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Have you ever been watching a kids show and thought to yourself, wow this is sexist? Nope, me neither because the audience of kids shows asides from parents are kids! The purpose of kids’ shows are to teach and entertain children. The essay “Sesame Street: Brought to You by the Letters M-A-L-E” By Diane Helman and Phyllis Bookspan views one children’s show in a different light in order to highlight sexism. Their essay covers the unequal treatment men and woman experience in education, how this bias starts before education and pervades on to collegiate level, and looks at the difference in male roles vs female roles in Sesame Street.
The Authors use Sesame Street to point out sexism in our society. The essay suggests the treatment of boys in educational settings is more engaged and overall better for boys. This unequal treatment starts at a young age and follows the student in through adulthood. The treatment of law students in the class room is then reduced down to students being taught to accept sexism from an early age. The authors support this idea by looking at Sesame Street and the roles played on the show. It is admitted Sesame Street does a good job at balancing sexual stereo types, but still concluded with every
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aspect of society having room for improvement. My first response to “Sesame Street: Brought to You by the Letters M-A-L-E” was this is full of loaded langue with very little support.
My second thought was: Is Elmo a boy a girl? But we will get back to that latter. Two references where made to support their claims, but if you notice the tittle of both their references (“How Schools Shortchange Woman” and “Gender Bias in the Classroom”) you notice they too are articles searching for sexism. If the authors’ where to cross check their references with a study that was about the graduation rate, attendance, grade average, attention span or academic performance between boys and girls at all levels of education without a set idea of feminism already in mind that would have made a much stronger
case. Think back to your four year old self. What was your favorite TV show at the time? Who where your favorite characters, and what did you think of them? My guess would be sexist did not cross your mind considering you were four. The claim is we are conditioned to accept sexism even before school starts. I quote the authors’, “Yes, Sesame Street is sexist!” Even the tone of that sentence tells you Sesame street is not a place you would look for sexism. By this point I am sure you see where I am going with this, but let us continue anyway. “Any parent of toddlers or preschoolers can testify that girls on Sesame Street are not very popular.” To the authors’ defense upon a quick google search I found that almost all of the characters on Sesame Street are voiced by the men. In fact several are voice by the same man. I do not have an explanation as to why that is. We would have to know more about the writers and how many female puppetries auditioned. Regardless of the voice behind the puppets, the characters themselves are pretty gender neutral. Like I mentioned earlier, what gender is Elmo? The main characters are Cookie Monster, Big Bird, and Oscar to name a few. None of them play dominate male roles or have significant jobs. Cookie Monster eats cookies and Oscar lives in a trash can. They are fictional creatures made to entrain children, they are just animals not a boy or a girl. To wrap this up guys and girls are different and sexism does exist. Though, not in dealing with children’s shows or education as far as I can tell from Diane Helman and Phyllis Bookspan’s “Sesame Street: Brought You by the Letters M-A-L-E”. If you ask Siri if Elmo is a boy or a girl she has the only answer I find worthwhile: “Hmm, I just don’t get this whole gender thing.”
Gerry Garibaldi, a high school teacher and Michael Kimmel, a professor of sociology both explain how the consequences of the feminism movement are harming boys in school and later in life. Kimmel and Garibaldi present their views on the gender education problems in their articles “How The Schools Shortchange Boys” and “A War Against Boys”. Both make passionate arguments and prove that boys are at a disadvantage in modern feminized classrooms. Kimmel’s arguments about the problems boys face in the American educational system are more convincing than Garibaldi’s, because his style of argumentation is more objective, supported by more statistics, and provides unbiased restatement of opposing views.
