Geena Davis: How the Media’s Gender Bias Hurts our Children
June 10, 2010
by Alison
|The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and not necessarily those of The New Agenda.
I’ve had a sneaking suspicion for some time now that many of the G-rated cartoons and movies that my daughter watches aren’t entirely good for her. Although we enjoyed watching Disney’s Tinkerbell the other night, both my husband and I thought that the popular fairy was entirely too sexualized. I also find Disney Chanel’s Phineas and Ferb funny and clever and yet the show strongly embraces gender stereotypes. Phineas and Ferb are the boy geniuses (dreaming up fabulous inventions) while the girls are either boy crazy or servantile (in this case a troop of Fireside Girls who assist the boy wonders on call).
So I often wonder what young girls are learning about their place in the world by watching these shows. And then other times I hear the voices of society shouting back at me: “You are reading too much into this. It’s just a show!”
Turns out my suspicions have merit and I can thank the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media for bringing real light to this often overlooked form of discrimination. And what’s great about the Geena Davis Institute is that they go far beyond mere observations and into the world of empirical research. The institute, working in collaboration with the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, sponsors “the largest research analysis ever conducted into content of children’s movies and television programs.”
Some of this research is highlighted in a recent article by Davis and the results are disturbing:
“For every female character there are three male characters in G-rated films. In group scenes, fewer than one in five characters are female.”
and
“Female characters in G-rated films wear virtually the same amount of sexually revealing clothing as female characters in R-rated films.”
and
“…studies show that the more television girls watch, the more limited they consider their options in life; the more boys watch, the more sexist their views become.”
Things certainly look dire in terms of representation for our girls in the media and truth-be-told it’s highly unlikely that concerned parents can entirely block the various forms of media from our children.
So what to do?
The Geena Davis Institute has some compelling and proactive solutions. Davis expalins, “Armed with our research, we work hand-in-hand with the content creators of children’s entertainment to encourage and foster improvement in the gender balance our children see.”
But Davis emphasizes that the general public can also have an effect. Parents, educators and the wider public can discuss gender stereotypes with children to help them gain critical awareness. Davis taught her own kids to count female characters with speaking roles in shows and movies and I think of this as something I can someday do with my child.
And if you are interested, you can be involved with this research to. The next time you watch a show or movie count the number of female and male characters with speaking roles and send this information to the Geena Davis Institute.
Personally, I think of gender representation in the media as one of the most insidious forms of sexism and I believe the consequences are far reaching. Fortunately, we ALL can get involved on this one. Liberals, Conservatives, Pro-Choicers, Pro-Lifers, women, men, boys and girls can all work together to make the media a better place for women and girls. And that’s the power of big tent feminism which I’d categorize the Geena Davis Institute as being a part of.
Great piece! I agree completely. Disney has other issues with women too – howcome the mothers are absent (they have already died by the time the story takes place, or they die in the beginning)? If the mother-child bond is so important, what kind of message are we sending kids when they watch movie after movie with no mother figure?
Whenever I am tempted to accept the gender count in a movie, I do a little mental game – I flip all of the genders (male becomes female and vice versa) and then I see how striking it is. This also lets me see how much I have been indoctrinated into the cultural meme that boys are active and girls are bystanders.
“Star Wars” is a great example of this, if you flip the genders, it’s a movie with ALL women except one man, whose role (and costume) gets smaller as the series progresses. Imagine a male character who did nothing but strut around in a speedo for 2 hrs, yet he was a hero? You would laugh out loud, yet we accept it when it’s a female character.
Brava Geena Davis for making this point public.
Start your counting with Sesame Street. Kermit, Ernie, Bert, Big Bird, Oscar, Cookie Monster, Elmo, Snuflupagus, the Count. . .
“Imagine a male character who did nothing but strut around in a speedo for 2 hrs, yet he was a hero? You would laugh out loud, yet we accept it when it’s a female character.”
Good points however I have never accepted this and either have many others. This is the very reason I read or listen to books on tape for entertainment instead of consuming visual corporate media. Another option is go to local or high school theater where stories are altered to come up with more female parts and actresses are picked for their talent instead of the BJ services they offer the male writers, directors and producers. I do not need to see what happens to a perfectly good story when it is run through the brains of a male writer, director, producer etc, etc, etc. I would just rather read and visualize on my own.
