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Gender Depictions in the Media

Our project focuses on animated media that has been and is currently directed toward youth. Disney films that target younger audiences and video games that are considered to be for teens and/or adults have been two of the main media exposures that are readily accessible and often trusted by parents. These primary sources of entertainment for young people have been known to and continue to influence the way people construct masculine and feminine characteristics in our everyday lives. Although these media is marketed worldwide, meaning that it can have a global influence, we are more focused on how these media influence the United States.

Disney as an established corporation has existed since about 1923, creating many unforgettable characters and classic animated films. Video games are newer to entertainment and did not really get popular until the 1970's. As the two industry continues to grow, gender depictions became more noticeable in both types of media. The reasoning that Disney is for children is because it made for a general audience, where everyone can watch, so it has to be children friendly. Video games are not always children friendly and can range to "Everyone" ratings to a rating for adults only; and price-wise it some are clearly not meant for children. We chose the years between 1990 to 2005 because in order to incorporate both media in a consistent way, we needed a relative time frame that is comparable to both media. Disney films are extensively older than most of the video games we mention, and we did not feel that there were enough films after 2005 that strongly depicted gender as its succeeding years had.

**__Research and Findings__** We started with creating a "coding sheet", which is simply a universal rubric for tallying what we see in separate video games and movies. We wanted to know things like how many males vs. females there were in each movie, how many strong males/females or weak males/females, who was wearing revealing clothing, and which of the sexes had deeper overall storyline growth. We tallied these coding sheets for each movie and video game that was researched and piled our data together. For the Disney movies, we also took notes on other general themes that are made clear in the pictures, as we were looking to create a sort of media "time line" from childhood to young adulthood; Disney movies to video games. In general, the amount of women that simply existed in each media format was significantly lower than that of males. Men were more likely to overcome great odds, while women were much more likely to need rescue or be in a form of trouble. While men were physically strong and usually mostly clothed, women were mainly depicted as weak and over-sexualized in their attire. Finally, we recognized a large gender gap between the usefulness/high purpose of individual characters. Typically, the men were the most useful and powerful, and women were second best.

"Long term and repeated exposure to television can alter viewers' conception about social reality. Researchers have found that here is a correlation between the amount of [media] viewing and gender-roles stereotyping among children and adolescents." * (Yao). Almost always, women are shown have big breasts in video games. Women are highly sexualized in video games. Sexualization is defined by the degree that the female character's body is exposed. Females are twice or more as likely to be shown in revealing clothing. There are not many roles that female character play. Since they are weaker than the men, their role in video games has been reduced to simply a sex object. "Beasley and Standley (2002) found that 70% of female characters in Mature-rated video games and 46% of female characters in Teen rated video games were depicted with abundant cleavage, 86% of female characters were portrayed wearing clothing with low/revealing necklines, and 48% of female characters were dressed in outfits with no sleeves."(Yao). In other words, the female characters role becomes about what she is wearing or in this case not wearing. Her only role is to appear sexy and display her large breasts. More and more these games are looking realistic. The game does not just look like graphics but like real people. "Research demonstrates that there is a significant relationship between media exposure to modeled gender stereotypes and individuals' stereotypical gender role beliefs and expectations." (Yao). The more and more young people are exposed to video games, the more likely that they will adopt the games portrayal of gender. If the games only shows women with big breasts, then the gamers will begin to believe that all women everywhere have big breast or they will believe that one is not a real women if she does not have big breasts. The gamers start to treat women as they would in their video games, like sex objects. Their ideas about women are reduced and thus they give women less worth. During the academic research process, we learned that there is a correlation between violence via a television and youth who commit violent acts. M.D. Victor Strassburger * concludes that television as a media source has an extraordinarily large impact on its viewers, mostly dependent on viewing time. He writes: "After 10 more years of research, the consensus among most of the research community is that violence on television does lead to aggressive behavior by children and teenagers who watch the programs. This conclusion is based on laboratory experiments and on field studies. Not all children become aggressive, of course, but the correlations between violence and aggression are positive." So what is the bigger picture? If media outlets as seemingly harmless as television or video games can have such a strong effect on a child's moral choices, the way they influence negative social stigmas and generalizations are probably equally as high. How can we teach our children kindness and compassion, when their superheroes are using violence to fight violence? How can we instill a sense of entitlement, independence, and strength in our young girls when their gender as a whole is considered weak, inferior, and simply as a source of entertainment for men? How can we teach our young boys that there is not such a large difference between boys and girls, and genuinely viewing them as equal people is more important than assuming anything about them because of conditioned belief systems. As a group, we believe that media like Disney movies and video games have the power not only to negatively impact our youth today, but reach out to them on a positive level. Unfortunately, breaking old habits will be hard to do, and it may take years for us to progress as a society into a more appropriate media era.

**__Meet the creators!__** ** //Pamela DeBarros// ** I am a Communications major at the University at Massachusetts, Amherst. My primary focus is video games. I grew up playing videos games with my friends. We would play Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat and not even think about the gender implications embedded in the game. As an adult, I now see how video games shape our societies views of what a female and male should be viewed as. The dominate view is that women need to be sexy and men need to be muscular, but these were not always the way society viewed men and women as. Video games has played a major role in reshaping our minds to automatically think men = buff and strong women = big boobs.

** //Alyssa Grant// ** I am currently a Sociology undergraduate with a focus in Social Service at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst year 2013! My focus for this project was primarily the Disney movies. As a child I spent a lot of time watching Disney and other cartoons, so the idea of looking at concepts of masculinity and femininity through that outlet was especially appealing. Though I was always more of a "tomboy" than a "girly girl", there was always a part of me that wanted the life and physical appearance of a princess. Beauty and the Beast and Pocahontas were the two that hit home for me and what I wanted for myself the most, so I incorporated Beauty and the Beast into this project to see how unbiased I could be, and what I could learn. I can be contacted at: argrant2013@gmail.com for any questions or concerns about this project. I'd love to hear from you.

** //Jackei Li// ** I'm a physics undergraduate.

** //Roman Ruiz// ** I'm a Sociology major at UMass Amherst with a concentration in Crime Law and Deviance and a passion for video games//.// I recognize that these inequalities are depicted in the games I play, for that is what the masses are expecting. I believe the media format focused on in this wiki is one of the most influential, if not //the// most influential of all in this day and age and as such we have to start with the basics if we hope to start a change which can benefit our future. This is part of the problem between men and women, the inequalities that have persisted for hundreds of years, and it can be re-shaped without losing its appeal...it's simply a matter of willingness to change the formula that has been working for a very long time. I hope you come away with more than you brought in with this wiki. I can be reached at romananthonyruiz@gmail.com for any Q&A.

* Yao, Mike Z. Chad Mahood, and Daniel Linz. "Sexual Priming, Gender Stereotyping and Likelihood to Sexually Harass: Examining the Cognitive Effects of Playing a Sexually-Explicit Video Game." (2009): Accessed on March 9, 2011. Found at []

Behm-Morawitz, Elizabeth and Mastro, Dana. "The Effect of the Sexualization of Female Video Game Characters on Gender Stereotyping and Female Self- Concept." (2009): Accessed on March 9, 2011. Found at []

* Strassburger, Victor. "Children, Adolescents, and the Media: Issues and Solutions." (1999): Accessed on March 5, 2011. Found at []