinese context has shaped the public's perception of traditional female athletes.However, is the media portrayal of Ailing Gu a different kind of male gaze?Is the political propaganda and image construction of patriotism still essentially subordinated to male domination?Based on this, this study will explore the news construction of Ailing Gu's image of women in the Winter Olympics in the Chinese media today in an attempt to expose the gender discursive construction behind the news texts.The new concept of "gender," which emerged in the 1960s, is a product of the same period as the second wave of feminism and has evolved in academic circles from a single term to a category of analysis used to explain the social constitution of femininity and to study the reasons for the maintenance of a male-dominated society and the ownership of power, gradually It became the new vocabulary of Western feminism.

Main categories Category Coding
In the 1970s, Ann Oakley drew a clear line between gender and sex [1].In the same period, the American scholar Tuchman made the first connection between the media and the image of women in his book Fireplace and Home: Images of Women in the Mass Media, in which he referred to the 'symbolic annihilation', where women are censured, trivialized or even ignored by the media in society and culture [2].Furthermore, nowhere is this 'symbolic annihilation' more prominent in society than in sport.Tracing back to the development of sport, it can be said that the development of the sport has been the process of the awakening of women's consciousness, a field that since its inception has been the domain of absolute male hegemony and has served to construct and reinforce a patriarchal society dominated by men.The role of the media in sports has been more to reinforce the absolute male hegemony, and the struggle for women's power in sports has been chiefly downplayed or even ignored by the media.For example, the Olympic Games, a symbol of equality, have only been used for men, and the father of the Olympic Games, Alexander Kubitan, fought for women's access to sport throughout his life, which has undoubtedly put up much resistance to women's equal rights in sport [3].
Later, the study of the role of the content of media texts in the image of women entered the academic perspective, and Rosalyn Gill mentioned in her book Media and Gender that different types of media have different effects on the construction of the image of women [4].However, in the Chinese context, sports journalism has always been predominantly male, portraying male athletes primarily as "brave, strong and full of blood," while female athletes are mostly portrayed as "soft, feminine and physically coordinated."At the same time, as female athletes compete in less competitive sports, the media's portrayal of women is also predominantly negative.
On the topic of the construction of women's social images in the Chinese media, Professor Liu Liqun mentions in his book A Tutorial in Media and Women's Studies that in the Chinese context, the translation and interpretation of gender theory are "tightly focused on the advocacy and protection of women's subjectivity, women's social and political rights [5]."Professor Liu Liqun argues that the Chinese media is concerned with women's subjectivity and discourse rights, is committed to balancing gender power between men and women, and has a positive role in promoting equality of gender and political rights.However, we are afraid we have to disagree with Professor Liu Liqun's utopian idea.We believe that the construction of women's image in the Chinese media is still in the service of patriarchal domination but only changes the way of communication and does not achieve gender equality in the media.Based on this, the author proposes a new concept of "media chauvinism" in this paper, arguing that today's media is still the absolute domain of male hegemony and that the focus on women only serves to consolidate men's domination of the discourse.In this paper, the author uses the example of "Ailing Gu," the female athlete representative of Chinese sports in 2022, as an example to support the view that male hegemony is still absolute in the media sphere and that the promotion of women serves the patriarchal society of male domination to a greater extent.

Agenda Setting
The concept of agenda setting dates back to the 1920s with Lippmann, who, in his book Public Opinion referred to the concept of a mimetic environment in which we all live in a virtual reality constructed for us by the media [6].His famous 'searchlight' metaphor, in which a light is shone on a dark wall, is akin to how the media present us with the idea that we can only look at the lighted area and assume that this is our actual reality.This concept is the theoretical basis of agenda-setting, which was introduced by McCombes and Shaw 1972, who argued that although the media cannot determine audience perceptions, they can influence them by adjusting the order and weight of stories [7].In 1997, McCombs and Shaw introduced a second concept of agenda setting, "attributive agenda setting," which suggests that the media can change audience perceptions through smear and other means [8].In the era of intelligent media, Guo Lei et al. proposed "online agenda setting," which suggests that online agenda setting can link audiences to different issues or attributes through a network of relationships, forming a social network of relationships on the Internet level.In this paper, the author will take agenda setting as the basis and introduce Entman's framework theory, i.e., from "defining the problem," "taking the pulse of the cause," "moral judgment," and "suggestions for countermeasures [9]."In this paper, we will analyze the media effects of the news coverage of Ailing Gu by different Chinese media and reveal the real purpose of media communication based on the four news frames of "defining the problem," "taking the pulse of the causes," "moral judgment" and "suggestions for countermeasures," in conjunction with the attributes of news agenda setting.This is an attempt to support the concept of "media chauvinism" proposed by the author.

