Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
How media influences gender roles
Impact of media on gender
Essay on role of media in gender related issues
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: How media influences gender roles
The male patriarchy in which society has created has lead to various gender inequalities mostly involving women’s way of life. Media has been the most influential platform to communicate oppression amongst the genders to reinforce the distinct barriers between all sexualities within income, political power, legal rights, life and job opportunities and overall status (Chtena 2018, 2). Through the decades, women have used media forms to inform and protest in inequality movements and campaigns to get one step closer to social justice. Social media has largely influenced individual’s gender identity process (Kirtz 2017). Women have experienced the biggest disadvantages and inequalities and have had to fight for equal pay, representation in politics …show more content…
Functionalists consider gender roles as a division in labour for society to function smoothly (enotes 2018, 1). Conflict theory explains how men try maintaining power and dominance for them to provide in society. Symbolic interactionism demonstrates how gender roles and stereotypes are reproduced and contrasted in everyday life such as children’s toys and in social media having distinct identity barriers. Terms that are used to describe genders such as “homosexual,” “transsexual,” and “transvestite” are determined by their behaviours and values, and are to label people into groups by society to convey their differences (Steven Funk n.d., 299). These differences were often portrayed in previous decades as a negative as through media outlets of social media and music children and youth were exposed to why certain genders were not ‘normal’ and or a ‘crime’. Todays societal construct has been more accepting to all genders and allow all individuals to feel comfortable in their own choices as well as decreasing the discrimination that had been taken place in job opportunities and in socialization. The LGTBQI+ community has created safe places and emotional support especially within the youth as historical studies and stories have proven the correlation of psychological distress amongst a person exploring their …show more content…
Media has been used to strengthen arguments associated with gender inequalities as people are able to ‘follow’ and connect with other people who have similar life perspectives to where movements and campaigns are started and gain immediate attention (Dongux Li 2017). The three waves of feminism have brought female equality movement to where it is today mainly in the western world, although there is still struggles being faced in third world countries as well as issues still not being rectified such as equal pay and justification for the sexualisation of women with abuse victims (Lövheim 2013,
In "Where the girls are: Growing Up Female With the Mass Media," Susan Douglas analyses the effects of mass media on women of the nineteen fifties, and more importantly on the teenage girls of the baby boom era. Douglas explains why women have been torn in conflicting directions and are still struggling today to identify themselves and their roles. Douglas recounts and dissects the ambiguous messages imprinted on the feminine psyche via the media. Douglas maintains that feminism is a direct result of the realization that mass media is a deliberate and calculated aggression against women. While the media seemingly begins to acknowledge the power of women, it purposely sets out to redefine women and the qualities by which they should define themselves. The contradictory messages received by women leave women not only in a love/hate relationship with the media, but also in a love/hate relationship with themselves.
In the documentary, “What Stands in the Way of Women Being Equal to Men,” gender inequality is analyzed within four different countries through the narratives of four young girls. Each of these countries, Iceland, Jordan, the United Kingdom, and Lesotho vary in their level of gender inequality, yet all maintain unjust social constructs. While Iceland does demonstrate less social tendencies towards gender inequality, feminism is not accepted and women are burdened with social expectations that men are exempt from. In Jordan, girls are assigned certain activities and restricted from participating in others that boys are free to do whenever they please. Girls and women in the United Kingdom are oversexualized through pornography and are expected
“Boys will be boys, and girls will be girls”: few of our cultural mythologies seem as natural as this one. But in this exploration of the gender signals that traditionally tell what a “boy” or “girl” is supposed to look and act like, Aaron Devor shows how these signals are not “natural” at all but instead are cultural constructs. While the classic cues of masculinity—aggressive posture, self-confidence, a tough appearance—and the traditional signs of femininity—gentleness, passivity, strong nurturing instincts—are often considered “normal,” Devor explains that they are by no means biological or psychological necessities. Indeed, he suggests, they can be richly mixed and varied, or to paraphrase the old Kinks song “Lola,” “Boys can be girls and girls can be boys.” Devor is dean of social sciences at the University of Victoria and author of Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality (1989), from which this selection is excerpted, and FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society (1997).
In this article, Shaw and Lee describe how the action of labels on being “feminine” or “masculine” affect society. Shaw and Lee describe how gender is, “the social organization of sexual difference” (124). In biology gender is what sex a person is and in culture gender is how a person should act and portray themselves. They mention how gender is what we were taught to do in our daily lives from a young age so that it can become natural(Shaw, Lee 126). They speak on the process of gender socialization that teaches us how to act and think in accordance to what sex a person is. Shaw and Lee state that many people identify themselves as being transgendered, which involves a person, “resisting the social construction of gender into two distinct, categories, masculinity and femininity and working to break down these constraining and polarized categories” ( 129). They write about how in mainstream America masculinity and femininity are described with the masculine trait being the more dominant of the two. They define how this contributes to putting a higher value of one gender over the other gender called gender ranking (Shaw, Lee 137). They also speak about how in order for femininity to be viewed that other systems of inequality also need to be looked at first(Shaw,Lee 139).
Germaine Greer, The author of the article, is a very is inflammatory writer who is known very well around the world for her feminism. She is most famous for her book The Female Eunuch, noted as a key text of the feminist movement in the '70s. Germaine Greer is a feminist, she wrote this article in order to create an alternative female out look on a male tendency, but also to show society what was wrong with their thought about masculinity and that it is determined by biology. In the book The Female Eunuch, the last chapter was called Masculinity. There were several but the three main essential attributes of masculinity, according to the minutes off their career are that they need to be extremely strong, they also need to be in control come and they have to always feel better than women.
