Portrayal of Women in Media

After our discussion in class today, I couldn't stop thinking about how women are portrayed in The Joke. It doesn't seem as if we really get to hear any of the women's perspectives in the novel, except for Helena, but all she really talks about is her ex-husband, what she should wear, etc. Also, and the author comments on how this is done purposefully, Helena's monologue in part 2 is pretty much just one run-on sentence. When I read it, I felt like she was just rambling and talking just to talk. It almost feels like the author is making her sound like she doesn't have anything important to say and maybe even nothing important going on in her mind. The next woman we are introduced to is Marketa, and like some people said in class, she is almost made out to seem like an awful person for turning Ludvick in to the Party for the joking letter he wrote to her. That is pretty much her only role in the novel as of right now. And then we meet Lucie, who barely has any lines in the novel except for when Ludvick tries to force himself on her, which is when she starts to say that she doesn't want to have sex with him. The only other interaction Ludvick has with a woman up until part 3 is when he goes to the bar with his friends from the camp, and all the soldiers are trying to pursue the few women there, and when they meet one, Ludvick and his friends take turns with her. I'm not sure exactly what the author's intention is when portraying women in The Joke, but from what I can tell, it's not a very positive portrayal, and I don't even consider myself a feminist.
It's made me think about my last post about cliques, and made me try to focus my attention more towards how women are portrayed in the media. Clearly in Gossip Girl, girls are always fighting, making their best friends hate them one day and then becoming best friends the next day, and sleeping around with any guy they can find. Shows like Gossip Girl want girls to create drama. And just like this, the portrayal of women in books like The Joke are making women feel like they are only as good as the guy they're with, or that their main goal should be to look good so that they can find a guy. Maybe I'm overreacting to the book, but it's a serious issue in our society today that women are constantly under pressure to look perfect. This week is National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, and it's mainly the media that has made women feel the need to become thinner which lead to eating disorders. Thinking about the way women are portrayed reminds me of a video that I watched in my Intro to Sociology class last year:

I feel that Kundera is not allowing the women in his novel to show their ideas (unless they are about the Party) on purpose, and I think that is my biggest issue with The Joke right now. I wish that we could see what's going on inside of Lucie's head. I understand that Ludvick is the main character and that we can only hear his thoughts, but the fact that we hear more from his friends at the camp that we do from Lucie really upsets me because he claims that he loves her, yet we never hear anything from her unless she's resisting him. Maybe we'll find out more about who she is later on in the novel, but she is just another example of women who are portrayed as being passive.