Gender and Movie Selection Introduction: A very diverse, broad, and extensive industry is the filmmaking industry. However, the unique aspect of the industry is that it is so expansive in all of the different categories and types of movies, but yet each film is individualized. A certain characteristic of a movie may appeal to one person and not another. Such characteristics may not only appeal to an individual but to a certain group of people. Could it be that characteristics of a film appeal to either the male gender or the female gender? Is there a difference in the category of movie that a male chooses as opposed to one that a female chooses? Such questions prove to be very interesting and ponderous. Upon thinking of such questions, I decided to revolve my research paper around the two concepts of movies and gender. My hypothesis for this research paper is “In determining a movie to watch, college-age males choose action and adventure movies while females of the same age choose romance or romantic comedy movies”. I feel that this topic is very interesting because many items today are marketed towards a specific gender. This can be viewed and noticed in such items as clothing, motor vehicles, and certain hobbies. This pattern may just as well carry over into the film industry. If it does, it may be reflected by the category of movie a certain gender selects to watch. Therefore, my thesis is: By used of an observation, a survey, an interview, and a personal history, I will prove that men choose action movies and women choose romance/romantic comedy movies because each gender relates to a different characteristic found in each type of movie. Methods and Materials: ... ... middle of paper ... ...that I encountered in collecting data was when I was observing. Since I had no contact with the subjects, I simply made the assumption that they were picking the movie for themselves to watch. However, the person could have been renting the movie for someone else. Another limitation occurred through the survey. I had two different choices for the categories of the movies. One choice was action/adventure and the other was romance/romantic comedy. Romantic comedy and true romance movies vary in multiple ways and I should not have categorized them as one type of movie. This could have swayed my results a little. In doing this research again, I would have three categories; one action, one comedy, and one romance. I also could have interviewed a female. I only interviewed a male and therefore, I only gained detailed information from one gender’s perspective.
Throughout time, women in movies and other similar texts are shown to be generally focused on men. This might make sense if every movie ever made was set in a time where women had absolutely no rights but of course, that is not the case. Older and more modern depictions of women in media, both show women whose lives revolve around men. Even movies that market their female characters as strong and powerful are still shown to be dependent on the male leads and puts them first. Also, since women in movies have more of a focus on men, female to female relationships suffer in the same films. There are very few exceptions to this unfortunate truth.
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.
Media plays a large role in creating communal measures including news, publishing, radio, computer, television, and film, at this moment is almost everywhere in modern culture. Gender aspects, as an example, survive solely because civilization as a whole chooses to accept them, but they are maintained by the media. Noteworthy viewers must be conscious of what the media is presenting to them, and make sure they are not operatively partaking in a culture of unjust impositions or restraints. Even on young children, gender roles are being pushed through cartoons.
Noel Carroll. “Film, Emotion and Genre.” Passionate Views, eds. Carl R. Plantinga and Greg M. Smith. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1999. 21-47. Print.
Film is the most powerful form of media from the topic of ‘Images in motion’, it is the most powerful mainly because of the large amounts of money that the film industry creates and how it has the impact to reach a big global audience. To gain a large audience and produce such large amounts of money it means that most commercial films need to have a large target audience. This means that these big blockbuster hits should generally fit into society’s ideologies, which is why representation and the function of power are important and relevant to ‘Images in motion’. Films usually stick to general stereotypes that are set by society but also ones that are also commonly shown with other forms of media. The most commonly enforced stereotype used is with gender and gender stereotyping is something that is shown across all genres of film enforcing the stereotype to many different audience demographics across the world.
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
Gender Roles. A hot button topic that has become a topic of conversation for years now. When we think of Gender roles what things come to mind? With Men we often think of qualities such as strength, toughness, bravery, and masculinity and being a Husband. With Women we often think of characteristics such as: care taker, Wife, nurturing, cooking/ cleaning, and often very supportive. But another big question that we should be asking ourselves is where and how these gender roles and stereotypes have come from? And for the answer to that question we should look to our media consumption. For years now TV shows and Movies have truly shaped what gender roles should be in our society. These ideas are planted in our minds even at a young age, whether
Everyone within a society has his or her own individual concerns in life. Some people, however, are occasionally looked down more by others, depending on if their problems are seriously destructive to the society or not. An often time in doing so, these people are manipulated into a dominant ideology which represents arguments about whether things are of optimistic or pessimistic standards in our civilization. This set of central principles, ideology, produces particular manners and offer ethical regulations by which one’s dealings can be evaluated. In fact, the media production business appears to be the focal resource that utilizes the governing beliefs by constructing imaginary medium contacts, appealing to massive audiences to reflect the way they live. Among various sorts of mass media, film industry contributes to generate racial and national contents as an association to carry out an ideological function. According to a cultural theorist and sociologist, Stuart Hall, he declares that the media provides racial ideology in several ways while it emerges to be ambivalence in every part of mass media episodes. With his own examples from movies, it becomes clear-cut for us to recognize how outlines of motion picture images can be created and reproduced by audiences and to embrace both positive and negative values out of it. Moreover, another associate professor, Sarah Benet-Weiser, adds her supports to Hall’s main argument about the ideological ambiguity in terms of media context with fundamental gender issues. Consequently, while both Hall and Sarah Benet-Weiser are successful in utilizing their own arguments to make significant statement about the ideological ambiguity by applying several examples from films, the use of postmod...
