2 MESSAGES OF MASCULINITY IN BEER COMMERCIALS

BOX 3.2 MESSAGES OF MASCULINITY IN BEER COMMERCIALS

In a content analysis of TV beer commercials, Strate (1992) argued that there is strong socialization occurring about what it means to be a man. Specifically, he claimed that five questions are addressed by such ads:

1. What kinds of things do men do? First of all, they drink (although they cannot ever be shown actually drinking on television). This almost always occurs in the company of others in the context of good times. Beer is seen as a reward for a job well done and is a common marker for the end of a work day, such as stopping for a drink with friends after work.

2. What kinds of settings do men prefer? Beer is identified with nature and the outdoors, through images like a cowboy, animals, or a clear mountain stream. The second popular setting is the bar, which is always clean, smokeless, and full of polite and non-intoxicated, upper middle- class people. Also, no one ever seems to pay for a drink, either in cash or consequences.

3. How do boys become men? Beer serves as a reward for a challenge or an initiation or rite of passage.

4. How do men relate to each other? Men relate to each other primarily in groups (interestingly enough, a contrast to the frequent loner image of masculinity). Beer drinking is the shared activity that brings the group together and is never seen as being harmful.

5. How do men relate to women? Although women are largely absent in beer commercials, they are occasionally there as rather passive and peripheral accessories. The male group is clearly more important.

Anybody watching sports events or other programming with many beer commercials receives a heavy dose of such messages. Many of these viewers are children. What are boys learning from beer commercials about the use of alcohol and what it means to be a man?

Effects of Gender Stereotyping

Although it is relatively easy to describe gender role portrayals on television, the question of their effects is a far more difficult research problem (Durkin, 1985b; Fejes, 1992). Negative or narrow gender images become a serious concern if they are seen as reflective of real life. Although no single exposure to a sexist commercial or sitcom episode is likely to irreparably harm anyone, the huge number of multiple exposures to commercials

Media Portrayals of Groups 66

unlikely not to have some effect, given what we have learned from cultivation and modeling research. In general, effects of repetition are often underestimated; if the same themes about how men and women are supposed to behave and think keep recurring on show after show, that is more likely to

be perceived as reality. For example, women may expect men to dominate them and to be relatively insensitive, or men may expect women to be submissive to them and to be preoccupied with their appearance.

Not only may we take the television portrayals of the opposite sex as reality, but we may take the portrayals of our own gender as cues to the ways we should look and behave. When we fail to meet these standards, that failure sets us up for experiencing low self-esteem. For example, a woman who feels frazzled meeting the demands of career, family, and homemaking may feel very inadequate comparing herself to the media superwoman who does it all so well, Similarly, a man losing his hair or a woman losing her youthful figure may feel like a loser when using video bodies as the standard (Myers & Biocca, 1992).

Such concerns are especially important when considering effects on children. Children who are heavy viewers of TV hold more traditional sex- role attitudes (Lemar, 1977; O’Bryant & Corder-Bolz, 1978). This relation- ship is particularly strong when limited to the amount viewed of sitcoms and soap operas with traditional gender-role orientations (Ex, Janssens, & Korzilius, 2002). Using an argument similar to cultivation theory, Kimball (1986) found that sex-role attitudes of children were less strongly sex-typed than normal in a town with no access to television; however, their attitudes became more stereotypical after the introduction of television. Wroblewski and Huston (1987) concluded that repeated TV appearances of women in traditionally male occupations can lead to more open attitudes in preteen girls toward considering those occupations. Other studies have shown that exposure to advertising portraying women in egalitarian fashion is followed by more accepting attitudes in young viewers (Geis, Brown, Jennings, & Porter, 1984; Jennings, Geis, & Brown, 1980). Botta (1999) found that media variables accounted for 15–33% of the variance in measures of adolescent girls’ drives for thinness, body dissatisfaction, bulimic behaviors, and thin ideal endorsement. Women exposed to TV ads portraying women as sex objects judged their current body size as larger and men judged their current body size thinner, compared to control groups (Lavine, Sweeney, & Wagner, 1999). Adolescent girls exposed to TV with conspicuously fat female characters were more likely to exhibit symptoms of eating disorders (Harrison, 2000; Harrison & Cantor, 1997). Obviously we cannot expect any given type of portrayal of the sexes to have a uniform effect on the public. For example, McIntyre, Hosch, Harris, and Nor vell (1986) found that less traditional men and women were more sensitive to and more critical of stereotypic portrayals of women in TV commercials, in contrast to more

67 A Cognitive Psychology of Mass Communication

traditional people. Dieting women may react differently to thin media images than non-dieting women (Mills, Polivy, Herman, & Tiggeman, 2002). Men who are more prone to use violence are affected more by sexually violent media (see chapters 9 and 10). Sometimes behaviors related in people’s minds (e.g., reading women’s magazines and anorexia-risk behaviors) in fact have different antecedents (Thomsen, McCoy, Gustafson, & Williams, 2002). Parental discussion and mediation can lessen the negative effects of media body-image stereotyping (Nathanson, Wilson, McGee, & Sebastian, 2002). The perceived reality differs across individuals.

Now that we have looked at media’s view of the sexes, let us turn to ethnic minorities, starting with a developmental model of the portrayals of minorities in media.