In both of these series, representations and meanings of masculinity and femininity are affected by the ideology of patriarchy. Even though it is true that these shows tried to fight back against stereotypical representations of men and women, the subtle textual evidence in these shows show that there are limits to how gender norms can be represented on television, especially in the Classic Network
Since the advent of the word “sexist”, the label itself has carried numerous negative connotations, regardless of whether or not it has been applied to the male or female set. This idea of the modern teenager became initiated by the proliferation of visible sex symbols in the 1950’s such as Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe and has since become increasingly more prevalent in American society. While the connotations may be well deserved, we as culture rarely seem to remember that most stereotypes are originated as a result of an observed pattern in the behavior of certain groups of people. John Updike is merely trying to embody the mind of the modern American teenage male in “A&P”, and not expressing his own opinion as to whether the thoughts going through Sammy’s mind are acceptable or not.
In his article, “The Gender Gap at School,” David Brooks scrutinizes common gender roles and introduces the idea that biological factors may play a role in human development. He begins his essay by analyzing the three gender segregated sections in any airport, which include the restrooms, security pat-down areas, and the bookstore. He goes on to explain that the same separation occurs in the home. Brooks includes a study given to nine hundred men and women who were asked to name their favorite novel. The study determined that men preferred novels written by fellow men, whereas women favored books written woman.
Gender dictates various components of American life: political quarrels, typical company employee hierarchies, social norms, the list continues. This year’s presidential election proves this statement to be true; as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump bump heads against notions of foreign policy and tax reform, American voters have divided themselves into a category of either for or against women’s equality. Trump’s recent rape allegations has portrayed him as sexist, allowing Clinton to make arguments against him and advocate for women’s rights. Besides politics, gender guides child development, teaching children what “roles” both men and women must play in order to be deemed acceptable. This is why the term “CEO”
In this case girls are the ones who are discriminated against. Teaches do not see girls as being as smart in math and science. Boys may get called on more for their disruptive behavior. This gives boys more practice and therefore can cause a gender gap. In the text it states “boys and girls behaved and performed in similar ways in the classroom.” this shows how both genders perform the same yet boys are pictured as more intelligent. This adds to the central idea of how there is inequality between students for no reason. The two articles talk about two separate problems however the root of the problem is the same. Teaches create biases about girls and black students. Getting girls active in STEM can close the gender gap and solve this problem. This will help because it will show how math and science are just “boy subjects” and girls can excel in them too. The two articles have the same main idea however the two writers cite different pieces of evidence. The writers do this to branch the main idea off into two different aspects of how gender and racial biases are occurring in
A little girl sits on the floor with her gaze fixed on the television screen in front of her, watching magical images dance before her eyes and catchy songs flow through her ears. Even though she had seen it at least twenty times before, she still loved The Little Mermaid just as much as she did the first time she watched it. As she watched it, she longed to be a beautiful mermaid with a curvy body and wonderful singing voice like Ariel. She longed to be saved by the handsome Prince Eric, and fall in love and live happily ever-after like Ariel did. In today’s society, women strive to achieve equality between the sexes. Despite the tremendous steps that have been taken towards reaching gender equality, mainstream media contradicts these accomplishments with stereotypes of women present in Walt Disney movies. These unrealistic stereotypes may be detrimental to children because they grow up with a distorted view of how men and women interact. Disney animated films assign gender roles to characters, and young children should not be exposed to inequality between genders because its effect on their view of what is right and wrong in society is harmful to their future.
Society cements certain roles for children based on gender, and these roles, recognized during infancy with the assistance of consumerism, rarely allow for openness of definition. A study conducted by Witt (1997) observed that parents often expect certain behaviors based on gender as soon as twenty-four hours after the birth of a child. The gender socialization of infants appears most noticeably by the age of eighteen months, when children display sex-stereotyped toy preferences (Caldera, Huston, & O’Brian 1989). This socialization proves extremely influential on later notions and conceptions of gender. Children understand gender in very simple ways, one way being the notion of gender permanence—if one is born a girl or a boy, they will stay that way for life (Kohlberg 1966). “According to theories of gender constancy, until they’re about 6 or 7, children don’t realize that the sex they were born with is immutable” (Orenstein 2006). The Walt Disney Corporation creates childhood for children worldwide. “Because Disney are such a large media corporation and their products are so ubiquitous and wide spread globally, Disney’s stories, the stories that Disney tell, will be the stories that will form and help form a child’s imaginary world, all over the world, and that’s an incredible amount of power, enormous amount of power” (Sun). Because of the portrayal of women in Disney films, specifically the Disney Princess films, associations of homemaker, innocence, and dependence are emphasized as feminine qualities for young children. Thus, children begin to consider such qualities normal and proceed to form conceptions of gender identity based off of the movies that portray the very specific and limiting views of women (...
