9 – The Gender of Media and Popular Culture
Learning Outcomes
- Analyze how gender influences media consumption patterns and preferences.
- Evaluate gender representation in various forms of media and popular culture.
- Identify stereotypes and biases in media content across different platforms.
- Examine the role of gender in shaping entertainment choices and cultural preferences.
- Develop critical thinking skills to assess gender-based marketing in media industries.
- Understand the social and cultural implications of gendered media consumption.
- Institutions: basic building block of society, helps explain how society works.
- Examples of gendered institutions: friendship, courting, marriage, families, and work.
- Media as an institution: behaviors (having a television) and formal organizations.
- Formal organization: A group of people who interact regularly and have a set of explicit, written rules.
- Importance of formal organizations: produce the content out of television, film projector, Internet, or video game.
- Looking at gender makeup of organizations (behind-the-scenes). Reveal how gender is a part of these behind-the-scenes activities is an important part of understanding the gendered content these organizations produce.
- Content-focused perspective: Focus on the actual stuff that’s on the television, the movie screen, the magazine page, or the computer screen.
- Gender shapes the structure of media organizations as well as the interactions that take place inside them.
- In advertising and public relations, women face a glass ceiling and segregation, work on products considered more feminine.
- Research shows popular culture industries intensify gender stereotypes, even worse than in other occupations.
- Male domination: In 2017, of the top 100 grossing films, 14% written by women, 20% produced by women, 0.04% directed by women. On television, women accounted for 31% of individuals working behind the scenes in key positions.
- Across all television platforms, women did best as producers (40%) followed by writers (35%), executive producers (30%), directors (26%), creators (25%), editors (21%), and directors of photography (5%).
- High-risk nature: Very few television pilots become successful shows that run for more than one season. Same in film where the 36,000 scripts registered each year compare to only 300 feature films actually released in the United States. Only 12% of key behind-the-scene positions in superhero and sci-fi films were held by women.
- Studios are averse to taking any risks, such as producing the first action movie written by a woman screenwriter.
- Confining women to a select genre of movies reduces the range of possible movie scripts they can write.
- It also makes female screenwriters more vulnerable to the ever-shifting trends in television and film.
- The Bechdel-Wallace Test: criteria portrayed in the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, by Allison Bechdel, in 1985. A movie must have two female characters, each of whom has a name, who have a conversation with each other about something other than a man.
- Original idea extends back to Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own.
- Critiques: The criteria set a low bar for movies; list of movies that fail the test is outstanding.
- Some studies suggest that only 50% of movies made between 1974 and 2015 pass the Bechdel-Wallace Test.
- Movies that do pass the test include “Kill Bill” Volumes 1 and 2 (2003–2004), “Frozen” (2013), “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015), “Hidden Figures” (2016), “Wonder Woman” (2017), “CODA” (2021), “Weird Science” (1985), “Goodfellas” (1990), “Showgirls” (1995), “American Pie 2” (2001), “Twilight” (2008).
Behind the Scenes: The Gender of Media Organizations: Gender and the History of Screenwriting
- Women scenarists during silent film era (1900s-1927): women made up somewhere between 50% and 90% of all scenarists. Highest-paid writer of the 1920s was Frances Marion.
- Displacement of women by men: Innovation of sound increased the importance of storytelling, raising the prestige of screenwriting jobs. Transition was nearly complete by the 1930s, with women making up only 15% of working screenwriters. Today, the percentage is only slightly higher, with women making up 13% of all screenwriters.
- Daytime television assumes women are home watching; prime time assumes men are watching with their families.
- Female executives are more likely to be confined to “feminine” divisions, supervising female-typed genres. This gendered structure continues for major broadcast networks.
- Limiting women’s opportunities to have their screenplays made or confining them to certain TV shows affects the gender content of media produced.
- Decline in female top executives at major studios affects the types of movies produced and released. Few women producers have to fight for movies that appeal to female audiences.
Gender, Advertising, and the Commodification of Gender
- Market segmentation: divide a diverse market into smaller segments based on characteristics like gender, social class, and race.
- Advertising creates a sense of need by convincing consumers they can attain some desirable state by buying their product.
- Commodification: Turning any object, idea, or behavior into something that can be bought and sold. Example: Diamonds associated with romance, happiness, and marital bliss since 1947.
- Reasons for using gender in advertising: gender displays are familiar; it allows advertisers to reach consumers through a core identity.
- Problems with using gender: Complex ways we experience gender are lost in advertising. Ads rarely depict working-class women and men of color, which are often negative.
- The complex ways in which we experience/live gender, and the variations in expressing gender, are largely lost in advertising depictions.
