12.5 Television, Film, and Video Games
Elizabeth B. Pearce; Emily Miller; Jessica N. Hampton; Hannah Morelos; and Katie Niemeyer
Take a minute to think about how much media you are exposed to in one day—from watching television and movies and cruising the internet to reading newspapers, books, and magazines and listening to music or watching music videos. Does anyone in your family play video games? The majority of this media is produced by corporations and infused with advertisements.
Television
According to the Nielsen Company—a marketing corporation that collects statistics on media usage—report, the average American ages “18 to 34 spent two hours and 45 minutes daily watching live TV in the Fourth Quarter of 2015, and one hour and 23 minutes using TV-connected devices—a total of four hours and 8 minutes using a TV set for any purpose” (Nielsen Company, 2016). The pervasiveness of media in culture begs a number of questions: what are the effects of such an overwhelming amount of exposure to media that is often saturated with advertisements? How do media construct or perpetuate gendered, sexualized, classed, ableized, and racialized differences and inequalities? What is the relationship between media and consumers, and how do consumers interact with media?
Media expert and sociologist Michael Kimmel argues that the media are a primary institution of socialization that not only reflects but creates culture. Media representation is a key domain for identity formation and the creation of gendered and sexualized differences (Kimmel, 2003). For example, think back to Disney movies you were probably shown as a child. The plots of these movies typically feature a dominant young man—a prince, a colonial ship captain, a soldier—who is romantically interested in a young woman—both are always assumed to be heterosexual—who at first resists the advances of the young man, but eventually falls in love with him and marries him.
Disney movies teach children a great deal about gender and sexuality; specifically, they teach children to value hegemonic masculinity and emphasize femininity. Hegemonic masculinity refers to a specific type of culturally valued masculinity tied to marriage and heterosexuality and patriarchal authority in the family and workplace and maintains its privileged position through subordinating other less dominant forms of masculinity (i.e., dominance over men of lower socioeconomic classes or gay men). Emphasized femininity, meanwhile, refers to compliance with the normative ideal of femininity, as it is oriented to serving the interests of men (Connell, 1987).
What do Disney movies have to do with how people actually live their lives? It is because they are fictional, so pervasive in our culture, and shown to us at such a young age that they may shape our gendered and sexualized selves in ways that we do not even realize. How many times have you heard people say that they want a “fairy tale wedding” or heard the media refer to a celebrity