Schaefer, Richard T., and Robert P. Lamm. Sociology. 9th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005. Print. This is a sociology textbook that talks about feminism and the impact of mass media on how people interact.
Throughout time, there have been certain influential individuals that have dominated their age and have forever marked that era with their name. Among them are Cleopatra, Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth, and Nefertiti, with many others. One thing these leaders have in common is their gender: they are all females. In this day and age, it’s a rarity to come across strong, powerful women who have been allowed the opportunity to be powerful. It begs the question, if these women were alive today, would they have the same chance to change the world as they did? However, it’s not only the powerful who feel the sting of sexism, because the misogyny in today’s society affects each and every woman, of every color, age, and shape. The most important lesson to learn for the cultural and societal growth of people is to understand the causes and affects behind anti-feminism. Sexism takes many forms, yet it can be broken down into three main parts: the portrayal of women in media, the oppression of women in society, and the boundaries of women through laws.
On a daily basis people are exposed to some sort of misrepresentation of gender; in the things individuals watch, and often the things that are purchased. Women are often the main target of this misrepresentation. “Women still experience actual prejudice and discrimination in terms of unequal treatment, unequal pay, and unequal value in real life, then so too do these themes continue to occur in media portraits.”(Byerly, Carolyn, Ross 35) The media has become so perverted, in especially the way it represents women, that a females can be handled and controlled by men, the individual man may not personally feel this way, but that is how men are characterized in American media. Some may say it doesn’t matter because media isn’t real life, but people are influenced by everything around them, surroundings that are part of daily routine start to change an individual’s perspective.
The social normality of the world is that men are required to be strong, determined and career driven, but for women, they ought to be weak, acquiescent to their male counterpart, and domestic. As of late, women have been acting against this stereotype. Rather than being complacent, women are beginning to stand in solidarity and dismantle the patriarchy that reigns over the nation. With this new-found empowerment for women, countless obstacles in the form of other social groups, particularly men, face them, working against women from allowing true equality to be achieved. Women in literature and media are beginning to be portrayed as women in power, something that was a rarity to previous generations. Contrary to traditional feminine gender
In summary, the media is using its powers to make life a bit more complex for females. Therefore, people need to get their act together and put an end to this. Consequently if nothing is done to resolve this issue, we will be stepping back in time. The outcome of the media using its powers to shorten the chances of woman being successful is getting devastatingly frightening. As a result, our mothers, sisters and cousins will have no chance to make it in this difficult world. All in all, together we can stop the media before they take it too far.
Krolokke, Charlotte; Sorensen, Anne Scott, "Three Waves of Feminism: From Suffragettes to Grrls". Gender Communication Theories and Analyses: From Silence to Performance. SAGE Publications, Inc; 2005 1-17. Print.
It is only recently that sociology has begun to explore the topic of gender. Before this, inequalities within society were based primarily on factors such as social class and status. This paper will discuss gender itself: what makes us who we are and how we are represented. It will also explore discrimination towards women throughout history, focusing mainly on women and the right to vote, inequalities between males and females in the work place and how gender is represented in the media.
Female journalists endure tough competition in the male dominated fields of media. Females are expected to be behind the scenes of a story or appear in front of a camera as a speaking mechanism, not as a serious reporter. In modern journalism, women are present in the three main platforms of the discipline—broadcast, print and online. Within these realms, females are represented differently. News stories are circulated and repeated throughout the main platforms constantly; therefore information and ideas are spread to people in different forms. When females are under reported and under represented, these notions of inequality are further spread throughout the news industry visually in the case of broadcast, words in the case of print and online in the case of social media. The tenets of journalism are objectivity and neutrality, which often contradict feminist tenets, “we face the dilemma of how to incorporate feminist sensibilities into teaching journalism—a profession that strives for detachment and, at times, seems oblivious to its own position of power” (Walker, Geertsema and Barnett 177). Female participation and inclusion in broadcast, online media and print news is present due to the male domination of the news industry. Lesley Lavery, Cindy Elmore and Dustin Harp and Mark Tremayne explore the world of journalism from feminist theory lenses. The theorists incorporate the media bias theory, standpoint theory and network feminist theory in analyzing journalism platforms of broadcast, print and online.
The term “feminism” tends to have a negative connotation in today’s culture. Feminism is now focusing on female dominance and male disrespect. Women are fighting for equality, yet using personal bias to define equality, claiming identical rights for all will produce an equal culture. The mainstream feminist movement is using this corrupted view of equality to force rights of women. Contrary to popular belief, true feminism fights for true equality for women, as well as other people groups. The false view of feminism causes women to distort gender roles, dishonor themselves, and degrade men.
Human beings have been, and always will be, dichotomized into either male or female. When determining a person’s sex we often look for differences in facial features, body shape or mannerism’s, but another promising way to determine a persons sex and one that is most often used today, is through gender roles. Gender roles are behaviors that portray masculinity or femininity. The theory behind gender roles through multidisciplinary viewpoints is the focus of this paper. Throughout history and in every culture these roles have shifted and transformed into what society says is expectable. In this analysis, gender roles will be examined through a sociological, biological and evolutionary scope.