Gendered media is not something I’ve needed an assignment to bring it to my attention, instead it’s

something I’ve been observing all my life, or at least a substantial portion of it. The media has been
utilizing a gender slant in their presentation of materials to us for about as long as I can remember.
Assuming that it will be the most effective way of reaching their target audience, but is that the case?
Are they reaching their intended audience, or turning people in massive numbers? I can only speak for
myself in saying I find most of the garbage they are trying to convince us, we simply can’t live without, is
just that, garbage! I do think, as a society, that we have come a long way, if we compare advertisements
of today with advertising from the 50’s or 60’s we see, for the most part, they’re not as blatantly
obvious as they were in the past. “She’ll really warm up to a Hoover,” or “Give her a range she’ll want to
come home to,” are just a few examples from fifty years ago that come to mind. That’s not to say that
all advertising has evolved, far from it. Hardee’s ads for instance, leave me asking the question, like
many ads, “What exactly are you trying to sell me there?” Now I know what their ultimate goal is,
getting you to buy overpriced thickburgers, but how do they explain the route? Their ads normally
contain the perfect representation of the ‘beauty myth’ seemingly enjoying an messy, humungous
burger that could probably feed an entire family of Ethiopians for a week! Really? Do you expect me to
believe that she would eat something like that, or better yet, if I do, girls like that will come flocking to
me? Please… As if any of that makes sense in the real world. I’ve seen the audience they target, and
target being the key word here, or manage to lure through their doors and it’s a pretty slim margin of a
percentage point that bear any resemblance at all to miss Barbie. There may be some hidden truth to
the phrase, “Thickburgers make thick people.” When your business is the almost weekly target of Jay
Leno’s nightly talk show exemplifying how your combo meal could sustain a small village, you might
become material for Jeff Foxworthy. Quite obviously, by viewing a view minutes of television, one can
see Hardee’s is not the only company guilty of the cheap tactic to grab their male audience’s attention
and advertising it certainly not alone in this onslaught of gender myths, the shows that fill the space
between commercials are just as guilty. Attempting to present characters they think people will identify
with, look to idealize or just laugh at. Shows like, “Home Improvement” or “Family Guy” depict men as
bumbling idiots incapable of functioning without the guiding hand of their ‘better half.’ Even if seen as
just humor, what kind of message is it sending? That its ok to be a childish, dysfunctional adult male, or
even to think that sort of behavior is humorous and would make you a well-received, entertainingly
funny man to mimic such behavior. Let’s hope this is not what people are taking away from the
messages being sent by these shows, but I am afraid some people do just that. It is alarming to think,
like Kimmel pointed out, the large number of families that will have a television on all the time, just to
simply have it on, for a voice in the room or whatever other reason. What is being sent to their
subconscious minds, while the TV plays in the background? Falling asleep with the TV on, being
subjected to not necessarily positive stimuli, while your mind is trying to rest and prepare for the next
day.

Television is not the only tool for peddling these gender myths, print media in the form of magazines
and newspapers is also full of the very same examples. The other night, my son, a friend of his and I
were looking at magazines at the mall. The picture on the back was definitely aimed at a feminine
market audience, so it caused me to propose to them the theory that the majority of this magazine
would have similar ads geared specifically toward women. Thumbing through the publication in a few
minutes had proved my hypothesis, when we were only able to identify roughly ten percent of the
advertisements to be aimed at a male audience and even then it may have been an attempt to still
market to women. Sending the message, you should look like her, then you’ll have this fine hunk of a
man. All in all far over the majority of advertisements were geared towards a female audience and this
was ascertained by just looking at the back cover… maybe we can judge a book by its cover.

The last subject I’d like to lightly touch on, if that’s possible, is the gendering of video games. Virtually
every character design aspect of a game always divides any sort of avatar selection into two distinct
groups, the binary, a female or a male. Well except for maybe the Gorn, who seem to only have one
choice for character sex, but then most people aren’t real sure about the Gorn anyway. I personally
have no desire to see a female Gorn, but then I’m not really into lizards. Even when character creation
does not provide a choice for selection of sex, the obviousness of a feminine or a masculine character
still shows through. For example, it seems clearly evident that an Orc demonstrates a very masculine
form while an Elf personifies an image of femininity. I could go on further, with this particular subject,
but I said I would only lightly touch on this.