Gender Stereotypes In TV Shows

Every once in awhile, shows such as Leave It to Beaver or Father Knows Best come up while surfing the tv guide. While these are two examples of remarkably popular television shows of the mid 1900’s, they also portray the gender normalities of the time period. Gender roles were simply and precisely defined. Men went to work and made the money, while the women stayed home to take care of the house and kids. However, as humanity enters the sixteenth year of the twenty first century, this precision begins to blur. Gender roles have come a long way in the past century. That being said, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, is almost like a time capsule, immersing the reader into the gender norms of the 1950s. Capote portrays these norms prominently throughout In Cold Blood, specifically in the second vignette.

In the Sixties sexism was a widely accepted part of society but not in modern times. Commercials still stereotype women today but not nearly as much as in the Sixties. In the 1960’s Folgers Coffee commercial, the husband’s attitude towards the wife, Papa Eddie’s interaction with the woman, and the woman’s reaction to the men reveal the sexist attitudes of the time period.

Television situational comedies have the ability to represent different values or concerns of their audience, these values often change every decade or so to reflect and highlight the changes that the audience is experiencing within society, at the time of production. Between the years of 1950 and 2010, the representation of gender roles and family structure has been addressed and featured in various sitcoms, such as “Father Knows Best” and “Modern Family”, through the use of narrative conventions, symbolic, audio and technical codes. These representations have transformed over time to reflect the changes in social, political, and historical contexts.

I chose to write my essay about the Fox sitcom, That 70s Show, which aired 1998-2006. The show is about six teenagers growing up in Point Place, Wisconsin in the 1970s. I will be analyzing how gender is portrayed in this essay. The main characters of this show are Eric Forman, Steven Hyde, Michael Kelso, "Fez," Jackie Burkhart, and Donna Pinciotti. At the beginning of the series, "Kelso" and Jackie are dating, and everyone in the group knows Donna and Eric really like each other. Eventually, they end up dating. There are many gender stereotypes shown in the show.

Modern Family is a popular primetime television show that airs Wednesday nights on ABC. This hit comedy presents the daily lifestyles of three separate but related families who reside in the suburbs of Los Angeles, California. The Dunphys are shown as the traditional white American family while the Pritchett-Tucker family are a homosexual couple with an adopted daughter named Lily. The Pritchetts are the last family who are an interracial couple with a large age gap. On the surface, this show seems to be one of the most diverse on television. However even with the different races and family structures portrayed, there is still evidence of unequal representation in casting, stereotypes, and gender roles.

The critically acclaimed, popularly viewed NBC television comedy series, The Office, has become a phenomenon of media, due to its monumental outbreak in the television industry from 2005 to 2013. The Office portrays the lives of Michael Scott, regional manager of Dunder Mifflin Paper Company in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and his employees through a documentary film crew that follows the cast around 24/7, capturing their everyday lives at and outside of work, as well as the ridiculously humorous antics they become involved in. The show’s distinct evolution of characters, plots, and relationships serve as the cultural foreground of the series. Each specifically placed character and relationship has its own distinct meaning, meant to represent a certain ideology for the audience to unearth and adapt.

Television sitcoms of the 1950’s through the 1990’s demonstrated the values and structure of the American family by portraying stereotypes. Since television sets became mainstream and entered almost every American home, the content of American sitcoms has reflected the culture of the times. Thus, as the popular American sitcoms of the 1950’s suggest, families living in the 1950’s were very tightly grouped and did everything together with roles of males and females clearly defined. In the 1950’s women have the housecleaning and child care and men worked, providing for the family. In the sixties, women acquired more freedom in their lives. The 1963 Equal Pay Act and the 1964 Civil Rights Act came into effect. It was the end of the baby Boomer era. In the seventies, women continued to fight for equal pay to their male counterparts. Many families had a color television by the 1970’s. In modern day, women are equal to men and feminism is decreasing. Four sitcoms, Leave It To Beaver, What’s Happening, The Wonder Years, and Malcolm in the Middle, portrayed the relationships and values of families during different decades.

In this world of advanced technology where people are connected to the internet like neurons are connected in a giant brain. The television has become the spotlight technology in today’s generation. Generation after generation people are evolving and getting more advanced, so has the way producers are using television as a source to persuade the audience. Especially, reality show directors use every information they possibly can about the contestants to make their show popular in the culture. The reality television impacts the world in a negative way. Reality television influences the culture by giving the young girls ' false expectations, stereotypes, and racism.

Within the first episode of the hit television series, Glee, we are introduced to a variety of unique personalities. As we are introduced to the various characters, it becomes apparent that they are more than simply ‘average’ people. Each member has his/her own uniqueness. Yet the women in particular seem to have more of the striking encounters, as compared to the men, who seem to play more of a passive role. It seems that the women are the ones who are portrayed as the stronger of the two genders; mentally, if not physically.

Reality TV brings out the worst in people. The first reality series ever, The Real World, even includes the lines “...people stop being polite, and start getting real” in its opening title sequence. Producers attempt to create the most entertaining show possible for their own monetary gains, so they edit and manipulate people’s actions to create drama and paint their casts in their worst light. A great number of reality shows “represent” certain demographics, such as young Italian-Americans on Jersey Shore or white, affluent teenagers on Laguna Beach. According to Media Ethics Magazine, one crucial component producers should uphold in reality television ethics is that the stars “be treated in a fair and responsible manner” (Crew). However, a show’s poor representation of an individual representing a demographic, even if it is acceptable to that

In this case study, it analyse how the concept of family has changed in the past 20 years as it will be depicting modern family forms and past norms. It is important to look at how families have developed throughout the years up until the 21st century as we compare the two and elaborate on the difference and what makes it so significant. In this case study, it contrast and compare the television series Modern family which is a 21st century concept of family and The Simpsons which was adapted 27 years ago and how things have changed with family dynamics and what is the norm now which was not the norm years ago.

There is definitely a problem when we talk about gender equality and sexism. It's everywhere: in movies, commercials on television, in music videos, at the workplace and even at school. The gender biases are blatant. One of the sources of the problem lies in the media and the way the media portrays women.

According to Lippmann, “stereotypes are ‘pictures in our heads’ that we use to apprehend the world around us” (16). Stereotypes can be formed due to effects of media, as Wood describes media as pervasive, powerful and influential (31). Hence, stereotypes can be defined as inaccurate perceptions towards a group of people or community that is strongly influenced by the media. Whether positive or negative, stereotypes are usually false as they are formed based on personal judgments, which are biased or exaggerated.

The objectification of women contains the act of ignoring the personal and intellectual capacities and potentialities of a female; and reducing a women’s value/worth or role in society to that of an instrument for the sexual pleasure that she can produce in minds of another. The representation of women using sexualized images that have increased significantly in the amount and also the severity of the images that’s been used explicitly throughout the 20th century. Advertisement generally represent women as sexual objects, subordinated to men, and even as objects of sexual violence, and such advertisements contribute to discrimination against women in the workplace, and normalize attitudes which results in sexual harassment and even violence

Despite the creator’s of Modern Family effort to portray a progressive view of American families, the show still accentuates outdated female stereotypes and gender roles; reinforcing gender characteristics, patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity. In contrast to its title, Modern Family promotes traditional gender roles and stereotypes of women, which result in the portrayal of an inaccurate image of the female, and weakens the stance of women in today’s U.S. society.