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how does television affect childhood socialization
tv as a form of socialisation
how does television affect childhood socialization
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Gender Stereotypes and The Real Housewives: What It Means for Male Viewers “Oh, no!” I thought to myself when she asked us to present our essay proposals to the class. A sinking feeling set in, and my heart began to race. I was about to share one of my deepest, darkest secrets. Each person went, and finally, it was my turn. My heart felt like it would burst as the words glided in slow motion across my lips: “Real Housewives.” The whole class started to laugh, and I wanted to shove the words back into my mouth, but I couldn’t. I just sat there and thought: “What have I just done?” As a male in society, there are certain habits and behaviors that I’m supposed to partake in and be happy with: mowing the yard, watching televised golf, drinking muscle milk, and playing video games with “my bros” with little-to-no dialogue because men bond better through activities than …show more content…
These manipulations and frames clearly outline the roles of men and women in society, which conflicts with the idea of male viewership. The role of stereotyping in The Real Housewives significantly contributes to societies dismissal of men who enjoy this so-called “Women’s TV”. By closely analyzing gender stereotypes in The Real Housewives, it is possible to see an implicit message that The Real Housewives is for women and women alone, because what man would willingly partake in such “feminine” behaviors? The media is a platform that has the ability to emphasize certain standards and stereotypical norms in society. More specifically, they can highlight gender roles in an attempt to place their characters within culturally dominant ideologies. The Real Housewives reinforces these dominant ideologies, which can have negative cultural repercussions for male audiences which I will elaborate on after analyzing these stereotypical feminine
The mass media is well known for its power to create the discriminating social system by producing misleading or simplified media representations of male and female and constructing the criteria for gender stereotypes (Ott 2010, p196). Sex and The City, a popular television series produced by Home Box Office since 1998, is recognized as a significant drama since it not only won a lot of awards but also became a cult hit. Unlike the other television shows which consolidated the stereotypes, the characters in Sex and the City go against the stereotype and leave an incredible mark on American TV history. Therefore, Sex and the City challenges female stereotype in American media and gives a picture of women who are not relegated by the two extremes. This article is going to analyze how Sex and the City obeys the gender stereotypes in four sections: active/passive, public/private, logical/emotional, and sexual subject/sexual object.
Michael Abernathy’s article “Male Bashing on TV” uses many television sources and percentages to explain how men are treated like idiots inside of the media. Abernathy is a television reviewer, cultural critic, and queer culture commentator (350). While Heather Havrilesky's article “TV’s New Wave of Women:Smart, Strong, Borderline Insane” is the opposite and uses television sources to explain how women are treated as smart yet crazy inside of the media. These two articles describe how men and women are portrayed differently in television shows and the media. The articles have smaller subtopics in common which are the portrayal of men and women in the media, the comparison of men and women in each article, and how Abernathy and Havrilesky want
In American culture today, women continue the struggle of identifying what their roles in society are supposed to be. Our culture has been sending mixed messages to the modern day female, creating a sense of uneasiness to an already confusing and stressful world. Although women today are encouraged more than ever to be independent, educated, and successful, they are often times shamed for having done just that. Career driven females are frequently at risk of being labeled as bossy, unfeminine, or selfish for competing in many career paths that were once dominated by men. A popular medium in our culture such as television continues to have significant influences as to how people should aspire to live their lives. Viewers develop connections with relatable characters and to relationship dynamics displayed within their favorite shows. Fictional characters and relationships can ultimately influence a viewer’s fashion sense, social and political opinion, and attitude towards gender norms. Since the days of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeanie, where women were commonly portrayed as being the endearing mischievous housewife, television shows have evolved in order to reflect real life women who were becoming increasingly more independent, educated, and career oriented throughout the subsequent decades. New genres of television are introduced, such as the workplace comedy, where women are not only career oriented, but eventually transition into positions of power.
The average America watches more than 150 hours of television every month, or about five hours each day (“Americans,” 2009). Of the 25 top-rated shows for the week of February 8-14, 2010, six were sitcoms, averaging 5.84 million live viewers each (Seidman, 2010), to say nothing for the millions more who watched later on the Internet or their Digital Video Recorders. The modern sitcom is an undeniable force in America, and its influence extends beyond giving viewers new jokes to repeat at the water cooler the next day: whether Americans realize it or not, the media continues to socialize them, even as adults. It may appear at first glance that sitcoms are a relatively benign force in entertainment. However, the modern sitcom is more than just a compilation of one-liners and running gags. It is an agent of gender socialization, reinforcing age-old stereotypes and sending concrete messages about how, and who, to be. While in reality, people of both sexes have myriad personality traits that do not fall neatly along gender lines, the sitcom spurns this diversity in favor of representing the same characters again and again: sex-crazed, domestically incompetent single men enjoying their lives as wild bachelors, and neurotic, lonely, and insecure single women pining desperately to settle down with Prince Charming and have babies. Sitcoms reinforce our ideas about what it is “normal” to be, and perhaps more importantly feed us inaccurate ideas about the opposite sex: that women are marriage-crazed, high-maintenance, and obsessed with the ticking of their biological clocks, while men are hapless sex addicts whose motives can’t be trusted. The way that singles are portrayed in sitcoms is harmful to viewers’ understanding of themselves...
