Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
About gender stereotypes in the media
About gender stereotypes in the media
Role of television in society
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Society has evolved significantly from its initial gender stereotype of the black and white images of the hard-working husband and the loving, domestic housewife. According to Raewyn Connell in his book Gender (2009) he says that men are or at least should be the ‘producers or breadwinners’ and that women should be the ‘consumers’. However, it was around the middle of the 20thcentury during the onset of the feminist movement when the idea of the perfect woman was featured by glamorous magazines and television. Yet, there has been much controversy about the ways in which the mass media represents women and how they have been affected by these images. In the patriarchal society of the period, there was a decrease in strong women being emotionally and mentally stable, intellectual and sexually attractive. Building on that premise, this paper will examine and analyse the different stereotypical roles the female characters of Desperate Housewives portray, how they are viewed by the audience, and what impact these gender constructions have on society.
Desperate Housewives (2004) was a “primetime soap opera” shown on the ABC network and premiered as number one, with an audience of 21.6 million viewers. It is a satirical female-centric comedy-drama series about suburban life that deals with divorce, infidelity, dating, the duality of being a stay-at-home mom versus a career woman, raising children, marriage, and household struggles. During the 1950s family structure started to change, and the term housewife became known. In typical domestic soap operas, housewives are shown as “sexless” because they have only time for the family and household chores. (Cheryl N, 2007). The keyword of the title: “desperate” reflects upon common issues of w...
... middle of paper ...
...rt they have between each other show their roles as empowering and independent as they can be. Their husbands are not oppressing them but at they same time they don not lose their femininity or condition of being women because of the empowerment there is.
The media has a stereotypical way of constructing the role of women. Taking this into account what Desperate Housewives does, is to give a gender role, which is more positive and “not phallocentric” when it is compared to other shows. The show might not be as accurate to how genders are constructed but it does expand on the idea that media has developed it own type of stereotypical women. The TV program shows how women can construct their reality in several different ways, doing gender in different ways. They are not just housewives, girly women and shopaholics; they have more in their identity than their gender.
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
Since the beginning of time itself, Television has been one the most influential pieces of media that the world has ever encountered. The beginning days of television depicted stereotypical mothers cooking and cleaning their homes for their husbands and children. Yet, as the decades passed, television took a dramatic turn, leaving the days of drama free entertainment as a vast memory. Now a day, however, when one hits the power on button to Bravo, the screen lights expand to ritzy socialites dealing with their everyday lives as “housewives”. Bravo TV’s hit number one reality television show, The Real Housewives of Atlanta, deals with the everyday lives of modern-day housewives. When speaking of these women and their family life, the reality series shows its viewers that family life in modern times is dramatic, full of misrepresentations of how people are perceived, and that fame comes at the cost of family.
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.
I chose to analyze the sitcom That 70’s Show, a show that follows the lives of a group of teenage friends: Jackie, Donna, Hyde, Kelso, Eric, and Fez. The show addresses several social issues of the 1970s, including: sexism, sexual attitudes, drug use, politics, and the recession. I selected certain episodes from Season One based on their titles and descriptions; ones I thought may deal with sexism more in-depth than other episodes.
In society, there has always been a gap between men and women. Women are generally expected to be homebodies, and seen as inferior to their husbands. The man is always correct, as he is more educated, and a woman must respect the man as they provide for the woman’s life. During the Victorian Era, women were very accommodating to fit the “house wife” stereotype. Women were to be a representation of love, purity and family; abandoning this stereotype would be seen as churlish living and a depredation of family status. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Henry Isben’s play A Doll's House depict women in the Victorian Era who were very much menial to their husbands. Nora Helmer, the protagonist in A Doll’s House and the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” both prove that living in complete inferiority to others is unhealthy as one must live for them self. However, attempts to obtain such desired freedom during the Victorian Era only end in complications.
