Media and Cultural Representation of the Gender

By Leonard Ibrahimi

INTRODUCTION

Mass media contribute to the cultural representation of gender and they do it in different ways; however this contribution depends on media form. Some media forms still perpetuate traditional gender stereotypes because they reflect dominant social values. In reflecting them media also reinforces them, presenting them as ‘natural’. A number of media forms, through their programs and list of items, have developed the idea in many people to believe that these programs – based substances are masculine.

This essay will aim to explain the contribution of mass media forms, such as advertising and soap opera, to the cultural representation of gender and the way audiences are positioned by these forms of representation. In media advertisements, gender stereotyping tends to be at its strongest because the target audiences are frequently both male and female. Men tend to be portrayed as more autonomous. They are shown in more occupations than women; women are exposed mainly as housewives and mothers. On the other hand, soap opera as a form of media are a consistent set of values based on personal relationships, on women’s responsibility for the upholding of these relationships and the applicability of the family model to structures. Soap opera, as a form of virtual reality, has a tendency to deal with societal concerns of women, the same things that women typically talk about domestic matters, kinship, and sexuality. Soap operas are like a distinct world where the men take seriously all the things that women have to deal with all day long.


ADVERTISEMENTS AND THE CULTURAL REPRESENTATION OF GENDER

Advertising occupies a special position within the economic organization of a modern society, and it is not just an economic entity. Advertising deals with ideas, attitudes, and values, giving them cultural form through its signifying practices (Sinclair 1987, p.57). Advertising as “signifying practices” gives meaning to words and images. Through this process, advertising distributes its meanings into the belief systems of the society. As Schudson (1984, p.13) puts, the promotional culture of advertising has worked its way into “what we read, what we care about, the ways we raise our children, our ideas of right and wrong conduct, our attribution of significance to ‘image’ in both public and private life”.

A significant cultural and structural analysis of advertising is provided in “Decoding Advertisements”, by Judith Williamson (1978, p.43). She explains the ideological processes in advertising by which goods are given meaning. According to Williamson, advertising transforms the practical “use value” of projects into the symbolic “exchange value” of commodities. She calls this the “metastructure”, “where meaning is not just ‘decoded’ within one structure, but transferred to create another”. This means that meaning is created through the audience, rather than meaning being directed at audiences. The exchange of meaning in the advertisement may depend from the reader’s cultural knowledge. Thus, Williamson emphasizes that it is the structure of the advertisement itself which “positions” the reader in a certain knowledge context.

According to Jhally (1987, p.130), there are stages to the constitution of meanings; one of the most important stages is that of “transferring” the meaning of one sign to another. The transference requires the active participation of the viewer of the advertisement. Audiences do not just receive meaning from advertising, they constantly re-create it. As a consequence, advertising plays the role of a mediator.

Since advertising reaches millions of individuals daily, it has become object for serious inspection by researchers interested about woman’s representation on the media. Advertisements have been accused of stereotyping images of women, and they have been targets of various studies. Advertising messages about women are often stereotypical (e.g., a woman's place is in the home, women do not make important decisions or do important things, women are dependent and need men's protection, and men look upon women primarily as sexual objects). Advertisements have constantly restricted women to traditional mother-, home-, or beauty/sex-oriented roles that are not representative of women's diversity.

Studies have shown that the image of women that has predominated in advertisements is of weak, childish, dependent, domestic, irrational, subordinate creatures, the producers of children and little else compared with men. Lucy Kosimar (1971, p.301) suggests the audience of advertising could never know the reality of women's lives by looking at advertising, since “A woman’s place is not only in the home, according to most advertising copywriters and art directors; it is in the kitchen, in the laundry room”. The image created by advertisers about the women is a combination of sex object, wife, and mother who achieves fulfilment by looking beautiful for men. A woman is not depicted as intelligent, but submissive and subservient to men. If a woman has a job, it is as a secretary, or an airline hostess, and nothing else.

Courtney and Lockeretz (1979, Vol. 8, pp. 92-95) examined images of women in advertisements; they reported the following findings:
Women were hardly ever shown in out-of-home working roles.
Not many women were shown as a professional or high-level business person.
Women rarely ventured far from home by themselves or with other women.
Women were shown as dependent on men's protection.
Men were exposed as a subject that consider women as sex objects or as domestic adjuncts.
Females were most often shown in ads for cleaning products, food products, beauty products, drugs, clothing, and home appliances.
Males were most often shown in advertisements for cars, travel, alcoholic beverages, cigarettes, banks, industrial products, entertainment media, and industrial companies.

Surrounded by the stereotypes typically engaged in advertising by the media are the ideas that women do unimportant things and a woman's place is in the home. Sullivan & O'Connor (1988, Vol. 18, pp. 181-188) found that there has been a 60% increase in advertisements in which women are portrayed in purely decorative roles. They also claimed that the woman's role in advertising is sexy and charming. Kilbourne (1990, Vol. 67, pp. 25-31) found that exposure to advertisements using stereotypical sex roles for women resulted in drastically lower perceptions of women's managerial abilities than exposure to advertisements depicting women in professional type roles requiring such abilities. In his book, Goffman (1979, p.182) concludes that women are weakened by advertising portrayals via five categories: relative size (women shown smaller or lower, relative to men), feminine touch (women constantly touching themselves), function ranking (occupational), ritualization of subordination (proclivity for lying down at inappropriate times, etc.), and licensed withdrawal (women never quite a part of the scene, possibly via far-off gazes).

