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Gendered media: The influence of media on views on gender
The influence of mass media on youth
The influence of mass media on youth
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In a world with so much diversity when it comes to race, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Why are the majority of TV shows, and movies, based around straight, cisgendered, white males? Today, I will be talking about the underrepresentation in the media, the negative effects of underrepresentation, and what we can do to fix the problem. Imagine being five years old and never seeing anyone on TV who looked or thought like you? You would feel completely excluded and separated from society. Young, developing minds are far more unquestioning, and accepting about what they see and hear on their screens. So what are we really telling them by only showing them a small portion of our world's diversity. In family films alone, males outnumber
females as lead characters in a ratio of 3:1. Horrifyingly, this statistic hasn’t changed since 1946. Out of the already small number of female protagonists, only a tiny sliver of these lead roles are played by people of colour, or LGBT individuals. When we don’t show women in positions of power in movies, and on TV, what messages are we sending out. If we continue to portray women as weak objects, that need to be rescued by men, are we slowly engraving that into people's minds? Imagine you’re a little girl, and when you’re older you want to be programmer. If you never encounter a female programmer in the media, you may begin to wonder if maybe, girls aren’t supposed to be programmers, maybe girls aren’t allowed to be programmers. Now while some fields such as science, and law are becoming more evenly distributed with female employees. The percentage of women in the IT workplace has declined by nearly 20% in the last 20 years. Now, I think it’s fair to say, we all enjoy seeing people who look, think, or act like us in movies as prominent characters, or to control characters who look like us in video games. As much as I don’t condone, or particularly enjoy violence, I find great comfort in seeing someone punch the source of evil in the face. Unfortunately, that person, more often than not is a brown haired white guy. Video games like Alan Wake, Heavy Rain, and Mass Effect all star a main character that fits into this mould. Thankfully in more recent times, we are seeing more multiracial casts with strong male, female, and non-binary characters. Movies like Fast and Furious 7 which have gained great success due to their featuring of both male and female characters, who were predominantly latino, asian, and black. I believe that as consumers, we need to stop purchasing merchandise from franchises that condone this horrible, and outdated behaviour of underrepresentation. In a world that measures success by wealth, it’s no wonder that companies that condone underrepresentation are reluctant to change from a point of view which is proving to become outdated. Why do we still struggle to find films that represent multiple races, genders, and sexualities without constantly falling into overused stereotypes.
Sex and Gender was the subject of the two movies Dreamworlds 3 and Further Off The Straight & Narrow. In Dreamworlds 3 Sex is portrayed as a status of life and happiness in the media. This media displays people as objects that can be manipulated for sexual pleasure. As the media is populated with sex it tiptoes around gender, specifically that of gays or lesbians. The film Further Off The Straight & Narrow emphasized the movement through media gay and lesbian topics. This text analyzes iconic television programs and how they reflect the societal stance during that time. As a member of a generation that has had the topic of these issues prominent I believe they are important but are banal. In this reflection I will be responding to two questions, what would woman driven Dreamworlds look like? And Do you agree with the statement that if you are not on television you don’t exist?
Dines, Gail, and Jean McMahon Humez. Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Text-reader. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995. Print.
This essay will discuss how national attitudes towards the working-class and the impoverished are represented in American Television. The purpose of this paper is to comprehend that television shows are not solely designed to entertain consumers but also contain a hidden agenda whose task is to protect certain ideological perspectives and therefore constant framing strategies take place. The paper will commence the analysis by discussing how males and females are represented in the television show Friday Night Lights, secondly it will look at the
Boylorn, R. M. (2008). As seen on tv: An autoethnographic reflection on race and reality television. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25 (4), 413-433.
Smith, Jeff, and Chloe Beighley. "Normalizing Male Dominance: Gender Representation in 2012 Films." Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy. N.p., 12 Feb. 2013. Web. 1 Apr. 2014.
According to Poverty & Prejudice: Media and Race, co-authored by Yurii Horton, Raagen Price, and Eric Brown, the media sets the tone for the morals, values and images of our culture. Many whites in American society, some of whom have never encoun...