Consistency of the code
Data were processed and analyzed using SPSS tools for the coding results.For the reliability test of this coding scale, this study was a coding exercise completed by three social science researchers with quantitative backgrounds after understanding the research context and coding requirements.The author calculated a Krippendorff coefficient of 0.7 based on this coded data, and the data largely converged between 0.8 and 1.0 with solid reliability.
Consistency was measured using Kendall W values for each of the five question outcomes, and the results were as follows.For Male gaze, p=0.003<0.05,original hypothesis denied, coding results are consistent.W=0.590, the degree of consistency is moderate.
For Objectified females in the report, p= 0.000010<0.05,original hypothesis rejected, coding results consistent.W= 0.786, the consistency is strong.
For Male discourse representations in reports, p= 0.001<0.05,original hypothesis rejected, coding results consistent.W= 0.648, the consistency is strong.
For Female discourse representation in the report, p=0.170>0.05Original hypothesis accepted, coding results not consistent.W=0.408, the consistency is moderate.
For Identity of Ailing Gu, p=0.135>0.05Accept original hypothesis; coding results not consistent.W=0.422 Moderate consistency.
The calculated measures revealed strong consistency in the coding results for questions 2 and 3 and moderate consistency for questions 1, 4, and 5.The three coders formed a relatively unified opinion after a discussion for those coding results that were not significantly different.In the judgment of the male gaze, in order to comply with the cardinality test for the expected number of times, the author firstly made a dichotomous judgment of "yes" and "no"; secondly, based on the specificity of the study, the sample type of male gaze was divided, and the original data was recorded(no=0, yes=1).The number of samples in which the male gaze was present (67) represented 62% of the total sample; the minimum expected count was 1<4.89<5, p=0.041<0.05,and the presence or absence of the male gaze differed significantly between media types (χ2=8.047,df=3).

Male gaze
According to the above table, we can see that the types of the male gaze are also different, with the highest percentage being "gaze fetish" (31.8%).However, the difference is that some commercial media are biased towards commodified fetishization, i.e., the "commodified" category that corresponds to the objectification of women.Objectification is a form of "dehumanization or depersonalization."According to the coding results, 58 samples stated that there was no objectification of women, and 50 samples stated that there was the objectification of women, with a similar proportion, close to 50%.Those who felt that "objectification of women exists" were concentrated in the category of "instrumentalization" (21.3%)."Instrumentalisation" is a representation intended to magnify specific physical characteristics of women and their functional utility, to separate them from the woman as a whole and treat them purely as tools, and to generalize or describe the image of women in this way.In the texts in question, this is often expressed in terms such as Ailing Gu's "good physical qualities" and "bridging the gap in female skiing in China."The different media types do not differ significantly in specific biological categories (χ2=4.328,p=0.224, df=3), with the official and commercial media showing a more uniform trend.However, according to the word frequency ratio, the commercial media focused more on the expression of "commercialization," such as "money-earning ability," "spokesperson," and "fashion.The emergence of labels and phrases such as "money-earning power," "spokesperson" and "fashion" amplifies the commercial value of Ailing Gu as a female athlete.In the table with the statistical distribution of discourse power, the representation of male discourse power did not change according to the media subject (p=0.269>0.05).Nearly 60% of the men in the sample were represented as having 'discursive power in the news stories about Ailing Gu.Similarly, due to the singularity of the event subject, there was no significant difference in the representation of women's discourse power across media subjects (p=0.196>0.05).However, the proportion of women's representation of 'discourse power' was as high as 60.2%, in contrast to men's 'discourse power' .By comparing the differences in coding frequencies and the chi-square test, the summary concludes that the differences between the categories of discursive expression power of men and women are significant (χ2=15.627,p=0.000<,0.05,df=2);.At the same time, the official and commercial media are more consistent in shaping gender discursive power, showing no significant differences or effects.

