PORTRAYALS OF THE SEXES

PORTRAYALS OF THE SEXES

To begin with, let us examine gender portrayals. What do media say about what it means to be a man or woman? For reviews of research on gender portrayals, see Durkin (1985a, 1985b), Gerbner (1997), Gunter (1986), and Signorielli (2001).

The View of Women

We have heard a lot in recent years about stereotyping of women by the media, but what, exactly, does content analysis research tell us about the way women are portrayed? Some of these concerns are very familiar, whereas others are more subtle.

Numbers. Perhaps the most basic gender asymmetry is that there are far fewer females than males. Content analyses of characters on television shows in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s showed about twice as many men as women in prime time dramas and three to four times as many in children’s shows (Fejes, 1992; Gerbner, 1997; Signorielli, 1993; Thompson & Zerbinos, 1995). On ensemble shows of such diverse genres as Saturday

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Night Live, ER, Everybody Loves Raymond, Home Improvement, Who’s Line Is It Anyway?, Seinfeld, Frasier, Garfield, and Sesame Street, a large majority of the characters have been and continue to be male. The percentage of female characters on U.S. TV only increased from 28 to 36% from 1975– 1995, and only 20% of characters ages 45–64 were women (Gerbner, 1997). Until such mid-1980s shows as Cagney and Lacey, The Golden Girls, Designing Women, and Kate and Allie, shows with all-women lead characters were largely nonexistent in the United States, with very infrequent exceptions like One Day at a Time and the arguably sexist Charlie’s Angels of the 1970s. However, virtually all-male shows have been common through much of the history of television (e.g., Bonanza, Barney Miller, My Three Sons, Spin City, Simon and Simon, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck cartoons).

Although women appear almost as often as men as characters in commercials, the voice-over announcer is male 83% to 90% of the time (Bretl & Cantor, 1988; Ferrante, Haynes, & Kingsley, 1988; Lovdahl, 1989),

a figure virtually unchanged from the early 1970s (Dominick & Rauch, 1972). Children’s cartoon characters are male three times as often as they are female (Dobrow & Gidney, 1998; Thompson & Zerbinos, 1995). Music videos show at least twice as many males as females and tend to reinforce traditional stereotypes (J.D.Brown & Campbell, 1986; Sherman & Dominick, 1986; Sommers-Flanagan, Sommers-Flanagan, & Davis, 1993; Toney & Weaver, 1994; Took & Weiss, 1994; Vincent, Davis, & Boruszkowski, 1987). Photos of men outnumber photos of women everywhere in the newspaper except the lifestyle section (Luebke, 1989). On radio, disc jockeys, news anchors and reporters, musicians, and voice-over announcers all are still overwhelmingly male, although increasing numbers of female voices are being heard (Melton & Fowler, 1987). A substantial minority of news anchors and weathercasters are now women, although far fewer sportscasters are. In a content analysis of guests interviewed on ABC’s Nightline from 1985 to 1988, Croteau and Hoynes (1992) found that only 10% were women.

Not surprisingly, when children were asked to name their favorite characters on informational TV programs, both boys and girls were more likely to think of male than female characters and remembered more traditionally masculine than feminine behaviors (Calvert, Kotler, Zehnder, & Shockey, 2003).

A second concern is that women are too often portrayed as youthful beauties whose duty it is to stay young and attractive to please their men. Once a woman is no longer so young and attractive, she becomes an object of ridicule. Support for this criticism comes especially from the subtle messages that a woman must not allow herself to age. This

Physical Appearance.

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message appears especially, although not exclusively, in advertising, the media content with the most stereotyped gender portrayals. Women have become slimmer during the 20th century (Percy & Lautman, 1994), but the weight gap between models and real women is widening. In the mid-1990s, models weighed 23% less than the average woman, a figure up from 8% less in 1975 (Kilbourne, 1995). Seventeen, the most widely read magazine among teen girls, devotes two thirds of its editorial content to fashion and beauty topics, with most of the remaining articles about relational topics like finding boyfriends and being popular (K.Phillips, 1993). Wrinkles, gray hair, or a “mature” figure are to be avoided at all costs. At least until recently, women obviously over 30, and especially those over 50, have been grossly underrepresented on television and in all sorts of advertising. When present, they were often seen as stereotyped “old folks” that no one would want to grow up and be like (H. Davis & J.H. Davis, 1985). Women in TV ads are younger than men (70% vs. 40% under 35, respectively), ratios unchanged from the early 1970s (Dominick & Rauch, 1972; Ferrante et al., 1988).

The idealized portrayal of feminine beauty, especially in advertising, is a highly unusual body type, namely very tall, very thin, and small-hipped. These characteristics co-occur in less than 5% of the adult female population, but models are usually of this type, The other common supermodel characteristic, large breasts, is an attribute so infrequent for this body type that at least one leading scholar in the area concludes that they almost surely must be implants (Kilbourne, 1995). Computerized image construction of models and the use of body doubles, even for very attractive stars, are common. For example, in a prominent movie poster for Pretty Woman, what appeared to be actress Julia Roberts was, in fact, composite body parts selected from the best of several models, plus computer graphic enhancement. Some of her sex scenes in the film used body doubles with even more beautiful bodies or body parts (Kilbourne, 1995). For a look at the complex interaction of food, sex, and weight loss, see Box 3.1.

Breast-feeding. The breasts are presented on media as sexual organs, even in the context of their intended biological use. Consider the case of breast-feeding, now recommended by virtually the entire medical community as the preferred method of infant feeding. Advertising, and sometimes even photos in feature magazine stories on breast-feeding, show women breast-feeding in very revealing poses. It would appear that the entire breast must be bared to nurse, when in fact an infant may be nursed in public quite discreetly without revealing the breast. Prospective mothers seeing such images may be turned away from nursing, thinking they do not want to disrobe to that extent in public. Prospective fathers may fear that their wives’ nursing entails a sexual seductiveness. Employers seeing such images may

be less inclined to allow breast-feeding in the workplace, mistakenly

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believing it requires considerable undressing and/or sexually revealing poses by nursing women. Advocates of breast-feeding worry that such media images discourage mothers from offering the medically best nutrition for their infants (Dettwyler, 1995).

BOX 3.1