Gender Stereotypes

Gender Stereotypes

There are many gender stereotypes which can be seen in commercials, witnessed in characters of your favorite movies, or even sung about in a wide array of songs.   One of the common stereotypes that I’ve seen and have been a victim of is how men are unemotional.   This makes it seem like man doesn’t have a heart and is incapable of showing feelings under the most severe of circumstances.   For example, say if a man at the age of fourteen lost both his mother and father.   Because of this gender stereotype, the man would be encouraged to be “strong”, forget about the passing of his parents, and may be expected to live on his own if he was the only child, or to take care of the family if he has younger siblings.   If the fourteen your old man had to take care of his siblings, then he would be violating the gender stereotype because men are not supposed to be caring and nurturing.   My point in bringing up this scenario is that some of these stereotypes can have different connotations because being “strong” could mean abiding your duties to the task at hand by assuming different gender roles.

For the scenario above, society promotes the stereotype of men in commercials because a lot of them show men participating in sports, being out at night with other guy-friends drinking beer, or working in jobs that require heavy labor like construction or being a fire-fighter.   It is rare that a man is portrayed as a parent.   There is one commercial for Cox Communications that provides a good example of this gender stereotype.   It opens up to a little boy who looks like he’s around three or four years old and he’s watching the associate from Cox dig into the ground, so he can install some fiber optic cables for higher speeds in internet.   The little boy mimics the Cox associate by getting out a box of fake, plastic tools and does the same motions as the Cox guy by twisting his fake screwdriver into a block of concrete.   The Cox guy finishes the set-up and the...