Also for you young folks. This was an issue of 1970′s feminists and they worked it hard. Obviously it did not pay off for them or our society. So I encourage anyone who want’s to work this issue now to express yourselves to Corporate Media in terms of attacks on their profits which is the only form of communication they can process. They don’t care about childhood development, what is fair, what is real or anything else.
Here is my experience with 7-8 year old girls and the Disney dead mother genre. I drove my minivan full of little girls to see Nemo. They loved it and on the way home they asked what I thought. I said “I am a little sick of the Disney dead mother genre”. They asked what a genre is and I told them it’s a type of movie like scary, adventure etc. We discussed the many Disney movies with missing Mothers an initially they found that odd. They came up with this explanation. The whole Nemo movie was about everything going wrong. If Nemo’s Mother were alive things would not have gone wrong because Mothers know what to do and there wouldn’t be anything to have a movie about. The whole point of the movie was how badly the Dad did with things when he had to take over because the Mother was dead. Then they explained to me that if your Dad died it would be a lot like when Woofie died. Yes you are very upset and you miss him but you still would go to school on time, go to soccer practice on time and your Mother would fix the right foods are the right time. If your Mother died your Dad might not know how to take you to school and pick you up, doesn’t know when soccer practice is and can’t cook. So for what it is worth that is the verdict of 6 7-8 year old girls. I found it hilarious.
“If Nemo’s Mother were alive things would not have gone wrong because Mothers know what to do and there wouldn’t be anything to have a movie about.”
*bursts out laughing*
This segues into the report that’s been making the rounds lately about how kids in lesbian-headed households do better overall than kids in het households. Everyone’s been dancing around the basic issue: these kids have two highly engaged parents. Plainly put, TWO MOTHERS. It’s not the lesbian thing, it’s just that they have TWO FEMALE PARENTS. I had a great relationship to my dad and still think of him with deep love, and even I can say out loud that two moms would be a bonus. It’s like a lion pride model: mom and her sisters, only here it’s mom and her wife. It’s still a bunch of mothers.
Sure, everyone would say that an equally engaged dad would be just as good, but seriously. I mean it. How low a bar do we have to set for males before we can say that one of them is “equally engaged?” Women are notorious for insisting that their husbands are equal partners even when research shows that women are still doing 80% of the housework. Again, I had a FANTASTIC father, so if I could just take the rose-colored glasses off and recognize this, anyone should be able to.
Samantha’s Mom,
You got me thinking about Sesame Street. The tough thing is, I love Sesame Street. Kiddo is totally learning her letters from Sesame Street! But you are so right. Here are the characters:
http://www.sesamestreet.org/muppet
3 Girl Puppets and 9 Boy Puppets. About 33 percent female. I’m also going to guess that it gets worse when you analyze the amount of speaking from boy and girl characters and that the boys speak significantly more. No wonder we have 17 percent representation in politics. It all starts with Sesame Street!
great article Alison
and Bes we got entirely rid of TV just for these reasons.
even when you look at these sweet shows like Dora in contrast to the spanish little guy with his tools. he is a completely competent little guy who can fix everything, Dora is just curious and benevolent.
the analysis about nemo is hilarious i have to ask my daughter what she thinks would have happened with nemo’s mom alive.
janis I will send this to my lesbian friends in Munich who raise a daughter. they will appreciate your comment.
Movies play way to big a role in the lives of American children. May I suggest that parnents with young children, buy a really great sterio and have them spend a good percentage of their (inside the house time) listening to classical and jazz music. Orchestral music is especially stimulating to a childs brain. More and more children are living in a visual world and it is easier to degrade females with visual images than it is with sound. In music, if we experiance it as we should, by listening to it not watching videos, we are not distracted by fashion trends and sexualized images of women. The other great thing about classical and jazz music is that it is still an industry that is a meritocracy and no one gets ahead by behaving like fools and getting arrested. Things like painting, working with clay and wood or even just building a fort in the snow are things that teach children to use their imagination and to accomplish something. Watching too many movies is just like living your life vicariously through the characters in the film. let your children become their own characters; belive me they will come up with better ones than those in Disney Movies.
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