Expressions of discourse
Concerning the results of the analyzed data, we can understand that Ailing Gu, as a woman with a certain social status, has external empowerment of her in the media system.The male voice is not weakened in this process but somewhat shifted to a group 'power' output.According to Foucault's theory of power, 'discursive power' is a coercive norm that, by defining and operating on something, has the power to dominate it.Therefore, it can be concluded that even though Ailing Gu has a certain social status as the subject of the narrative, she is still suspected of having a 'weakened voice' in the official media, which is dominated by male voices.In contrast, the commercial media gave more balanced data on the representation of male and female discourse, and the commercial media was more inclined to open gender attitudes and equal rights practices of freedom of expression than the official media.The focus is on Ailing Gu as an individual, a young and talented 18-year-old athlete whom the media have given various names and labels.According to the data results, "champion" was the most frequent word, accounting for about 50% of the total.This phenomenon is presented in the official and commercial media, with no distinction between the sexes.The identity labels given to Ailing Gu are not only "champion" but also "Z-era youth," "athlete," and "genius." According to the results of the descriptive statistics, in addition to the specific identity representation given by the word champion in a specific context, Ailing Gu is mostly described as "someone else's child" or "talented girl," which is mostly reflected in the text as "talented The term "gifted" and "all-round learner" is used in the text.The two categories "Z-era youth" and "athlete" have a general connotation and are not specifically reflected in the text.The media portrayed both the public and private image of Ailing Gu -the 'world champion' in the public eye and the 'academic genius' in the private sphere -with the intention to create a representative female figure utilizing 'deification,' implicitly using her as a benchmark or yardstick against which to compare or measure the women of the new era.

Gender bias entrenched in the world of sports media
The intense nature of sport and the pursuit of power and speed make the sport seem to be a natural no-go area for women.In all types of media, women are often "silent" or "voiceless" due to the absence of media.Men have long dominated sports, and the imbalance between the sexes is particularly pronounced.As the number of female athletes and their achievements have increased rapidly, the number of women in the media has increased, and their perspectives have become more diverse, but the gender bias in sports media coverage has not disappeared.
In the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, Chinese female athletes, represented by Gu Ailing, gained the attention of the media in China with their outstanding achievements.Through a multidimensional reading of the selected sample of news reports, we found that both official and commercial media, in the articles focusing on Gu Ailing, repeatedly emphasized her status as a "female athlete" and described her around the more distinctive aspects of femininity, such as physical characteristics and dressing.As one of the most talked about athletes at the Games, Gu Ailing was portrayed in the media as much more than a female athlete on the field.In addition to her achievements and recaps of the games, the coverage focuses more on her off the field, with more attention given to her family, education, and business value than to her contribution to the sport.
As a male-dominated society does not automatically change its gender power structure, women have to change their position in sport by challenging and changing the male domination, as in the case of Gu Ailing.Some media coverage has focused on Gu Ailing's behavioral displays of female empowerment, such as the deliberate display of bangs on her forehead during games and interviews about Gu Ailing's attitude towards women in sport.However, this seeming emphasis on the representation of 'her power' in sport is, in fact, further entrenchment of the structural characteristics of the male-dominated and femaledominated field, masking the longstanding passive subjugation of women with the struggles of the female athletes themselves, and is an implicit reflection of the entrenchment of gender bias in the world of sports media.

The male gaze in the confines of the traditional gender order
Influenced by the traditional "male superiority over women" gender order, Chinese men have long been in a repressive position, holding the power of social discourse and perpetuating the "gaze" on female groups as a manifestation of their gender power.The term "gaze" was first coined by film critic Laura Mulvey in her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," where it refers to the core ideas of feminist theory and the "male gaze."The "gaze" in this context refers to the central idea of feminist theory and the "male gaze [10]."The"gaze" is a way of seeing with a will to power, concealing a dichotomy between the subject and the other.In the male gaze, men often act as the viewer and women as the watched, achieving self-actualization in the male act of watching.
In the case of the Winter Olympics, a major sporting event, the media coverage of Gu Ailing is a concrete manifestation of the male gaze's desire to probe and control female athletes and even objectify their bodies.
According to the author's analysis, in the selected sample of news reports, the male gaze tendency was present in both official and commercial media, with the highest percentage of gaze fetish among the coding types of viewing fetish, gaze fetish, and worship fetish.The texts were more likely to direct readers to Ailing Gu's outstanding appearance, surging business value, and mythical growth story than to her sporting achievements, which perfectly matched men's expectations and imagination of the perfect woman.
Under the influence of the traditional gender order, the construction of women's image in news reports is mainly to highlight male power, satisfy the desire of the male gaze and weaken women's independence and contribution.In the coverage of Gu Ailing, various media outlets have not failed to portray her abilities positively.However, they have inevitably and intentionally led to the exploration of the reasons for Gu Ailing's achievements in various fields such as sports, academics, and business, specifically the exploration of her father's identity and family background, as well as her appearance, figure, and dress.This reflects that the media in China has fallen into the habit of expressing the male gaze discourse under the long-term confinement of the traditional gender order.

