Running head: How women are being portrayed in media 1
How women are being portrayed in media Mariyona Anderson University of Southern Mississippi
HOW WOMEN ARE BEING PORTRAYED IN MEDIA 2
Abstract
In today’s society when you turn on your television you are mostly met with advertisement, movies, television shows, and the news. In each thing, you see on the television makes a huge impact on your life without you even realizing. What you see has an impact on the types of people that belong to a certain stereotype or identity. Media plays and have played a major part in how we live, how we think, and how we communicate with each other. When people both men and women see each other on television they expect a certain role or responsibility to be met by each sex. Women for example are expected to be mothers, house keepers and the backbone of every family. It has been seen that way for centuries and centuries. After doing extensive research I have come up with percentages and facts of how women are portrayed in today’s media. Women in prime-time television had very small roles and were not seen as an equal compared to men. They were playing mothers, wives, girlfriends and if they were lucky they were seen as a nurse or a desk clerk.
HOW WOMEN ARE BEING PORTRAYED IN MEDIA 3
How women are being portrayed in media
Women in primetime television were put
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Also in other films if women have a major role they are the mistress or the wife of the male that is the main leading role. Mostly in Hollywood films the women are seen half naked or in a sex scene. In Hollywood films if a woman is seen as being successful and has a good paying job she is still in a depressed sense trying to seek male attention. In the film, she is desperately having trouble trying to find a husband because she is seen as too dominant. Television show also play a major part in what we
movies are about men’s lives, and the few movies about women’s lives, at their core, still
The media influences many aspects of American society. Media affects sexuality, gender roles, and family structure. The images of gender projected through the media correlates with gender norms held in society. The media demonstrates a misogynistic view towards women. Women, statistically, interact with media more than men and are exposed to the images the media promotes. Media distorts how women should look, their role in society, and sexuality. Despite the negative images presented in the media, these beliefs can change.
In our media, women are objectified, hypersexualized, or shamed, which both reflects and conditionalized the prevailing hegemony and standards of our society. It exists to be seen by men, or subordinate women, continuing the existence of a mindset which many believe, or would like to believe, has dissipated through out the years to no longer be socially relevant, but on the contrary, has become the basis of media and the perception of our society today. Various archetypes of the portrayals of females include patriarchal subordination, the deadly “female fatal”, and stereotypical ethnic representations. These portrayals have dealt a great deal of damage to both men and women in society, where today, we are faced with how to address and transcend
women in powerful positions on television. If girls are not able to see themselves in such
Throughout history when we think about women in society we think of small and thin. Today's current portrayal of women stereotypes the feminine sex as being everything that most women are not. Because of this depiction, the mentality of women today is to be thin and to look a certain way. There are many challenges with women wanting to be a certain size. They go through physical and mental problems to try and overcome what they are not happy with. In the world, there are people who tell us what size we should be and if we are not that size we are not even worth anything. Because of the way women have been stereotyped in the media, there has been some controversial issues raised regarding the way the world views women. These issues are important because they affect the way we see ourselvescontributing in a negative way to how positive or negative our self image is.
In the United States, gender has always been a dichotomous, discriminatory system. The men are privileged and the women oppressed. The media, especially film and television, reflect this. From a purely quantitative standpoint, women are perpetually underrepresented. For the qualitative, men receive complex story lines where explanations are given for all behaviors, negative and positive, and women are lucky to receive story lines. Of the women who are in film and television, they usually serve as a sexual object to supposedly attract audiences or as side characters designed to further the character development of a male protagonist. This lack of diversity harmfully affects female audiences and to lesser extent, male audiences. Female
The work's topicality is characterized by the existence of the gender stereotypes in society, having generalization, and does not reflect individual differences in the human categories. Meanwhile, there is still discrimination on the labour market, human trafficking, sexual harassment, violence, women and men roles and their places in the family. Mass media offers us the reality, reduces the distance, but we still can see the negative aspects too. TV cultivates gender stereotypes, offering ideas about gender, relationships and ways for living. Such media ideas attach importance to many people in the society. Consequently, it is quite important identify gender stereotypes in the media, in order to prevent false views relating to gender stereotypes.
The media, through its many outlets, has a lasting effect on the values and social structure evident in modern day society. Television, in particular, has the ability to influence the social structure of society with its subjective content. As Dwight E. Brooks and Lisa P. Hébert write in their article, “GENDER, RACE, AND MEDIA REPRESENTATION”, the basis of our accepted social identities is heavily controlled by the media we consume. One of the social identities that is heavily influenced is gender: Brooks and Hébert conclude, “While sex differences are rooted in biology, how we come to understand and perform gender is based on culture” (Brooks, Hébert 297). With gender being shaped so profusely by our culture, it is important to be aware of how social identities, such as gender, are being constructed in the media.
In today's world, what we see in the media dictates our world. Media, by definition, is a form of mass communication, such as television, newspapers, magazines and the internet. Since the beginning of this media phenomenon, men and women have been treated very differently, whether it be through advertisements or news stories. As women have gained more rights and social freedoms, the media has not changed their views on women. They are often viewed as objects, whether for a man's pleasure, or for as a group to sell only cleaning products to.The portrayal of women in the media has a highly negative impact on the easily shaped young women of today. Women of power are often criticized, others hypersexualized. The media also directs advertisements for household things at women.
Media representations of women remain wrong. However, the status of women has changed significantly. Representations of women across all media tend to highlight the following: beauty (within narrow conventions), size/physique, sexuality, emotional (as opposed to intellectual) dealings and relationships (as opposed to independence/freedom).
Socialization of people has been occurring through family, public education and peer groups. However in recent years, the mass-media has become the biggest contributor to the socialization process, especially in the ‘gender’ sector. The mass-media culture, as influential as it has become, plays the most significant role in the reproduction process of gender role stereotypes and patriarchal values. It is true that a family model of nowadays is based rather on equality than on patriarchal values and women have more rights and possibilities on the labor market. However, mass-media still reflect, maintain, or even ‘create’ gender stereotypes in order to promote themselves.
Another major factor that influences millions of impressionable females and males is television. Not only does the television teach each sex how to act, it also shows how one sex should expect the other sex to act. In the current television broadcasting, stereotypical behavior goes from programming for the very small to adult audiences. In this broadcasting range, females are portrayed as motherly, passive and innocent, sex objects, or they are overlooked completely or seen as unimportant entities. Stereotyping women is not only rampant in the adult world; it also flourishes in the kiddie universe as well.
As a result it can be concluded that the general effect of the illustrations of women in the media to strengthen rather than condense injustice and stereotypes. The mass media in the United States has not made sufficient efforts to argue serious issues regarding women and arrange the women to play their correct and equivalent role in society. To alter this situation, it is required to observe the media and point out the qualities and faults constantly.
Despite some opposing ideas, the stereotypes in the media have negative impacts for both men and women and also children. I personally think that the media should not place a huge barrier in between the genders because it only creates extreme confinements and hinders people from their full potential. Overall, it is evident that the media has had an important role in representing gender and stereotypes in our
Media plays a vital role in producing these stereotypes. This is because the media is a very dominant mode of communications in the society that we live in today. In the past 50 years the media has shaped thoughts and influenced people in numerous ways. “Most common forms of media are television, radio, newspaper, magazines, direct mail, and billboards.” We are bombarded everyday in some way or the other by images from the media world. Therefore, it becomes impossible to escape the messages that are presented to us over and over again. These stereotypes are there in order to form propagand...