...ironment. Young people use all kinds of media to find out who they are and what the world is like. The media is a powerful influence on children’s ideas and understanding of the world. If Disney continues to portray women with these stereotypical ideas, this endless cycle of gender roles will never be diminished.
Although we have taken monumental strides in the past fifty years towards racial equality and diversity, it is still commonly argued that popular culture lacks some sort of racial representation. In the United States, the people who live here are vastly diverse when it comes to race and culture, yet in the media people of color get marginalized and stereotyped everyday in film, music, and etc.
The depiction of transgender women characters in mainstream television has been offensive, insulting and derogatory. An article from GLADD called “Victims or Villains: Examining Ten Years of Transgender Images on Television”, examines 102 episodes and storylines on mainstream television that contained transgender characters since 2002. Of these, more than half were characterized as containing negative representations of transgender. In 2007 only 1% of television series had a recurring transgender character, which has slowly increased to 4% in 2013.
While watching movies, have you ever noticed that the villains in almost every single Hollywood film are of Middle Eastern or European descent? In a reoccurring theme of Hollywood, the villains in these films are almost always foreigners or people of color. This is a stereotype. On the other side of the spectrum, we often see that the heroes of these films are most often than not white males. This is another stereotype. Within the last few years, we’ve seen actors such as Will Smith, Morgan Freeman, and Zoe Saldana take the lead roles, so it can’t be said that there are no non-white heroes, but there certainly isn’t many. Hollywood action movies, moreover than other genres, are typically loaded with an abundance of stereotypes. The way these movies are composed and structured can tell us a great deal about the views held within the American psyche and who holds the social power. The harsh reality is that the media ultimately sets the tone for societal standards, moralities, and images of our culture. Many consumers of media have never encountered some of the minorities or people of color shown on screen, so they subsequently depend on the media and wholeheartedly believe that the degrading stereotypes represented on the big screen are based on fact and not fiction. Mary Beltran said it best when she stated in her “Fast and Bilingual: Fast & Furious and the Latinization of Racelessness” article, “ultimately, Fast & Furious mobilizes notions of race in contradictory ways. It reinforces Hollywood traditions of white centrism, reinforcing notions of white male master while also dramatizing the figurative borders crossed daily by culturally competent global youth – both Latino and non-Latino” (77). This paper will specifically look...
At the end of the NPR article they discuss the problem between keeping television shows diverse, “without amplifying the problems of stereotyping and prejudice” (Feld). Television shows feel that in order to a successful show with diversity, the people need to be cast-typed or take on every stereotype that is associated with that particular race or gender. The Erigha article discusses how, “many of actors were type-casted, or put in racialized roles, that fit their ethnicity” and some of these people do not necessarily fit that type, “they used Asian Actors as an example, many of the actors that were born in America, were asked to speak in a Chinese accent.”
Ethnicity and appearance has become a tremendous problem in the media due to the fact that they try to use it as a power to control creativity of abstaining the truth in media. According to journalist Nishijima, A, she refers to the Oscars and explains that it is very absurd how the media is slowly progression in lacking diversity. This was recognized when watching the Oscars and seeing that based off predominantly white nominees. Nishijima quotes “Boone Isaacs decl...
I am a woman. Without the feminist understanding that my education has afforded me, mainstream media portrayals of woman in relation to man would burn holes through the fabric of my mind and dismantle my ambitions. Ignoring the infraction that media portrayals impose on naïve minds gives the impression that it is acceptable to be inappropriately cultivated in gender equality. Television media continues to pose a grave threat; but worse is the deceitful attempt to find something attributable to women, the attempt to lure them with admiration, only to smack them with the patronizing undertone of being incomparable to men.
Adam Sharpiro, Megan Schultz, Christina Roush, Cassandra Schofar, Emily Shilling, Tawnia Simpson, Natalie Sampiller. Portrayal of Homosexuality in Media. 26 March 2014 .
Mar, Tyler, Tyler Mar, and View profile. "Typed Into Our Heads: Gender Inequality In Media". Tylermar.blogspot.com. N. p., 2015. Web. 18 Apr. 2016