In her blog Bolick (2011) stated that “I grew up watching both I love Lucy and The Honeymooners and even as a child I always wondered why the wives on these shows didn’t have to work.” Women in television shows decades ago mirrored the roles women played in society. Yet, women in society, although they have made major progressions towards equality they are still portrayed as the housewife. For the first time, America has a woman running for President of the United States. But parents think that children do not have suitable role models because of what they see on television. Does that fault fall on producers of television shows and movies? Or on the parent for allowing the children to watch those shows? Children look up to people in their immediate presence the most, imitating what they see and are accustomed to the most. With the changes in of roles in television, however, society is still noticing the unimportant things. During a recent study conducted by “The Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film” Lauzen (2016) stated that “Moviegoers were more likely to know the occupation of male characters than female characters…… In addition, moviegoers were much more likely to see male characters at work and actually working than female characters.” What this shows is that people have become so accustomed to the way society ‘used to be’ that they pay attention to the details
It is often said that the media and the arts are an accurate reflection of any given community. This is especially true in American pop-culture, where television shows depict the various stereotypes attributed to men and women and the roles they play in society. House, a highly popular medical drama that revolves around Dr. Gregory House and his diagnostic team, is a particularly good example as it represents the true state of the traditional gender roles in American culture today by, both, redefining and reinforcing them over the course of the show.
In the article “Male-Bashing on TV,” published in PopMatters (2003), the author Michael Abernethy, wants gender stereotypes to stop. He mentions how most of all these television advertisements and shows put men down, and how men need the help of a women. Abernethy starts off with a short anecdote of when he had a hard day from work and sits down to watch some tv. Over the next two hours of watching a television show he notices that there are four men who are nothing like him, because the show portrays them as selfish and lazy, inconsiderate husbands and poor parents. Not only does Abernethy see male bashing on television shows but also on tv ads. For instance on a digital camera ad, it shows a man looking for items in a picture that his wife
Stereotyping is the belief that all individuals with a common characteristic are the same in certain aspects. There are many different forms of stereotyping including race and ethnicity, but one of the biggest is gender. Gender roles have been a large part of our society for long periods of time, the gender role theory that suggests that individuals socially identified as males and females tend to occupy different roles with in social structure. It is even shown in children because they learn these stereotypes and categorize themselves by gender around age 3. Although gender stereotyping can be learned through many sources, one of the biggest in today’s culture is the media. The media presents women as an object to men, just something to be viewed; Sigmund Freud calls this the concept of “the gaze” where the men give it and the women receive it; it is common in advertisements. In television there has been a shift in the way genders have been portrayed through out history. Years ago in the time period around the 1970s, women on the television had the role of housewife’s who stayed home to take care of the family while men were the bread winners. By the time the 1990s came around there was a noticeable change in the way gender was represented on television. Women now had roles other than the homemaker; females and m...
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.
In 2013, a new Netflix series called Orange Is The New Black was written by Jenji Kohan based on the book by Piper Kerman. The show almost instantly became a hit. The series takes place in a fictional women’s prison in upstate New York. It follows the life of Piper Chapman as she leaves her suburban life and adjusts to her new life in prison. The viewer, while seeing the past and present life of Piper, also gets to experience the past and present lives of the other inmates that Piper interacts with. The women represent a large variety of races/ethnicities, social classes, sexual orientations, and gender identities. Though Orange Is The New Black does show diversity, I would like to argue that despite the representation of diversity, the show portrays its characters in a way that propagates dominant ideologies and stereotypes.
Television has been a part of the American culture for quite some time. While a fair amount of parents told their children “too much TV will turn your brain to mush” it exposed children to new ideas and concepts that they couldn’t comprehend at the time. In the TV shows I watched as a child, the male and female characters were treated equally and when the girls were told “you can’t do that because you're a girl,” they proved them wrong every time. But as I grew up the content of the shows matured with me and introduced battles more difficult than kicking a ball. These issues consisted of how gender roles create unrealistic expectations of women that result in stereotypes that are commonly inaccurate even though it’s what people assume is the
Since the beginning of time, gender has played a big role in how one acts and how one is looked upon in society. From a young age children are taught to be either feminine or masculine. Why is it that gender plays a big role in the characteristics that one beholds? For centuries in many countries it has been installed in individual’s heads that they have to live by certain stereotypes. Women have been taught to be feeble to men and depend on them for social and economical happiness. While men have been taught to be mucho characters that have take care of their homes and be the superior individual to a woman. For the individuals who dare to be different and choose to form their own identity whether man or woman, they are out casted and secluded from their community. These stereotypes that people have been taught to live upon have been a huge burden on women because they are the ones who have been taught to be the inferior individual. Women have struggled to obtain their own identities and become independent, but as time has evolved women have developed and are able to be independent. Surprisingly it is being accepted.
On September 20, 1984 a show aired that changed the way we view gender roles on television. Television still perpetuates traditional gender stereotypes and in reflecting them TV reinforces them by presenting them as the norm (Chandler, 1). The Cosby Show, challenged the typical gender stereotyping of television, daring to go against the dominant social values of its time period. In its challenge of the dominant social view, the show redefined the portrayal of male and female roles in television. It redefined the gender role in the work place, in social expectations, and in household responsibilities. The Cosby Show supported Freidan in her view of “castigating the phony happy housewife heroine of the women’s magazines” (Douglas 136).
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.
When three diverse families come together, the result is unexpected but always entertaining. A refreshing departure from other family oriented sitcoms, Modern Family is one of the most creative and relatable TV shows of all time, owing its success to its diverse characters, witty dialogue intertwined with quirky storylines, and unique production that brings new light to family life in a modern age.