Media's Role in Defining Gender Essay

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As Gaye Tuchman points out in “The Symbolic Annihilation of Women by the Mass Media,” our society’s new pulpits are the ones that come with television screens and societies messages are those pronounced like epistles from these screens. What people learn about themselves and each other is that which is projected for them to see every day and night on the television screen. The mass media is the purveyor of modern culture. It is not surprising, therefore, to realize that our conception of woman in the modern sense is formed by and large by what the mass media asks us to think about her.



Tuchman notes that the primary lesson that TV promotes is that “women don’t count for much” (12) essentially because “they are underrepresented in television’s fictional life” (12)—i.e., they are annihilated from life portrayed on TV and therefore consigned to oblivion in modern culture. This lack of representation on TV reflects, moreover, an undercurrent in modern culture regarding the roles that women play in society. Because men are still viewed as “instrumental leaders” and as “active workers and decision makers outside the home,” TV reflects as much by focusing on characters (typically male) who are active in the world (Tuchman 14). A woman at home is not going to be a very fascinating character in TV, is she? The problem with this line of thought is that it allows stereotypes and prejudice to continue to exist in society, reinforced as it is by the cues given by the mass media on TV. As Tuchman suggests, media must be more complicit in promoting positive images of women if a culture of equality and equitability is going to be produced in our era. From a feminist theory point of view, mass media is culpable for engendering stereotypes that reduce women to roles of subservience and of little importance in society, and this contributes to male-oriented hegemonies being perpetuated in modern culture.

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I would say, however, that today TV is far more representative of women than it was in the 1970s when Tuchman wrote the article.



In the article entitled “Gender and the Media” it is shown that over the decades, the media has been responsible for projecting images and portrayals of gender that have informed generations of people growing up. It analyzes what scholars have said about gender studies and even notes that….....

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Works Cited

“Gender and the Media.”

Tuchman, Gaye. “The Symbolic Annihilation of Women by the Mass Media.”

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