Medical dramas have been around a long time and changes have been made to recreate and reinforce our society. Women and people of color could not and were not physicians on television, film and in the Western world back in the less progressive years. Now there are women, gay people, African Americans, Asians, and many more minorities playing doctors. Television has certain portrayals of femininity and masculinity, even if it has come far. On the episode of Grey’s Anatomy, “Rise Up”, Dr. Owen Hunt asks Dr. Callie Torres about two female surgeons and who he should chose to participate in the solo surgery. One of the candidates, Dr. Cristina Yang, comes into the room to explain the charts to both doctors. She later leaves when asked to go update
Relationship Between Soap Operas and Reality TV Dating Shows Tania Modleski’s “The Search for Tomorrow in Today’s Soap Operas” proposes that the unique appeal and function of soap opera lies in (a) the viewer’s ability to inhabit the text’s prescribed spectatorial position of ‘the good mother’, and (b) using the archetypal ‘villainess’ to displace one’s own repressed anger and powerlessness. It can be argued, using Modleski’s analytical perspectives on the interpellated spectatorial positions of soap operas, that a new genre of television programs (namely the reality dating shows) function in a similar way. An examination of Modleski’s thesis renders these statements more likely. Modleski argues that soap operas are essential in understanding women’s role in culture.
In the hit TV show Gossip girl, the traditional gender roles are broken. The women in this show don’t obey men’s wishes, they aren’t seen as sexual objects, but rather as independent and strong willed women. They give us insight into how our society has evolved from the traditional roles and demonstrates how women are now respected in the business world and can be seen to follow their own dreams. The women in this show are intelligent and passionate about what they believe in and they don’t let anything, even gender equality get in their way.
Do you know the guiltiest pleasure of the American public? Two simple words reveal all—reality TV. This new segment of the TV industry began with pioneering shows like MTV’s The Real World and CBS’s Survivor. Switch on primetime television nowadays, and you will become bombarded by and addicted to numerous shows all based on “real” life. There are the heartwarming tales of childbirth on TLC, melodramas of second-rate celebrities on Celebrity Mole, and a look into a completely dysfunctional family on The Osbornes. Yet, out of all these entertaining reality shows arises the newest low for popular culture, a program based on the idea of a rich man or woman in search of the perfect marriage partner. The Bachelor, and its spin-off The Bachelorette, exemplify capitalist ideology founded on the Marxist base-superstructure model and establish the role of an active American audience.
The documentary Miss Representation identifies the numerous ways women are misrepresented in the media, including in news, advertisements, movies, and television. The title Miss Representation emphasizes that the way we portray women in the media is a misrepresentation, as in it does not do women justice and oftentimes, has a negative impact on the perception of women. Frequently in the media, women lack leading roles and complexity, are held to an unrealistic standard of beauty, and are subject to objectification and beautification (Newsom, 2011). These misrepresentations lay the groundwork for gender socialization, and therefore, shape how women perceive themselves and are perceived by others.
From past to present, men have dominated women in media. Media is a big part of people’s everyday lives. It influences how we see ourselves and the world. There are many different types of media like movies, television shows, newspapers, advertisements, etc. In these different forms of media, there are images of men and women who are represented in different ways and characteristics. In both films, Changeling (2008) and The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (2005), a woman, not a man is the main character. These two movies are based off of a true story from a woman’s perspective. This type of genre portrays women in the past and very well may be the same as the present. This movie shows the life of a mother in Los Angeles in 1928 who works constantly
Gender stereotypes and biasses exist in media. In most situations, women are associated with more negative stereotypes and their portrayals can “undermine their presence by being “hyper-attractive” or “hyper-sexual” and/or passive” (Smith, 2008). In The Wolf of Wall Street women are objectified. They are treated
11 Ellen Seiter and Mary Jeanne Wilson, “Soap Opera Survival Tactics”, in Thinking Outside the Box: A Contemporary Television Genre Reader (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 138.
Gender stereotyping has been ongoing throughout history. The media has been distorting views by representing gender unrealistically and inaccurately. It created an image of what "masculinity" or "femininity" should be like and this leads to the image being "naturalized" in a way (Gail and Humez 2014). The media also attempts to shape their viewers into something ‘desirable’ to the norm. This essay will focus on the negative impacts of gender-related media stereotypes by looking at the pressures the media sets on both women and men, and also considering the impacts on children.
These homemaking shows’ tactics were to encourage and show women that being a homemaker, wife, and mother is not a lonely life or a life full of drudgery and that having this status is not being an unproductive citizen. These shows had to incorporate these tactics because a decade before women’s role were vastly different to the roles they have now. Women before were working in jobs that were mainly solely for men, they were independent by earning their own wages, and being patriotic citizens by participating in the war effort by fighting on the home front or joining the military. Their work on both fronts were dangerous and life-threatening in which these jobs were predominantly for men; many were spies, others made bombs and weapons, and many flew planes and carried out dangerous missions. All of this changed during the postwar years in which their main occupations now were mothers and housewives. It may seem that women decreasing independence and their rigid gender and social mobility made them feel limited in