Misrepresentation Of Women In Media Essay

The misrepresentation of women in the media is a large issue when it comes to how gender stereotypes are perpetuated. Young children are taught early on by various movies and television programs that there are certain attitudes, tasks, and positions for males to hold. They are taught that these behaviors, tasks and positions are different from those that women should hold based on their gender. The creation of these societal norms creates a divide when it comes to how men and women are to behavior respectively within a society. These gender roles are particularly noticeable when it comes to views on positions of power. The media has created a norm that positions of power are reserved for males. One way that the media accomplishes this goal …show more content…
The advancement of technology has made it easier than ever for people to keep in touch with distant friends and relatives as well as making it easier to communicate with people. One downside of this technological advancement has been the ease to which the media outlets can broadcast their messages and just how saturated our forms of entertainment have become with ideas on what is to be expected of people in society based on their gender. Some of these ideas are subtle and are conveyed with subconscious imagery used to perpetuate the objectification of women such as women dressed in provocative clothing or behaving in ways that indicates they desire to be viewed as sexual objects. Other ideas are obviously shown when the majority of women in television or movies are displayed as being submissive to the dominance of their male counterparts be it as a wife taking orders form her on-screen husband or with a female employee taking the direction of her male supervisor despite the obviously wrong direction that he is leading her. These mentalities created and perpetuated by the media have lead to the hypersexualization of women, especially in movies and television programs. The hypersexualization of women has created a societal norm that women are objects of desire for men to obtain and creates an unachievable standard of beauty for women to constantly strive. By disseminating this idea the media outlets have successfully kept a majority of women focused more on their physical appearance than any their part of their existence. This ensures that women are not focused on achieving positions of power and ensures those positions are held by the white, heterosexual, old males for another generation. It has also become readily apparent that women need more strong on-screen female role models to encourage them to strive for those positions of power in society. The lack of female filmmakers is largely