Amanda Judd
Dr. Sonia Apgar Begert
Research Paper
9 December 2015
The Media’s Gender Roles
For most of human’s
time on Earth, there has been a social hierarchy that has defined human
relations for the majority of our written records. These traditions support the
ideals of male dominance, males supporting the family, being career driven,
etc. While the females are subservient, housewives, mothers, the male’s
property, etc. These were the traditional roles which most of society adhered
to. “I learned that day that cleaning, cooking, looking pretty, and taking care
of babies were the major tasks associated with womanhood in my family”
(Williams). For most of time, this is what being a woman was like. To be
considered a man, society deems that “boys need to keep their emotions in
check; that violence is an acceptable response to emotional upset; that their
self-esteem relies on power; and that they must reject any and all signs of ‘feminine’
qualities” (Pollock). In the Twentieth Century however, that all began to change.
The World Wars forced men to war and women into the workplace. Life would never
be the same because women discovered that they could do what men did, and
wanted to do it. From then on women gained rights and became even more
independent. In today’s time, it is not uncommon to see women working, men
staying home, couples having or abstaining from having children, and a switch
in who takes care of them. What is even more common is the media’sl portrayal
of couples, men, women, and even children. Their portrayal does not coincide
with these new cultural realities, but in fact shows traditional portrayals. What
is meant by “media”? The Oxford English
Dictionary, online version, defines media as “The main means of mass communication
(broadcasting, publishing, and the Internet) regarded collectively.” Using this
definition as my boarder, I wish to discuss the portrayal and techniques
employed by the media, and why the effects are to be taken into serious
consideration.
How the media
portrays genders is the foundation of this paper. The traditions they still
adhere to are not the ones within the ranks of our social structure today, yet
every day they show us these outdated views. How exactly are their portrayals
traditional and outdated however, compared to those today? Starting with
something everyone sees throughout their day, Malgorzata Wolska stated in her
case study that, “men generally advertise cars, cigarettes, business products
or investments, whereas women are shown rather in commercials with cosmetics
and domestic products.” This shows that men belong in the business world, while
women should busy themselves with the household chores and looking pretty. This
is because of what the advertisements are trying to teach. If you show men
doing something, men tend to feel as though it is alright to do it, likewise
with women, going back to the childhood teaching of “monkey see monkey do.” Speaking
of children, they too are depicted in commercials in their “proper place.” According
to Wolska “Girls are shown as babysitters, nursing dolls, or cleaning house with
a pink cleaning kit[. W]hereas boys do sports or play computer games.” Commercials
and advertisements leave no area unaddressed-but it isn’t just the commercials
the media is toying with. Dr. Diane Negra, a Professor of Film Studies and
Screen Culture at University College Dublin, published an article in the Cinema Journal in the Fall of 2013 titled “Gender Bifurcation in the
Recession Economy: Extreme Couponing
and Gold Rush Alaska.” Her main argument in her paper is that,
“these cable series retain femininity as fundamentally domestic and recuperate
masculinity as a state of territorial expansion while promulgating
ideologically ‘safe’ modes of entrepreneurialism that conform to hegemonic
gender codes.” In English, she means that the media is presenting these shows
to show women need to be home taking care of the house and kids; while men go
out and tame the wild because these conform to the traditional gender roles and
ideologies. She first goes over the drama Extreme
Couponing, which is a show about exactly what it sounds like. This show
takes place in the recession period within America, depicting women as
“stepping into the income breach without deviating from their domestic role.”
Meanwhile the drama Gold Rush Alaska
depicts “the thematics of men risking their lives and struggling against nature
in remote settings and the glorification of working class resilience and
adaptation…it seeks to recover viable physical working class masculinity…”
(Negra 126). These two shows have vast influence over how their audience’s view
the characters being portrayed. The first is about women, and the second is
about men, where the other sex is scarcely, if ever, shown. Dr. Negra addresses
the few times their spouses are shown. In Extreme
Couponing, the husband of Amada Ostrowski only highlights her couponing
when it “is framed as a gesture of support for her elderly grandmother”(Negra
125) to give a “rationale for couponing, which must be seen as serving the
interests of someone other than herself” (Negra 124). This plays into the
traditional ideal that women are to care for everyone else instead of herself
because it is that is a kind, submissive, woman trait. When addressing the
women in Gold Rush Alaska Dr. Negra
states that the show “goes out of its way to caricature women as incapable of
understanding the depth of male dedication to a cause” (Negra 128). This plays
into the traditional ideal that women are simple minded and cannot understand
or comprehend everything a man can. Amongst the commercials, advertisements,
and TV shows, there is one form of media that is often overlooked: Videogames. Dr.
Karen Dill, currently program Director of Media Psychology at Fielding Graduate
University, and her colleague wrote the article “Video Game Characters and the
Socialization of Gender Roles: Young People’s Perceptions Mirror Sexist Media
Depictions” published within Sex Roles
in 2007. According to her study, males were represented in the traditional way:
muscular, dominant, and aggressive, while women were depicted as damsels in
distress, visions of beauty, obstacles, and highly sexualized. She also found that in the Grand Theft Auto series (GTA), one of
the most popular games out there, that:
Women are typically depicted as prostitutes
and men as violent thugs. A male character can have sex with a prostitute, then
kill her and take his money back…Female prostitutes, when hit by a male
character, are programmed to respond, ‘I like it rough’…[this is] consistent
with hyper masculine ideals, advertising text sometimes [depicts] danger as
thrilling and violence and manly.