Therefore, more strongly than in earlier years, the representation of both men and women on advertisements is largely traditional and stereotypical. This serves to promote a polarization of gender roles. With femininity are associated traits such as emotionality, prudence, co-operation, a communal sense, and compliance. Masculinity tends to be associated with such traits as reasonableness, good organization, competition, individualism and ruthlessness. Using women in a sexist tone in advertisements has more profound social implications. If the media do shape expectations, opinions, and attitudes, then the audience of these advertisements may accept the way women are depicted as reality. What may be needed is the portrayal of women in roles that actually reflect their perceived attributes and their individuality.


SOAP OPERA AND THE CULTURAL REPRESENTATION OF GENDER

Soap opera, as a form aimed at women, was developed in the boundaries of popular civilization as a space for the cultural representation of an underestimated component of experience – personal and emotional life. Soap opera is addressed to the socially mandated concerns of women – the family, the domestic arena, personal relationships as they work out both in the family and at work (Hall 2003, p.376). Soap operas are like a distinct world; with their intriguing plots and lifelike characters, they are able to capture the minds of many viewers.

The audience of soap operas does include men (and almost certainly more men than are ready to admit it), but some theorists argue that the gender of the viewer is ‘inscribed’ in the program (domestic and community issues) so that soaps address women in particular. Soap operas appeal to those who value the personal and household world. Dorothy Hobson (1982, pp.150-157) argues that women typically use soaps as a way of talking indirectly about their own attitudes and behaviour.

Soaps in general have a predominantly female audience, although prime-time soaps such as ‘Dallas’ are intentionally aimed at a wider audience, and in fact a huge number of the audience for this soap was male. According to Ang (1985, p.121), and hardly surprisingly, in ‘Dallas’ the main interest for men was in business relations and problem and the power and wealth shown, whereas women were more often interested in the family issues and love affairs. In the course of her analysis of the representation of women in soap opera, Geraghty (in Hall 2003, p.367) suggests a series of oppositions that produce a world constructed between the poles of gendered difference: women (that are associated with qualities such as personal, home, talk, community) and men (that are associated with qualities such as public, work, action, individualism).

Two of several interesting features of soap opera are its running of several story lines at the same time and the endlessness. Running of several story lines at once is not a matter of sub – plots as adjuncts to a central action but the intertwining of different characters lives. This clearly helps to keep the serial going, so that as one story line runs out, another is coming to the boil (Hall 2003, p.364). Secondly, soaps are unlike traditional drama which has a beginning, middle and an end: soaps have no beginning or end, no structural closure. The structure of soaps is complex and there is no final word on any issue.

Ien Ang (1985, p.45) argues that watching soaps involves a kind of realism for the viewer: an emotional realism which exists at the connotative rather than denotative (content) level. This offers less concrete, more ‘symbolic representations of more general living experiences’ which viewers find recognizably ‘true to life’ (even if at the denotative level the treatment seems ‘unrealistic’). Therefore, soap operas are virtual reality in the way that they expose their viewers to another world. In this world, people are aware that soap operas are a separate entity; however, at the same time, one may feel as if he or she is a part of the show.

Talk, as a defining feature of soap opera, offers a different approach of social action: conversation, gossip, dissection of personal and moral issues, and at crisis points, rows. Talk, in these forms, however is culturally defined as feminine involving the exercise of skills and methods of understanding developed by women in the particular socio – historical circumstances in which they live. It is, therefore, a key to establishing a female cultural verisimilitude, as opposed to the investment of male – oriented genres in action (Hall 2003, p.371). In this respect, soap opera’s talk is the most important factor in its negotiation of gender.


CONCLUSION

To conclude, there is difference between advertising and soap opera regarding to their contribution to the cultural representation of gender and the way audiences are positioned by these forms of representation. Advertisements are conservative and tied to the existing ideology of the culture. They are largely traditional and occupied by gender stereotyping. The ‘dream-girl’ stereotype is gentle, demure, sensitive, submissive, non-competitive, sweet-natured and dependent. The male hero tends to be physically strong, aggressive, and assertive, takes the initiative, and is independent, competitive and ambitious. It seems that advertising has a role to depict women not necessarily how they actually behave, but rather, how advertisers think women behave. Moreover, this depiction serves the social purpose of convincing the audience that this is how women are, or should be.

On the other hand, soap operas are characterized by a tendency to deal with societal concerns of women; soaps appeal to those who value the personal and domestic world. The soap opera genre shares such features as moral polarization, strong emotions, female orientation, unlikely coincidences, and excess. Soap operas define women in relation to a concern with the family. In ‘realistic’ soaps, female characters are portrayed as more central than in action drama, as ordinary people dealing with everyday problems; and men may sometimes be seen as caring, loving and expressive rather than dominating and authoritative.










REFERENCES

Ang, I. 1985, Watching 'Dallas': Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination, Methuen, London.

Courtney, A. & Lockeretz, S. 1979, ‘A woman's place: An analysis of the roles portrayed by women in advertisements’, Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. 8, pp. 92-95.

Goffman, E. 1979, Gender Advertisements, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

Hall, S. 2003, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks.

Hobson, D. 1982, 'Crossroads' - The Drama of a Soap, Methuen, London.

Jhally, S. 1987, Codes of Advertising, St. Martin's Press, New York.

Kilbourne, W. 1990, ‘Female stereotyping in advertising: An experiment on male-female perceptions of leadership’. Journalism Quarterly, Vol. 67, pp. 25-31. Kosimar, L. 1971, Woman in Sexist Society, Basic, New York.

Schudson, M. 1984, Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion, Basic Books, New York.

Sinclair, J. 1987, Images Incorporated: Advertising as Industry and Ideology, Croom Helm, New York.

Sullivan, G. & O'Connor, P. 1988, ‘Women's role portrayals in magazine advertising: 1958-1983’, Sex Roles, Vol. 18, pp. 181-188.

Williamson, J. 1978, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. Marion Boyars, London.