In modern society, the public uses multiple types of media each day. Two main types of media for entertainment are video games and movies. Although they both started for different purposes, they now leave people choosing between one or the other (Franich, 2011). Due to the specific stereotyping of movie characters, movies are more influential than video games. People can relate better to the characters, and thus change their perceptions and beliefs after viewing movies.
During the medieval periods, the social rank of an individual set limits to what they could accomplish in life. This system of social status obligated and forced people to stick to what "fate" and society had in store for them. For example, peasants could only be peasants and that was the only occupation they could be. Individuals in higher social ranks such as kings, some knights and people of the church looked down at people at lower ranks. In the movie this is seen when William is found to be a fraud and only because he isn’t nobility , he is arrested and shunned. Many aspects of the movie demonstrates that social statuses revolve around individuals having more pride by either earning it or pretending to have it.
Films have been in the forefront of perpetuating female stereotypes not only in the recent past but also throughout the history of filmmaking. Stereotyping refers to thoughts or expressions that specific type of individuals behave in a particular way, which is not necessarily true. The film industry for a long time has depicted the behaviors and roles of women in a negative way thus contributing to retrogressive beliefs about women in society. Various theories have been proposed to explain why personalities behind film making create female stereotypes. This essay contends that female stereotyping has been a central theme of the film industry throughout history.
Despite making up over 50% of the Population, there is a startling lack of female representation within the film industry. In the diversity study conducted by the University of Southern California, the research team released data on the amount of female characters in movies released in 2014 and 2015. Across the 11,306 speaking characters evaluated, 66.5% were male and 33.5% were female (Smith, Stacey L., et al.). This calculated into a sample wide gender ratio of seeing 2 males to every 1 female on screen, which
Discrimination is a big part of a lot of people’s life. Many people face a lot of racial discrimination but that is not the only kind of discrimination there is. There is also gender discrimination and that was very big before but not as big as it used to be. There are two movies where the main character’s Scout and Skeeter both face lots of discrimination, and they both dealt with racial and gender discrimination. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout deals with racial discrimination towards her family. But in The Help, Skeeter deals with a lot of racial discrimination because it took place in southern alabama when they still had slaves.
Feminism is a movement that supports women equality within society. In relation to film, feminism is what pushes the equal representation of females in mainstream films. Laura Mulvey is a feminist theorist that is famous for touching on this particular issue of how men and women are represented in movies. Through her studies, she discovered that many films were portraying men and women very differently from reality. She came up with a theory that best described why there is such as huge misrepresentation of the social status quos of male and female characters. She believed that mainstream film is used to maintain the status quo and prevent the realization of gender equality. This is why films are continuously following the old tradition that males are dominant and females are submissive. This is the ideology that is always present when we watch a movie. This is evident in the films from the past but also currently. It is as if the film industry is still catering to the male viewers of each generation in the same way. Laura Mulvey points out that women are constantly being seen as sexual objects, whether it is the outfits they wear or do not wear or the way they behave, or secondary characters with no symbolic cause. She states that, “in traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote it-be-looked-at-ness.”(Mulvey pg. 715). Thus, women are nevertheless displayed as nothing more than passive objects for the viewing pleasure of the audience. Mulvey also points out through her research that in every mainstream movie, there is ...
The authors have backed up their arguments by referencing others including those not involved in the film industry, throughout the text. This supports the argument that this perception of gender inequality affects the wider community. The article uses a lot of suggestion and evidence to back up their argument and to capture the reader’s attention. One of the people frequently referred to throughout the text is Joan Acker; she is identified as someone whose work and ideas backs up their main arguments. The authors also used direct quotes and current issue observations in their introduction, including the experience and memories of their colleagues, to support their