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 ideal 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 in 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, that was what being a woman was like. And for being a man it was
In the Twentieth Century however, that all began to change. With the World Wars forcing 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, unmarried couples living together and having children, married couples not having children, among other cultural shifts. What is even more common is the medial portrayal of couples, men, women, and even children. Their portrayal does not coincide with these new cultural realities, but in fact show traditional portrayals. But, 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today, yet every day they show us these outdated views.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portrayals traditional and outdated however, compared to those today?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 is showing that men belong in the business world
while women should busy themselves with the household chores and looking pretty.
This is because of whom the advertisements are trying to reach, 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, whereas 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 being men 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. This
show takes place in the recession period within America, depicting women “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 views 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 king, 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. “Enter Quote from
Lisa Here” 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 to 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, 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. By focusing on women’s beauty and familial
relations allows us to place the athlete back into her domestic role as well as
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 is masculine and feminine, 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 had 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 we the views apply these 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 paper 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 in college kids’ minds, 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’ omen 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.
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
Cuklanz, Lisa M. "Mass Media
Representation Gendered Violence." The Routledge Companion to Media
& Gender
(2011): n. pag. Academic Search Premier. Web. 13 Oct. 2015.
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.
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.
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