Gender Roles In Popular Culture

We have to admit that media is a central and essential part of modern life which brings huge impact on our ideology. At the same time, gender and media are connected in inextricable way; gender remains the foremost status of how we think about our identity, media creates tons of images of male and female and pass message about gender role today. However, what we saw in the media about gender recent decades year ago might not so relevant what we see today, because media has changed so was gender role. Like John Fiske’s audience power theory, I think popular culture is made and chosen by people, because our society creates and shapes popular culture; the characteristic of culture is continuous developing and it changing with attitude of society

“In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, only 20 to 35 per cent of characters in TV show were female.” (Gauntlett D. 2002, p43) These figures generally illustrated the status of female role in the media which were ignored by people. So situation was similar in the films, but the gender role in the film was more complex. Unsurprisingly, gender role was changing with the new notion about femininity and masculinity, the traditional idea of female character was emotional, in need of protection and they offering love to support male role, and male character was still confident, taken the dominant position, they made decisions and lead the story developing. I am going to take James Bond as my example, because it is a long-running series film since 1962 to today and it still filming, so it is a good example to make us see the changing of gender role in the movies. My point of view is they don’t developed so much on the male character-Mr. Bond, he is always charming and attractive when he wear the perfect suit in the film, he is the typical here characters which reflects masculinity is already mature in the

In 1950s, it was very normal that sexism against women and showed in the advertising, and some of them are very offensive to abuse women, female were expected to do a role like cleaning and cooking and the image of wives being completely controlled by their husband. I will demonstrate two pictures of advertising during 1950s to 1970s to describe male and female roles in the advertisement. I chose two advertisements from completely different two industries area, although they are two different categories of advertising, but they were all conveying the same message which is women status is lower than men. Regardless of how insulting or offensive advertising were towards to women, people’s attitude was tolerate and accept some female stereotype because masculinity taken the main position during that time. The first campaign is Doyle Dane Bernbach did the Volkswagen campaign launched in post-war