Stereotypical Perception Of Gender Media

The mass media play a significant role in a modern world, by broadcasting information in fast pace and giving entertainment to vast audiences. They consist of press, television, radio, books and the Internet. The latter is now the most developing medium, however, TV also has a wide field of influence. By creating a certain type of message, media can manipulate people’s attitude and opinions.

As explained in Judith Lorber’s excerpt from “‘Night To His Day’: The Social Construction of Gender”, gender is a socially constructed concept that everyone unconsciously adheres to (Lorber). As a socially constructed concept, representations of gender roles can reinforce or challenge the stereotypical images. In Killing Us Softly 4, Jean Kilbourne analyzed the advertisement industry’s representation of women and argued that the media plays a huge role in shaping gender formations (Kilbourne). Although objectification of women is still a prevalent issue, Kilbourne acknowledged that there are efforts nowadays that challenges the unrealistic representations of women and femininity (Kilbourne). Inspired partly by Killing Us Softly 4, the project is my way to reflect on how the Disney movies I had watched as I grow up represented gender.

Gender and the Media by Rosalind Gill addresses gender stereotypes that are brought onto women and men through the media resulting in objectification and subjectification. Gill discusses how the representation of gender is altered as a result of the media in Western societies. Gender and the Media is aimed to address the rapid transmission of media and how those changes affect the construction of feminine and masculine gender roles in society. Gill uses her interest in the contradictions of gender construction by society, to analyze gender and the media. Using feminism as a backbone for her research, Gill and many commentators support the idea that feminist ideas are common and may even affect the media. Gender and the Media addresses multiple forms of media: postfeminism in advertising, gender in the news and journalism, and gender in magazines. Gild aims to address the construction of gender representations, elements for gender analysis, and feminist culture with Gender and the Media.

Gender roles influence every characteristic and aspect of our life, from how we feel about ourselves to the degree of our contribution in social life. From a ripe young age, children become exposed to this type of gender bias right away, which can negatively affect and shape their whole outlook on life. Consequently, as these young boys and girls mature both physically and emotionally and move on into adulthood, they are, in essence, shoved into a world that impacts their attitudes and behaviors towards gender roles and stereotypes. These specific attitudes and behaviors first cultivate in the private doors of their parent’s house. Afterwards, these same biases become reinforced by the child’s peers, school experience (education), television viewing, and, of course, advertisements in the realm of print and television media. From the looks of it, it is near impossible, for children to not become subject to some degree of gender bias at an early age. As a child grows and develops, the stereotypes follow them into the next phases of their lives (i.e. adolescence) and then on into adulthood. Not only are these gender stereotypes destroying girls, they are also killing boys. The components of this essay will attempt to illustrate how advertising in print and television helps to perpetuate gender stereotypes in our world. Along with that, one must ask the question of how much harm these negative biases in gender roles truly affects the minds of men, women, and young children.

The way in which a person perceives the world and society surrounding them has a large impact on how they think, and act accordingly. One of the most distinct ways that determines how a person will interpret what is constantly happening around them is age. Age determines the level of understanding a person has of both simple and complex concepts, thus altering how they will react to different aspects of society. One of the most prevalent and commonly debated topics embedded in society is gender. For generations, society has had strict views on what should be considered acceptable for either gender, and age plays a large role in determining how a person understands gender roles, or how they identify with their gender. How people understand gender, and thus the society they interact with daily is largely determined by age.

Historically, social and feminist scholars have focused on media representations of gender roles and how they affect the lived experiences of women (Green, 2013; Soulliere, 2006). Gender is widely considered to be a cultural rather than strictly biological creation, and it is often constructed and represented through popular culture media such as advertisements, magazines, and television (Soulliere, 2006). While women have made great strides in expanding the culturally acceptable definition of femininity (or femininities), masculinity continues to be narrowly defined and policed by society (Soulliere, 2006; Tragos, 2009). This evidence of asymmetrical change in popular culture gender role portrayals suggests that more effort should be given to examining the representation of men and masculinities in media, and its influence on the lived experience of men.

