Page 108 - Essencials of Sociology

Socialization into Gender 81

Do you see how these girls were giving gender lessons? They were reinforcing images of
appearance and behavior that they thought were appropriate for females.
It isn’t only girls who reinforce cultural expectations of gender. Boys do the same
thing. Sociologist Melissa Milkie (1994), who studied junior high school boys, found
that much of their talk centered on movies and TV programs. Of the many images
they saw, the boys would single out those associated with sex and violence. They would
amuse one another by repeating lines, acting out parts, and joking and laughing at what
they had seen.
If you know boys in their early teens, you’ve probably seen a lot of behavior like this.
You may have been amused, or even have shaken your head in disapproval. But did you
peer beneath the surface? Milkie did. What is really going on? The boys, she concluded,
were using media images to develop their identity as males. They had gotten the mes-
sage: “Real” males are obsessed with sex and violence. Not to joke and laugh about
murder and promiscuous sex would have marked a boy as a “weenie” or a “nerd,” labels
to be avoided at all costs.

Gender Messages in the Mass Media
As you can see with the boys Milkie studied, a major guide to the gender map is the
Watch on MySocLab
mass media, forms of communication that are directed to large audiences. Let’s look Video: Socialization in Focus:
further at how media images help teach us gender, the behaviors and attitudes consid- Socialization
ered appropriate for our sex.
Television, Movies, and Cartoons. If you’ve watched youngsters while they are
watching children’s videos or television, you’ve probably noticed how engrossed they
are. They can hardly lift their eyes from “the action” when you try to get their attention.
What are children learning through these powerful media that transmit ideas through
words and moving images? One major lesson is that males are more important than
females, as male characters outnumber female characters two to one (S. Smith et al.
2012a).
In children’s cartoons, females used to be portrayed as less brave and more depen-
dent. Reflecting women’s changing position in society, more dominant, aggressive
females are now being featured. Kim Possible divides her time between cheerleading
practice and saving the world from evil. With tongue in cheek, the Powerpuff Girls
are touted as “the most elite kindergarten crime-fighting force ever assembled.” This
changed gender portrayal is especially evident in the violent females who play lead char-
acters in action movies, from the assassin in Kill Bill to Katnis Everdeen, whose athletic,
archery, and fighting skills are nothing short of amazing.
A key part of gender is body image, and the mass media are effective in teaching us
what we “should” look like. While girls are presented as more powerful than they used
to be, they have to be skinny and gorgeous and wear the latest fashions. Such messages
present a dilemma for girls: Continuously thrust before them is a model that is almost
impossible to replicate in real life.

Video Games. The movement, color, virtual dangers, unexpected dilemmas, and abil-
ity to control the action make video games highly appealing. High school and college
students find them a seductive way of escaping from the demands of life. The first mem-
bers of the “Nintendo Generation,” now in their 30s, are still playing video games—
with babies on their laps.
Sociologists have begun to study how video games portray the sexes, but we know lit-
tle about their influence on the players’ ideas of gender. The message of male dominance
continues, as females are even more underrepresented in video games than on television: mass media forms of communica-
90 percent of the main characters are male (Williams et al. 2009). Some video games, tion, such as radio, newspapers,
though, reflect cutting-edge changes in sex roles, the topic of the Mass Media in Social and television that are directed to
mass audiences
Life box on the next page.