Objectified female symbols in a consumer society
In the media, women's many characteristics are easily the object of media communication and are seen as symbols to be consumed.In today's consumer society, women are often 'labeled' by the media.As in the previous analysis of the 'male gaze, the degree of attractiveness of women is closely linked to what men 'see,' and the degree of attractiveness to men becomes an essential measure of the value of women.For example, female celebrities and anchorwomen are often labeled as "soft porn" in current media coverage, and such stereotypes and social perceptions "are bound to affect the construction of serious social events in the media [11]." The emergence of Gu Ailing as a confident, healthy, independent, successful woman seemed to be a break with the conventional image of women and prompted collective praise in the domestic media.Some scholars have pointed out that symbolic capital as a relational concept, a value recognized and identified by social groups, can give women a certain legitimacy in sports journalism and help them be recognized more quickly [12].More symbolic capital and a surge of attention have made more women fully 'visible' in sport and able to reap the benefits beyond sporting awards.
However, behind this seeming acknowledgment of women's power is an orgiastic consumption of the rich symbolism of women in Gu Ailing by the media, especially in the commercial media.According to the author's analysis of the texts on Gu Ailing in both the official and commercial media in China, the commercial media show a more pronounced tendency toward commodification and fetishization than the official media, which places more emphasis on seriousness.In today's traffic and profit-driven media environment, the media exploit women's special symbols and use them as capital for consumption in order to increase attention and indirect income and Gu Ailing, who has become the most popular after the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, has allowed the media to do so.

Unbalanced discourse under media chauvinism
Some researchers have examined the three prominent roles of discourse, one of which is that "discourse is a vehicle for structural power [13]."Discourse and its power are not just ordinary linguistic expressions but deep sociopolitical phenomena with cultural and ideological underpinnings in constant flux.It is thus clear that discourse and power are closely linked, and that discourse is, in fact, the externalization of power, dominated and controlled by it.In the media field, the power-controlled reporting discourse is a concrete manifestation of media chauvinism.
From the author's analysis of Gu Ailing's reports, it can be seen that at the level of discursive power, the proportion of men's discursive power in official media reports is close to 50%, which is a reflection of men's long-term dominance in discursive power.In the news reports focusing on Gu Ailing, the greater power of women's discourse is, in fact, due to the social status of Gu Ailing as the subject of the narrative, while more women are often caught in the dilemma of losing their voices in the news reports, losing more benefits than men in the disparate power relations between the sexes.
In the case of Gu Ailing's report, men still dominate the channels of expression, and the official media is still suspected of undermining women's voices.The media still serves the patriarchal domination of China's media to construct the image of women, and the media still focuses on the absolute hegemony of men.The discussion of Gu Ailing's nationality and other content repeatedly emphasizes her identity as a Chinese athlete, which is subordinated to the ideological and political position held by the media.Unlike the ideologically charged official media, the commercial media have achieved a relatively balanced representation of gender discourse, with no significant difference in the proportion of power and rights of men and women.This shows that the Chinese commercial media have shown more openness to gender inclusiveness than the official media in their coverage of Gu Ailing, a practice of pursuing gender discourse equality in media chauvinism.

