Final Paper

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they still adhere to are not the ones within the ranks of our social structure today, yet every day they show us these outdated views. How exactly are their portrayals traditional and outdated however, compared to those today?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