Gender stereotypes stem from the media’s portrayal of appropriate female and male behaviors that are considered to be “correct” and “normal,” however, “correct” and “normal” differ everyday because society rapidly changes. As a result of television and its gender stereotypes, the world pegs men and women with weights that forbid them from going on to do certain things they wish to do and forces them to act in ways that they would prefer not to. For example, in “The Glass Castle,” Jeannette’s mother must conform to the idea that women are better caretakers and must be more gentle on young children; while her father, Rex Walls, highlights the typical father figure who is too harsh on children and does understand that kids cannot, and should not,
Author and feminist Alix Kates Shulman said once: “Sexism goes so deep that at first it’s hard to see, you think it’s just reality” (McEneany). That quote sums up perfectly the way our society runs. There is no class teaching children how to act according the their gender. Yet little boys and little girls learn at a very young age what is expected of them. They get ideas about their gender roles from their parents, their school teachers and subconsciously from the toys they play with and the television shows they watch.
Even after these prejudices were overcome, the education system still maintained sexism in both obvious and subtle ways. Books rein...
American society needs to break from the mold of the myth of gender, which suggests that society and culture dictate our roles as men and women, as can only restrict us into unnecessary conformity. The opinion of society should no longer decide who we are, what we do, and what we’re capable of doing. We, as Americans, need to deeply analyze and question this fallacy of gender and the way it restricts us at home, in the media, and in the classroom. If we continue to follow the invisible guidelines of in invisible rulebook, we’re destined to hurt ourselves and our future generations by remaining nestled into our cultural cocoons and never shedding them.
Toys, literature, media, and films also encourage sex roles. Males are depicted as "doing", while females are always "receiving." In this paper, 5 articles focusing on sex roles were used. The articles look at the damaging effects of sex role stereotyping, and some ways the sex roles are accentuated in the schools.
Stereotyping women is not only rampant in the adult world; it also flourishes in the kiddie universe as well. Here, there are depictions of women and girls as motherly or innocent, silly, and passive. This occurs not only in popular programming on Public Broadcasting, but also on television in other countries. Mothering images on Philippine TV has shown some of the same trends that is seen in the United States. Although “Teletubbies and Barney & Friends display an equal representation in number, each show displays gender stereotyped qualities,” it is obvious that these programs are sometimes reinforcing the wrong ideas about gender roles to children, roles that feminists have been battling for almost half a century. “Both programs demonstrated clear gendered roles with males being more active and females being more social and passive. This distinction appeared most obviously in the real-life segments of both programs with women as mother or passive viewer of action. Neither program shows women or men in non-stereotypical roles, indicating at an early age children are exposed to gender-specific occupational expectations.” Each show has children as additional characters, and each episode consists of a live action activity.
Girls are seen as caring, nurturing, quiet, and helpful. They place other’s needs above their own. Girls get ahead by hard work, not by being naturally gifted. Boys are seen as lazy, but girls are seen as not capable. In class, teacher will call on boys more than they call on girls. Boys are seen as better at math and science; while girls are better at reading and art. This bias is still at work even out of the classroom. There are more males employed at computer firms than women. The ratio of male to female workers in STEM fields is 3-1. In college, more women major in the humanities than in the sciences. In education, women are often seen as lesser than; even though 65% of all college degrees are earned by women. Women are still often seen as needing to be more decorative than intellectual, as represented by the Barbie who included the phrase, “Math is hard!” and the shirt that JC Penneys sold that said, “I’m too pretty to do homework, so my brother has to do it for me.” While there was a backlash on both items, it points out that there is a great deal of work to do on the educational gender bias to be