The content of the communication is based on the concept of gender equality
In the development of women's sports, female athletes have always strived for the right to speak for themselves.Gender differences and the logic of discrimination based on nature should be discarded, and the media should pay more attention to gender issues in sports, giving more voice to female athletes and advocating for them to fight for their rights more positively.At the same time, the media should be more sensitive to the gender issues that already exist in sports reporting, strengthen gender awareness in media presentation, and, in addition to the general principle of "journalistic professionalism," be sensitive to gender issues in reporting, adopt terms that contribute to fairness and equality between the sexes in specific contextual variables, and frame the reporting in a more The framing of the story is a more multidimensional demonstration of female power rather than a condescending male gaze.
At the same time, the structural gender issues behind the content of media coverage should also be considered.According to the 2020 China Journalism Development Report published by the China Journalists Association, "the gender ratio of journalists in China is equal, with 50.62% of men and 49.38% of women [14].While female media workers occupy half of the industry, men still dominate the decision-making power in the industry, and men almost monopolize the sports field.The loss of voice of female media workers inevitably leads to the strengthening of the male gaze and the media chauvinism that serves patriarchal domination, and the media image of female athletes is trapped in the male imagination and construction for a long time.

Media writing returns to the value of sport itself
Lippmann pointed out in his "mimetic environment" theory that people's knowledge of the external objective world cannot be based on their practice and that most of the impressions of objective reality formed in people's minds depend on the media's reflection of them, and that if media communication is accurate and comprehensive, people can obtain the closest understanding of the real world.In sports reporting, the media's portrayal and construction of female athletes is both a reflection of ideology and social culture and a reaction to the formation of sports culture and gender structures, which profoundly impact public psychology and social consciousness.
Therefore, the media should make reasonable use of the function of 'agenda setting,' return to the exploration of the value of sport itself in sports reporting, increase the attention and coverage of female athletes, and guide the audience to understand the value of sports and female athletes themselves objectively.Instead of catering to the market's 'aesthetic' complex and focusing too much attention on the construction of female athletes' images outside of the field, we should Instead, they should return to the true nature of sports journalism and disseminate information about women's sports in objective, fair and balanced manner so that the purpose of sports "nurturing" can be implemented.

Open and tolerant attitudes that play down gender differences.
The media's coverage of female athletes, in which information about women's bodies, families, and private lives is scrutinized, identified, and extracted, dramatically demonstrates the gender power order that is still maintained today, with the diverse symbols of female athletes being subjected to constant ideological discipline and social psychology in the logical control of consumer society [15].
Of course, within this long-established structure, the media should also capture the patriarchal system and the looser parts of the ideology, as well as the dilution and blurring of gender and body concepts in the field of sport.In sports such as weightlifting, there is a growing number of female athletes with a masculine perception of the body and a growing social acceptance of them.It is evident that perceptions of gender are fluid rather than static, "subject to revision and reshaping according to the ideological direction of the dominant society and the circulation of values in cultural events."The media should start by being more open and inclusive in their approach to reporting on gender-related topics.In their reporting, they should try to balance the two sexes, reduce the emphasis on gender differences, and avoid creating sensitive topics.Whether in the official or commercial media, this is an inescapable problem that the media must face.

Conclusion
As a phenomenal female athlete in the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, Ailing Gu has become the subject of intense media coverage in China.By examining and analyzing the image construction and discursive practices of female athletes in China's official media and mainstream commercial media, it is easy to see that gender power is still present in news texts in an overt manner.In a male-dominated discourse system, the media are accustomed to imagining and presenting female athletes through a hegemonic gaze, abusing and extracting female symbolic capital to serve the intentional political propaganda and the male-dominated gender structure.Whether it is Ailing Gu, who has a certain social status, or the many female athletes who remain 'invisible,' their image and power may not seem to be a central part of the sporting sphere, but in fact, they have a deeper political meaning, which is indicative of a country's social psychology and political civilization.Using Ailing Gu as an example, the author intends to lift the haze of media chauvinism from female athletes, not only in the hope that our media will make objective analysis and forwardlooking guidance on gender issues but also to focus on the significance of the media writing of female images for the grand "modernization of national governance."

3 Review of the literature 3 . 1
Male gaze V1.Presence or absence of male gaze in reports None = 1 Viewing fetish (yes) = 2 Gaze fetish (yes) = 3 Object worship (yes) = 4 Objectify woman V2.Presence of objectified women in reporting None = 1 De-selfing (yes) expressions of Gu Ailing's status None = 1 Z-era youth(yes)=2 Genius(yes)= 3 Athlete(yes)= 4 Champion(yes)=5 The coupling and embedding of gender and media in the field of sport.

Table 2 .
Presence or absence of four dimensions

Table 3 .
Male gaze type of distribution of different media

Table 4 .
Objectifying Women type of distribution of different media

Table 5 .
Expressions of discourse type of distribution of different media

Table 6 .
Different distribution of Identity Shaping