Media and Gender Roles

Brace yourselves. The new fall television season is approaching.

Television critics who've previewed the offerings say there will be plenty of recycling: more "reality," crime-solving, and medical shows. And perhaps even less surprising, there will be the same old gender stereotyping that wins approval from TV's ubiquitous laugh tracks, as in Stacked with Pamela Anderson, returning on FOX.

Stacked is about a party girl who gets a job in a bookstore — hence the double entendre. If you know what Anderson looks like, you'll know what I mean.

So will viewers, especially teens. And when they think "stacked," they're not thinking books.

If you thought that gender stereotyping had gone the way of the rabbit-ear antennae, think again. On TV, in print, and in video games, it's alive and well and living in your kid's bedroom.

TV's "Reality"

Television, magazines, and video games often promote stereotypical ways of looking, feeling, and behaving. Pre-teens and teens can be very suggestible, and many internalize in an unhealthy way what they see in the media.

"Television plays a central role in most youngsters' social lives, providing the fuel for conversations and peer group cohesiveness," says Nancy Signorielli, a noted researcher in the field of children and the media, and professor of communications at the University of Delaware. "The prime-time television world transmits a compelling and fairly stable set of images about gender roles."

Women on television tend to be younger than men and fade from the screen as they age. "It's a world in which good looks count, and watching too much television may give adolescents unrealistic expectations about what can happen as they grow up," says Signorielli. It follows that teens see as reality the gender stereotyping and sexual hype of the media.

A "reality" show like MTV's The Real World, for example, offers an unscripted look into the lives of seven young people between 18 and 24. They're "usually beautiful and always overly dramatic," says Danielle Stern, an Ohio University Ph.D. candidate in mass communications. She says they illustrate "the larger problem of television producers using sex and the exploitation of the female body to attract a young audience."

The 12-24-demographic is hugely popular with advertisers, because many members of that group are discriminating and frequent shoppers. MTV pulls out all the stops to deliver that demographic to its advertisers, but at the expense of girls and young women, who may be tempted to engage in sexual risk-taking as a result of a steady diet of TV characters who are doing just that.

Gender Roles in Print

Magazines for women and girls send mixed messages about sexual experimentation and ideal body types, too. Titles geared to teen girls offer tips on flirting, looking "hot," and making out at school, while scattering cautionary advice on sexual behavior on other pages. But the big headlines and glossy spreads are all about personal appearance and initiation into heterosexual romantic relationships.

In their chapter in Sexual Teens, Sexual Media: Investigating Media's Influence on Adolescent Sexuality, university professors Kim Walsh-Childers (University of Florida); Alyse Gotthoffer (University of Miami); and Carolyn Ringer Lepre (California State University — Chico) note, "Teens' magazines have increased the amount of space focused on non-health sex issues even more, percentage-wise, than have women's magazines; at the same time, space for sexual health-focused content has grown only slightly." In other words, the publications are offering teen girls more information on sex than on sexual health.

In her study of Seventeen, the leading magazine among U. S. teens, Frances Gorman deplores ads that "display women as subordinate and sexualized. Many ads contain mixed messages, with a model signifying confidence through her direct gaze and subordination through her body language.

"Women's bodies continue to be displayed and emphasized as objects, either through photographic cropping or subordinate postures paired with body display," she says. "Teens are consuming the same messages as their mothers, with a variety of new trends mixed in which serve as nothing more than updated versions of the same gender-stereotyped myths of femininity."

And among Latina teens, the media is a stronger predictor of girls' support for traditional gender roles than acculturation, according to a study by Rocio Rivadeneyra published in the July 2005 issue of Journal of Adolescent Research.

The Thin Ideal

Publications that trumpet a thin body ideal can cause considerable harm, and women's and girls' titles are often among the repeat offenders. "Magazines, not television, seem to have the strongest relationship to eating disorders," says Rose M. Kundanis, author of Children, Teens, Families and Mass Media: The Millennial Generation. Magazines offer more instruction on dieting and therefore seem to be more significantly correlated to eating disorders."

The impact is even being felt in grade school: in 2003, Teen magazine reported (without acknowledging its own role in perpetuating the thin ideal) that 35 percent of U.S. girls six to 12 years old have been on at least one diet, and that among normal-weight girls 50 percent to 70 percent consider themselves overweight.

But TV is still a powerful influence in persuading teen girls that they must preserve, or attain, a thin body in order to appeal to boys. A classic is the study of young women in Fiji, conducted shortly after the introduction of TV to that island nation.

In Fijian culture, weight gain was considered good and losing weight was seen as unhealthy. In 1995, TV arrived. Within three years, the number of teens at risk for eating disorders more than doubled. Fijian girls who watched a lot of TV were 50 percent more likely to describe themselves as fat and 30 percent more likely to diet than those girls who watched less television.

The Guy Thing

In the video game world, one of the worst offenders when it comes to depicting men and boys as ruthless tough guys and women and girls as sexual objects is the Grand Theft Auto video game series. In July 2005, the Parents Television Council called for the producer of the game to recall the San Andreas version of Grand Theft Auto because it contains a software modification, called "hot coffee," that allows characters to engage in sex acts at a girl's house. The modification can be downloaded from the Internet.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) has promised to introduce legislation that would limit the sale to minors of sexually explicit and violent games. And the Entertainment Software Rating Board has launched an investigation into "hot coffee."

Sadly, the old saw that "the more things change, the more they stay the same" is at work in today's media offerings. Negative and often harmful stereotypes continue to blanket both special-market and mainstream media, influencing teens' behavior and the choices they make every day.