- Examples: Advertisements rarely depict working-class women and men of color which are often negative. The copy for a magazine advertisement for rice read, “Whatever you’re giving him tonight, he’ll enjoy it more with rice,” and featured a picture of a woman smiling seductively.
- The words and images begin to create an increasingly distorted sense of gender and sexuality.
- Example: Women and men are bombarded with images of ideal beauty as primarily white, young, and thin.
- Shifting attention to content of advertisements moves us toward the content of messages produced by the media and what consumers do with those messages.
- Exploring this approach raises questions about how we make sense of what television, movies, the Internet, popular music, and magazines are telling us about gender.
- Media power theory: culture industry, developed by Theodor Adorno, describes it as a “well-oiled machine producing entertainment products to make a profit.” Culture becomes something imposed, a commodity to be bought and sold.
- Media products are “exactly the same” in embodying values of the established system. Choices are controlled by media organizations.
- Television shows, movies, and magazine articles consist largely of interchangeable elements that are reused.
- Content is less important than the time and energy media consume. Conformity replaces consciousness. Banal content turns audience into passive, conformist sheep.
- False consciousness: Institutions mislead people about the true state of affairs and relations of power. The media convinces us it has no influence.
Audience Power Theory: Power to the People
- Audience power theory: popular culture is made by the people, argues John Fiske. We are not sheep but consumers capable of decoding and interpreting media to suit our needs and deciding whether to participate.
- Production of media content takes place within a framework of power relations, but meaning escapes its preferred meaning.
- Preferred meaning: An intended meaning given for a commercial while in the process of the creation of that commercial. Overspill of meanings: Possibility for viewers to create their own alternative or resistant meanings from any particular media content.
Gender, Sexuality, and Slash Fiction
- Fan fiction: written by and for fans on a not-for-profit basis, posted online. Characters live out alternative lives. Shipping: Affinity for a fictional couple. Slash: Fan fiction that sexualizes/romanticizes same-sex relationships (mostly male). Fem slash focuses on two female characters.
- Assumptions: Slash seen as an attempt to “make everything gay” or influence the plot trajectory.
- Queering of mainstream media: Use power to shape narratives that better reflect diversity. Slash brings attention to how everything is queer because gender and sexuality categories are flawed.
- Slash shipping: Way to reclaim stories in a potentially liberatory way.
Super Girl Fan Fiction in China
- Three categories of fan fiction: good conscious (het slash), Yaoi/Tanbi/boys’ love (BL) which is slash, Yuri/girls’ love which is fem slash.
- Super Girl: Chinese version of American Idol, audience votes. Focuses on imagining relationships between women contestants.
- Arguments about boy’s and girls’ love fan fiction: stories have the potential to challenge sexual taboos, rebel against heterosexual norms, turn women from objects into active gazers at male objects. But some point out that girls and women are still largely absent from these narratives.
- Yang and Bao’s study found resistance from the wider Super Girl fan community. The online forum was kicked out of a general forum because of their emphasis on girls’ love. Members tended to be more feminist.
- Slash fan fiction is viewed as pornography by the Chinese government.
- Limited power of audiences: The crackdown by the Chinese government highlights the limits of audience power, especially in a society where free speech is curtailed.
- Terrorist depictions of Arab men are repeatedly seen in media, not an accurate representation.
- Early depictions of women of the Middle Eastern world were based on Europeans’ exposure to stories, and therefore, they centered on depictions of women as exotic and mysterious objects of curiosity, locked away from Western eyes in luxurious harems.
- The image of the harem led to an emphasis on sensuality and submissiveness of Arab women.
- Women are the moral gauge, symbols of the nation itself. In Egyptian movies, women represent the values of the nation. Egyptians refer to their nation as Umm al-Dunya (Mother of the World).
The Struggle Over Images: Beware of Black Men: Race, Gender, and the Local News
- Local television news programs in the United States show images of Black men robbing, raping, looting, and pillaging night after night. Being an African American man is most dangerous for African American men themselves.
- Consequences of Black Men images: Police violence against Black men and women led to the rise of the #BlackLivesMatter movement in 2013.
- Depiction of Asian men in the United States: passive and feminine, lacking masculine characteristics. Cast as exotic villains with sexual designs on white women, more recently as action heroes but rarely as leading men with romantic interests.
The Struggle Over Images: Homer and Ralph: White, Working-Class Men on TV
- White, working-class male buffoon: Dumb, immature, irresponsible, lacking common sense.
- Examples: Homer Simpson, Fred from The Flintstones, Archie Bunker from All in the Family, Doug Heffernan from The King of Queens, Peter Griffin from Family Guy.
- Contrasting roles: Buffoons are well-intentioned but never imitated. Father figures in middle-class comedies are wise and capable, working with their wives to raise perfect children.