These all coincide with the traditional views of male-female
relationships: men are dominant and women are submissive. Women are the
property of men and must “give it up” when he deems necessary. Rape is when a woman
changes her mind, and others. When broken down, it is scary how much a modern
spin has been put into traditional roles, how much it is shown to us, and how
easily we accept it.
We only accept
these portrayals so easily because of how hard the media works to make them
blend in with our culture today. The scales are tipped in their favour because
of the techniques they use to imbed their view into us. The key to the media’s
success is reinforcement; constant reinforcement of ideas into an unknowing subject.
Statistically this means that sooner or later, those ideas will be accepted as
true. Especially if the data being fed to that subject is biased. Visual and
Verbal ques is the trick to it all is based on Dr. Amy Jones’, Chair of
Communications at the University of Alabama, study titled “Visual and Verbal
Gender Ques in the Televised Coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics” published in
2011 within The International Journal of
Interdisciplinary Social Sciences. The media’s visual ques for women are
based on full body shots, fewer camera angles, and a focus on that athlete’s
beauty and sexuality. For men visual ques include more camera angles, close
ups, and a focus on athleticism. Verbal ques for men are focused on praising
male masculinity (aggressiveness and dominance), as well as described based on
their athletic talent. While women are often described as wives or mothers
first, their beauty and appearance second, and how much of a team player they
are rather than individual competitors. It is like we are being conditioned to
believe what the media wants us to believe, which is exactly what is happening.
The media controls what we see, how we see it, and what we hear about it. So
using these ques allows them to train us the same way we would train a dog using
a clicker. Focusing on women’s beauty and familial relations allows us to place
the athlete back into her domestic role. Praising men for their aggressiveness
allows us to place him back on his original dominant pedestal. Describing women
as team players allows us to play back into the idea that women are here to
serve others, like a team, verses being her own person and competitor. “She is
a beautiful, loving, wife, and mother who helps around her community and is a
pretty good team player” verses “She loves her sport, she went 12-0 last
season, and is off to a great start this season with being voted MVP for her
team and leading them into a 3-0 season thus far”. The first is for women and
the second is for men, because it focuses on her dominance at the sport and her
individuality away from the home and community, but those, according to the
media, are not feminine traits. Dr. Dill gives excellent definitions of what
masculine and feminine is, she writes:
Socially prescribed masculinity is an understood
ideal, and though not attainable for many, includes power, aggressiveness,
material success, and heterosexual conquest. Emphasized femininity is only
constructed in relation to this hegemonic masculinity; women exist for the
men’s sexual titillation and ego stroking, to mother children, and generally
serve men.
Those are not the only way that the media reinforces their gender roles
on us. For those of you who vote or take any interest in politics, I hate to
tell you, but the media uses gender stereotyping to sway your vote one way or
other. Dr. Nicholas Winter, a Political Scientist at the University of
Virginia, wrote “Masculine Republics and Feminine Democrats: Gender and
Americans’ Explicit and Implicit Images of the Political Parties” Published in
Political Behavior in 2010 and if you couldn’t already guess, it has to do with
classifying political parties with gender stereotypes. My point in bringing up
such a touchy paper is for the method he goes over within his paper. “This
evidence suggests that people do not merely ascribe to the Democrats and
Republicans a series of traits that happen to be feminine and masculine.
Rather, ideas about the parties are linked cognitively with ideas about gender”
(Winter 589). He means that the viewers apply gender stereotypes to the parties
because that is what has been imbedded into our brains since we were born;
“Even young children reliably classify colors, types if plants, and animals,
shape, and much more as masculine and feminine” (Winter 589). Although it
sounds like this article doesn’t support my paper, it does. Here is why:
The gender gap first achieved sustained
public attention after the 1980 election as the result of efforts by women’s
groups to increase their influence within the Democratic party…and has been a
fixture of media coverage of presidential campaigns ever since.
The media has always implied gender into elections, since it was around
really. Once they learned the former techniques, the media began to shape our
opinions into what they wanted based upon gender roles.
So the media uses
subliminal techniques to enforce their traditional point of view on us, why
should I care? That is a great question, thanks for asking. The effects of this
type of portrayal can be detrimental depending on who is watching and what they
take from it. Dr. L. Monique Ward, a
professor of Media Psychology at the University of Michigan, provides the
answer. She proposed “that television’s consistent yet restrictive images and
portrayals construct a specific portrait of reality, and as viewers watch more
and more television, they gradually come to cultivate or adopt beliefs about
the world that coincide with this portrait” (360). This means those in charge
of the media are turning us all into likeminded robots. Has anyone read 1984? That is about where we are headed.
