Boys and Masculinity–The Gender Environment We Have Created

As publication of my book The Achilles Effect: What Pop Culture is Teaching Young Boys about Masculinity draws ever nearer (looks like a February release), I am using this post as a sort of pre-emptive strike for those who might think I am a tad uptight about gender images. (And I am, but I think my attitude is justified.)

I am quite prepared for people to disagree with my assessments of TV shows, films, and books—especially when the targets are much beloved films like the Toy Story series or very popular TV programs like Phineas and Ferb.

It is easy to disagree with me when you look at those items in isolation. What’s the harm, some people might think, of letting boys watch a funny show, even if it does contain stereotypes?

Here’s my answer. The harm does not lie in one episode or a single viewing of a film. Rather, it lies in the gender environment that these individual items help create.

This concept of a gender “environment” is well established. Justin Lewis, head of the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, while not talking specifically about gender in this quote, noted the impact of children’s media in the 2001 documentary Mickey Mouse Monopoly: Disney, Childhood & Corporate Power, a film that does address gender issues:

“I think it’s a mistake for us to imagine that the only way that media affect us is through an immediate impact on the way we think. The way media influences the way we think is much less immediate and much less a sort of straight forward impact … [it] is much more a question of creating a certain environment of images that we grow up in and that we become used to and after a while those images will begin to shape what we know and what we understand about the world.” (Emphasis is mine.)

Psychologist Cordelia Fine, in the excellent book Delusions of Gender, does speak specifically about gender when she discusses the implicit stereotypes many of us hold. She describes the assumption behind implicit associations: when people are presented with a stimulus, it will “rapidly, automatically, and unintentionally activate strongly associated concepts…more than weakly associated ones. These primed representations become more readily accessible to influence perception and guide behaviour.” (Emphasis is mine again.)

The learning of these associations is unconscious and beyond our control. “Associative memory” indiscriminately picks up whatever associations are in the environment that surrounds us. Fine provides an example: “Place a woman behind almost every vacuum cleaner being pushed around a carpet and, by Jove, associative memory will pick up the pattern.” She also notes that associative memory most likely responds to cultural patterns in society, media, and advertising.

Applying Fine’s theory to my work, we can see the impact of the gender environment we have created. If we see enough images of bratty boys (like a new commercial from Nissan that I absolutely despise), we will come to associate boys with bad behaviour. Similarly, if boys repeatedly see portrayals of males as tough, aggressive warrior types, they will begin to associate those traits with men and masculinity.

Other studies have proven that repeated exposure to biased images influences people’s gender perceptions. In 2001, in the Encyclopedia of Women and Gender, psychology professors L. Monique Ward and Allison Caruthers summarized the findings of some 76 different studies into the impact of media on children’s perceptions of gender. They concluded that greater exposure to mainstream media gender portrayals, which tend to be traditional and stereotypical, increases support for sexist attitudes, especially toward women. Conversely, exposure to non-traditional gender portrayals seems to encourage more flexible ideas about gender and gender roles.

So, what is the big deal about a boy seeing a program that refers to male characters as wimps or wusses, watching films where females are marginalized, or reading a book that glorifies bad behaviour? If he encounters these images only once, then it probably isn’t a big deal. But if he sees these images all around him all the time, his ideas about masculinity and femininity will be affected.

Instead of looking at films, books, and TV programs in isolation, I encourage parents and caregivers to look at them as representative of the wider gender bias that permeates all areas of children’s popular culture.

(In my next post, I’ll look at how boys’ fashions affect this environment of gender images.)