Several advertisements in the set of stimuli for these interviews inspired reactions which resonate with this courtship theme. All three informants became emotionally involved in these ads, able to self-project to a tremendous degree and to create imaginative stories about the people portrayed in the ads. Also importantly, the role portrayals of women in these ads were never seen by any of the informants as sexist or inappropriate, contrary to the researcher 's own introspection.

Gender roles plays a very significant part in society and the way people are portrayed in the media. Men and women are portrayed differently in the media specifically based on how they are perceived in society. Men have a more predominant role in the media. Women are presented as delicate individuals with less predominant roles. There are stereotypes of women and men, especially those seen on television. “Virtually all groups of people suffer from stereotyping and men are no exception. Stereotypes are powerful because they affect our expectations of what men should and should not be like. They are damaging because they narrow our notions of what men can be and do.” (Femiano & Nickerson, n.d.)

Wood presents to us that women are being underrepresented by media portraying images of “sexes”, which many misinterpret unreal, “stereotypical”, and limiting awareness. Wood explains her first argument which is that the media has led people to see that men are the cultural standard by showing a disproportion number of women allowing us to think that there are more men than women. Wood continues to her next disagreement about the underrepresenting of women which is that because of the distorted reality of men being presented as energetic, venturesome, strong, sexually dominant and rarely involved in human relationships and women being portrayed as sex toys, young, fit, beautiful, passive, reliant, helpless, and dumb, it can deceive how we see ourselves, what we understand is normal and enticing for men and women. Wood lets us know that men have been portrayed as self-reliant, “competent”, sexually dominant, fear of nothing, violent, complete control of all his emotions and are in no way feminine. Another stereotypical portrayal of men that Wood points out is that mothers are usually taking care of the child and not the father. This reinforces the “negative” stereotype of men not being family orientated. Wood then explains the two images that the media represents: the good and bad ones. These total opposites are placed side by side to dramatize differences in consequences that happen to good

From a young age, people are taught to behave according to their gender, often through media such as television and film. The portrayal of both men and women on media would influence people to have the mindset that there is only one certain way to act for each gender, therefore altering the behavior of the viewers, making them think that they should behave according to media’s depiction of their gender.

In the last few decades the daily lives of Americans is revolving around about what the entertainment media has displayed for them. Society has been influenced by the media with movies, advertisements and news that are constantly bombarding us. Entertainment media has given Americans a taste of the films that display a traditional housewife woman and heroic male figures. However, today’s media has offered a new perspective on how a woman or man can act. These stereotypes have been making a difference for woman and men by allowing them to be able to express their individuality. In many Disney movies, gender stereotypes have been changing from the typical idea of what a woman’s image should be. The twentieth century

Media today portrays gender in many different ways. Whether it’s a women doing a man’s job or vice-versa. Overall magazines, tv commercials or any type of advertisement for the most part women are seen as a sex symbol while guys are the hard workers. I did a random you tube search for Tv commercials. Many commercials I found were banned from tv for being “too sexy for Tv”.

Studies regarding gender roles in media show that the feminine essence tends to be depicted as inferior, with women often being marginalized, disempowered and humiliated through a status that is based on their youth and looks; whilst men tend to be portrayed as superior with higher and longer lasting careers

Stereotypes have become a prevalent issue in our media. They, without our knowledge, prevent us from moving forward as human. In this essay, I will discuss the effects of stereotypes in media on gender roles, religion, and race.

There has been a lot of research done on the influence media can have on society, in particular the degrading images of women that are often seen in media. Since the second wave of the women’s rights movements these images were the object of scrutiny and an easy example of how women were viewed. In modern society where women have made many strides towards equality why are there still instances in popular media were women are negatively depicted? Have women come as far as they think? The popular sitcom The Big Bang Theory negatively depicts the female characters by reverting to a binary view of gender, in which the female characters are lacking, they can be beautiful or smart however they cannot be both.