Media Stereotypes

            Arguably, the award for most controversial ad this year goes to Subway. The franchise’ Halloween ad for 2014 succeeded in polarizing their audience. It featured a young lady wishing to keep her waist slim to fit into her various costumes, all of which were portrayed as sultry in nature. She accomplished this goal all by eating Subway. This, of course, is meant to show that if young women eat subway they will be slim and seductive in their costumes as well. Many people loved this ad simply for its holiday themed nature. Many others though condemned it for what they viewed as sexist connotations. Images like this bombard us every time we turn on our televisions. Products continually convey the idea that by using whatever it is, women will become more beautiful and feminine and men will become more handsome and manly.

Freeze Frame of Subway's Halloween Commercial.
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            For the last century women have had to live up to the expectations put upon them by the media. Throughout history when we think about women in society we think of small and thin. Today's current portrayal of women stereotypes the feminine sex as being everything that most women are not. Because of this depiction, the mentality of women today is to be thin and to look a certain way. There are many challenges with women wanting to be a certain size, one of them being mental unrest when they cannot meet society’s expectations. Female stereotypes in the media tend to undervalue women as a whole, and diminish them to sexual objects and passive human beings. Magazine ads show a dismembered female body, with parts, instead of the whole which turns women into objects. Many classic movies that we show to our children depict slender, unrealistically curvaceous, and quite vulnerable young women, who are dependent on male figures for strength and survival, not their own sense of empowerment. Media stereotyping of women as objects and helpless beings creates very low expectations for society's girls. When a woman is in a position of power, such as the rare female boss portrayed in the media, she tends to be a cold-harted , detached career woman with sociopathic tendencies. This sends the message that a powerful woman sacrifices a healthy relationship, family, and possibly even her sanity to be extremely successful at her career. For the young girl who dreams to run a company, or become a famous journalist, astronaut, or scientist, the media does not provide enough models for her to look to for encouragement and inspiration.

One "sexy" girl being submissive to the group of "manly" men that dominate the image.
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A cologne ad for men, with a skinny naked women.
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            Men are often the forgotten gender when it comes to stereotypes but they are no less affected. The commercials of today show many different products that give the male consumer the image of being more attractive to the opposite sex should they be purchased and used. The iconic male stereotype is the provider and strong backbone of the family. The image of strength has not changed much in the thousands of years since its formation. There is always going to be pressure put on a man to provide for his family, but media has not done anything to ease the struggle. Images pollute the stations that scream out “real” men drive this car, dress in these clothes, or make this much money. Just like the pressure women feel to measure up to the impossible ideal form shown to them, men feel pressure to have the bulging muscles and fit physique of the male models that women everywhere fawn over. The pressure put upon the male gender is not given the attention it deserves in the media, but it is no less detrimental to the mental health of our society than the images of a stick thin woman modeling in a bathing suit.

Extremely skinny women in a "I Love My Body" ad
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            Although people are aware of the danger of these grossly in-achievable stereotypes, they tend to be conformists and would rather submit to the dominant patterns than oppose them and risk the backlash from others in reaction to these opinions. Though there is hope to change the current standards of the world. If we become aware of the stereotypes and teach our children to recognize such depictions, perhaps we can change the population into informed viewers instead of manipulated and mechanical consumers. Moreover, the commercials evolve along with the development of a society and are the answer to many social and political changes. If we as a society stand up and require the media to change their portrayal of both men and women they will, their bottom line will require it. However, in order for this change to take place the world must be ready for it. In recent years there has been more and more social unrest over the what is shown to us by the media. Conversely, the negative images have also gotten more extreme with each commercial shown and each magazine issue released. The world is polarized with one side calling for a change and the other enabling the spread of false expectations. It is time for the public to pick one of these sides.

Beautiful but a bit more naturalistic looking woman.
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Depicting women that are not idealistic but actually love their body and are not afraid to show it.
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More empowering
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TV Through the Ages

Old Television set
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Television is arguably the greatest invention of the 20th century if not the most influential. In the late 1940’s through the 1950’s television became a household staple. The whole family would gather around the earliest television sets and watch Howdy Doody and CBS News. If you were lucky enough to have a one of those T.V.’s you were the envy of the neighborhood. Television brought the family together to look in awe at the moving depictions of the happenings of the world. After World War II television sets became a highly popular consumer product, and the addition of color to broadcast television after 1953 increased the popularity of television sets even further.

Technology has shaped everything in the modern world, television being no exception. Those early televisions would be hardly recognizable to the center pieces of the living rooms of today. The original innovators of the television set could never have imagined the advances modern technology has made to their devices. In the early days there were two or three channels tops where as now we are swimming in options to tune into next. The 1980’s introduced television accessories such as the VCR and gaming consoles like the Nintendo. Three decades later we have seen these evolve into the Blu-ray players and Xboxes of today. We take for granted now that it was not always so easy to watch the latest movies. With the addition of concepts such as AppleTV and GoogleTV, the TV and computer have merged into one device. The introduction of smart phones has reduced the need for television sets at all, since streaming directly to the handheld device is gaining increasing popularity.

Scene from The popular 1947 Howdy Doody show
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The programming that has come into our homes these past 64 years has vastly changed over the years. In the beginning there were three major broadcasting entities that are still around today: NBC, CBS, and ABC. The main focus of the programming in the 50s and 60s were to make viewers laugh with shows that were an exaggeration of what happened at home as well as the original variety show, The Tonight Show. These original shows are the grandparents of the many shows that we have today including drama series, sports programming, cartoons, soap operas, etc. Technology has molded the programming in the sense that the advances in filming techniques and computer generated technology has allowed for the visions of even the wildest imaginations to come to life.

Cable Timeline
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 Television is just one of the areas technology has advanced. Like so many other things, however, it came at a price. Watching television is no longer the event that brings a family together to watch the events of the day. A snowball effect started long ago that makes television the background noise of our lives. Instead of bringing people together it is more of a distraction from each other. People focus on the programs behind the screen instead of the life in front of it.

The progression of how we view TV programming.
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