MEDIA AND GENDER

How Do Media Affect Team Age Girls As Far As Its Concerning With There Body

How Do Media Affect Team Age Girls As Far As Its Concerning With There Body

Introduction

It is estimated that the average American is exposed to over 40,000 television commercials per year. When the even larger amount of print advertisements are considered, it is easy to understand why so many scholars of gender and media studies are concerned about the omnipresent effect of media advertisements on gender stereotyping (Byerly & Ross 2006, 14-28). Because of the limited amount of time allocated to television commercials and the short attention span of the audience, advertisers often rely on highly visual and easily recognizable images and situations to promote their products and services. Often, these messages contain gender, class, and racial stereotypes that reinforce social perceptions of already marginalized groups by the use of widely held inaccurate and overly simplified images and conceptions.

Social learning theory best explains the impact of advertisements on audiences and suggests that audiences are more likely to identify with an advertisement's preferred meaning and persuaded to purchase a product or service if the narrative is easily recognizable and often repeated. Gender portrayals in mainstream advertisements therefore tend to reflect hegemonic, unquestioned gender roles that are easily recognizable and widely accepted in society. While stereotypical gender portrayals may help advertisers to sell products, such portrayals also negatively influence self-perceptions of audiences. In fact, media effects theories often see a correlation between exposure to gender stereotypes in advertising and female levels of self-consciousness and social anxiety. (Byerly & Ross 2006, 14-28)

How do media messages influence people's self-perceptions? Direct effects media scholars suggest that people copy and adjust their behaviors and thinking according to the volume and content of media messages they encounter on a daily basis. Therefore, for instance, if mass media systematically portray men as physically and emotionally aggressive, audiences may begin to believe that such dominant behavior is gender appropriate. This problem becomes more acute with audience members whose access to information is limited to these advertisement sources. Media critics, however, have noted that direct effects models are rather one-dimensional, discounting various manners and social contexts in which audiences watch and interpret media messages. Direct effects models, they argue, tend to ignore the transforming effects of individuals' agency or institutionalized social inequalities on message-decoding processes. Media effects, then, are not embedded in the messages themselves or even in the medium through which these are spread, but rather in what audiences do with these messages. The ways in which individuals interpret the ideologies embedded in advertisements depends on the social and physical environments in which these are viewed. This interpretation also depends on personal characteristics and social identifications of the audience, as well as the social networks in which the ideologies are discussed.

Whether one believes in direct or indirect media effects, concerns about the effects of sexist media portrayals on self-perceptions of audiences are grounded in the belief that people use media messages and information to construct ...