- Intersectionality: Draws attention to how gender is employed to enforce other types of inequality.
How Women Are Portrayed On Screen in the Top 500 Films (2007-2012)
- 30.8% of speaking characters are women.
- 28.8% of women wore sexually revealing clothes, as opposed to 7.0% of men.
- 26.2% of women actors get partially naked, while 9.4% of men do.
- 10.7% of movies featured a balanced cast where half of the characters are female.
- Average ratio of male actors to female actors is 2.25:1.
- Percentage of teenage females depicted with some nudity has increased 32.5% from 2007 to 2012.
- Roughly a third of female speaking characters are shown in sexually revealing attire or are partially naked.
- Sexuality in past eras: Shakespeare's bawdy humor, pornographic writings, nude photographs (before photography), moving pictures used to film a striptease as early as 1896.
- Internet: The word sex is the most popular search term used on the Internet.
- Shift in depictions: Sexual acts depicted now were not seen in early Hollywood. Sexualization of women seems to begin at increasingly younger ages.
- Midriff: young woman intentionally uses her sexuality as a means of empowerment. Evolved with pop culture icons like Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Kim Kardashian. Represents working through contradictions regarding gender and sexuality after the second wave of feminism.
- Effects of youthful exploration of sexuality as empowerment: Rising rates of teenage pregnancy and spread of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).
- Goth: Music-based subculture with ties to media and popular culture. Involves ways of seeing and being seen. Characterized by open sexuality that many goth women find liberating.
- Two norms of the goth scene: respect spatial boundaries at goth clubs (violators ostracized), and goth women wear fairly revealing clothing. They interpret this as taking advantage of the safe space to express their sexuality.
- Audience research or reception studies: The ways in which audiences make sense of the media are more important than trying to discover some definitive meaning intended by the creators of that particular media.
- Interpretive reproduction: Children are inventive social participants in the reproduction, interpretation, and formation of their social world. Emphasizes how children adopt, use, and transform cultural symbols in peer culture.
- Use of Cinderella as a way to do gender: For girls and boys, Disney’s Cinderella reinforces gender norms and demonstrates their knowledge of masculinity and femininity. They interpret the symbols in ways that largely reinforce existing ideas about gender.
- Two periods of Disney animated movies: domestic era (1937–1989) where female characters are domestic housekeepers in need of rescue (Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty), and rebellious, new-age era (1989–present) where female characters are more independent but lose their voices (The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Pocahontas, Mulan).
- Genderbent Disney characters: Artwork in which the gender is changed, a way to actively alter symbols and meanings of the films and demonstrate audience power.
Masculinity and Video Games: Learning the Three Rs
- The audience for video games in general demonstrates more gender equality, the audience for the most violence-prone video games is predominantly young men.
- One study conducted in 2019, found that women made up 54% of those playing computer and video games, an increase from 38% in 2006.
- Men dominate the world of game consoles like Xbox and PlayStation, where players are 75% male. The players of sports and adventure games, from Madden NFL to Duke Nukem, are 95% male.
- Michael Kimmel argued many video games are violent, misogynistic, heterosexist, and hostile toward racial and ethnic others. Examples: Grand Theft Auto (misogyny), Tomb Raider (heterosexist), The Warriors (hostile toward racial and ethnic others).
- For young, white, male college students, playing video games did not contribute to real-life violence but reinforced the three Rs of guyland media: relaxation (escape from adult demands), revenge (against those who have usurped what you thought was yours, portrayed through stereotypes), and restoration (sense of control, power, and privilege).
- Reverse discrimination: Perception that affirmative action policies result in discrimination against dominant groups such as whites and men. According to U.S. Department of Labor (1994) statistics, out of more than 3,000 cases, less than 2% involve charges of reverse discrimination against whites or men.
The Gender of Leisure
- Economists view leisure as the opposite of paid work. Noneconomists view it as free time to spend as we choose.
- Pure leisure: Engaging only in leisure activities.
- Contaminated leisure: Combining leisure activities with unpaid work, like housework and childcare.
- Men's leisure time > 61% of men’s leisure is pure leisure, while women's little more than half of women’s leisure is pure leisure.
- Women experience a larger proportion of contaminated leisure.
- Harried leisure: Leisure widely distributed in short increments.
- Women are more likely to squeeze leisure into their schedules, with shorter uninterrupted periods of leisure than men.
- Adult leisure: Leisure spent purely with adults. Family leisure: Leisure spent with children.
- Among parents with small children, men spend more time in adult leisure than women. Mothers spend more than half their time with children doing physical care. Men spend almost a third of their childcare time playing with their children.