Just kidding-that is a bit extreme for now. However, what she is saying is not
wrong. Remember ‘monkey see monkey do’? Children are avid watchers- that is how
they learn. Taking into account how much television kids watch now a day, it is
bound to become ingrained into their little moldable mind eventually. And it
does: “Males exposed to advertisements featuring women portrayed as sex objects
subsequently show greater rape supportive attitudes” (Dill 853). That is based
on college students, when most of their opinions are already formed and are
being put to the test. As far as children go, kids from 0-6 years of age who
watch an average of two hours of television a day my end up with lower
self-esteem, a lack of self-importance, a lack of career motivation, as well as
bad body images which can lead to anorexia and bulimia as well as self-harm and
possible suicide according to the National PTA. These effects are detrimental
to kids not only within themselves, but with their interaction with others as
well. Dill states that “frequent TV viewers show dysfunctional beliefs about
relationships and greater acceptance of sexual harassment”. But that is not
all, in an earlier paragraph she cites a sample using 231 male and female
college students and the results showed “that exposure to curvaceously thin
images of females predicted the personal acceptance of this figure as an ideal
by both men and women” as well as “exposure to media images of ideal beauty
causes college men to find average-looking ‘real’ women less attractive”. So not only does it harm the individual, this
portrayal of “ideal” women, men, relationships, and interactions are now
causing real people to have false expectations of themselves and others. The
portrayals by the media have gotten so bad that now there is federal action
being taken to try and contradict some of the effects the media has inflicted.
Healthy Media for Youth Act was submitted into congress in 2010. The idea for
this bill is to “award grants to nonprofit organizations to provide for the
establishment, operation, coordination, and evaluation of programs to: (1)
increase the media literacy of girls and boys, and (2) support the empowerment
of girls or boys in a variety of ways”. If the federal government is pushing to
find a solution, it must really be a problem because the only thing that gets
them moving is the promise of war. I suppose this could be considered war in a
fashion, a war of bad thoughts or a war against the dehumanization of realistic
ideals towards real world people. Stepping away from statistics and psychology
for a moment, let us take a look at Laurin Mayeno. She is a writer for the
Huffington post, but more importantly, she is a Mother. In her article “My Son
Was a Princess for Halloween, and I Became a Better Parent” she explains her
struggle with her son publically breaking gender norms. Her reasoning for her
hesitation and struggle is because she feared her son would be made fun of and
made an outcast and that she would be seen as a bad parent. Due to the stigma
placed around what is deemed fit for a man or boy, when her son wanted to be a
princess, she countered with Peter Pan.
With the portrayal
of traditional and ideal gender roles the media is parading around, the
techniques they are using and the effects they are causing, it is a wonder how
we allowed them to get so far. Those behind the media are highly educated and
very good at what they do to fool an entire planet worth of people into giving
them as much free rein as we have been. Looking at the evidence I have
presented today, all jokes aside, this is a very serious problem that will only
get worse if allowed. The federal government is doing just about all they can
do without stepping on our first amendment right. So now the question is, what
do we, the people, do about it?
Works Cited
Dill, Karen E., and Kathryn P. Thyll. "Video Game Characters and
the Socialization of
Gender Roles: Young People’s Perceptions
Mirror Sexist Media Depictions." Sex Roles 57:11 (Oct. 2007): 851-864 JSTOR.
Web. 2 Nov. 2015.
Jones, Amy H. "Visual and Verbal Gender Cues In the Televised
Coverage of the 2010
Winter Olympics." The Social Science
Collection 6.2 (2010): 199-216. Academic Search Premier. Web. 6 Oct. 2015
Mayeno, Laurin. “My Son Was a Princess for Halloween, and I Became a
Better
Parent.” Huffington Post News. Huffington
Post News, 30 September 2015. Web. 13 Oct. 2015
Negra, Diane. "Gender Bifurcation in the Recession Economy: Extreme
Couponing and
Gold Rush Alaska." Cinema Journal 53.1
(2013): 123-129. Academic Search Premier. Web. 6 Oct. 2015.
Pollock, William. Real Boys:
Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood. New York.
1998.
Smith, Stacy L., Dr., and Amy D. Granados. "Gender and the
Media." National PTA.
AXA Foundation, 2006. Web. 13 Oct. 2015.
United States. Cong. HR. Energy and Commerce. Healthy Media for Youth
Act. 111th
Cong.,2ns Sess. Serial No. 4925. Washington:
HR, 2010. Web. 2 Nov. 2015.
Williams, Aleichia. “My Culture Taught Me to be a Homemaker. Thanks, but
I Want
More.” Huffington Post News. Huffington Post
News, 22 Sept. 2015. Web. 13 Oct. 2015.
Winter, Nicholas. "Masculine Republicans And Feminine Democrats:
Gender and
Americans' Explicit and Implicit Images of
the Political Parties.” Political Behavior 32.4 (2010): 587-618. Academic
Search Premier. Web. 6 Oct. 2015
Wolska, Malgorzata. "Gender Stereotypes in Mass Media. Case Study:
Analysis of the
Gender Stereotyping Phenomenon in TV
Commercials." .Krytyka.org. N.p., 9 Sept. 2011. Web. 13 Oct. 2015
