Messages Portrayed About Women in Television

When watching television, we hardly stop to analyze what subliminal messages the ads and shows are portraying. We usually just pick up the obvious messages and the rest is placed somewhere in the back of our minds. After thoroughly analyzing one television channel for 2 hours, I began to realize that a lot more ideas and messages are entering our minds than what we may see on the surface. In my writing I am going to be analyzing the ideas portrayed in the shows and commercials presented on the television station “Nick at Nite” and examine the way they they depict beauty images and how they represent the beauty norms of our society.

I want to begin by sharing the commercials and ads that portrayed messages which I wasn’t surprised to find in my research. The first example I will be discussing is from the show, “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”. In the beginning of the scene a young woman, Hillary, frolics into her home, wearing an all blue outfit with a matching hat and sash, very excited to share with her family that she had just volunteered to be girl scout leader. After her father asked her what activity she had planned on doing with the girl scouts, she responded with “I don’t know just watch them run around or something.” Shocked by this response he informed Hillary that she most likely is going to be expected to take them to do some type of “outdoorsy-type” of activity. As soon as Hilary hears this she makes a disgusted noise and stomps off, very upset at the thought of having to do anything outdoors. The scene fast forwards and Hillary bursts through the front door crying. She exclaims, “We had to do a nature walk and it was horrible! We were startled by a deer and were swarmed by butterflies.” Before this, I had watched other episodes of this show and in every one of them, Hillary’s character displays a variety of stereotypes that our generation tends to associate with women. She is a young woman who hates the outdoors, loves makeup and fashion, has a very flirtatious personality, and isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. Hillary’s character reflects the characteristics of a stereotypical woman and in some ways may even encourage people to maintain the mindset that all women are like this.

The next example I viewed was a Neutrogena advertisement. The commercial begins by claiming that their face wash is a treatment for acne sufferers. They boast of their customer's claims that they had begun seeing dramatic results after only one week of using the product. The model that they chose to portray this transformation was a beautiful young women who didn’t seem to suffer from the skin disease at all. The only sign of any breakout was one small pimple located on her cheek. This pimple however seemed very strange as it stood alone on her otherwise perfectly clear face. Now this was somewhat misleading due to the fact that Neutrogena had clearly claimed that their product was designed for people who suffered from acne. After a thin white bar swiped across the screen, the “results” of using the face wash was revealed. Suddenly, without facial expression change, clothes change, or hardly any change really whatsoever, the “pimple” disappears and the woman has flawlessly clear skin, almost magically. Upon further inspection, it became clear to me that the “pimple” was obviously computer generated and was nothing but a tiny red dot that didn’t even exist in reality. Similarly to the ads presented in the video we watched in class, “Killing Us Softly” this ad displays unachievable standards, thus causing the women targeted in these ads to feel like they must look a certain way or meet a certain criteria in order to feel accepted. The ad specifically portrays the unrealistic beauty expectation of how a woman’s acne should look before they even bought the product to remove the acne! How ridiculous is that? By television stations sending these messages to acne suffering women at home, they may be unintentionally (or maybe not so unintentionally) attacking their confidence.

The last example of a message portrayed on this station which, sadly, I wasn’t surprised by what I viewed, is in another advertisement. This one for a subscription box. This advertisement displays different people busily doing different things throughout their day. It shows people rushing to work, busy at their job meetings, cleaning their house, and taking care of children. The idea is that a lot of people are extremely busy throughout the day and do not have a lot of time to plan out what they should make for dinner every night let alone go to the grocery store to pick up the ingredients necessary. With the product presented in this ad, all of these issues are eliminated. The ad is for a subscription box called Home Chef that will be delivered to your house as often as you like. You will receive a recipe along with all of the ingredients to make a home cooked dish for you and your family. The issue I had with this ad was something that I think might not have caught the attention of most. I noticed that all of the busy women displayed in this ad were doing things like cleaning a home or caring for a child, while the busy men were doing things like trying to beat the traffic to work or conducting a business meeting. This ad clearly displays the common stereotypical gender roles associated with both women and men, and does nothing to challenge the way our society views women.

Now I would like to discuss the messages displayed in advertisements and shows which I was actually surprised to see. Firstly, in a car advertisement where different types of cars were lined up, each accompanied by a man who was holding the car door open. A woman walks by, ignoring each car offered to her, along with the man holding its door open for her. Eventually she bypasses each of the cars and gets into a Kia. Although the message being displayed was that she preferred the Kia over any other car, I interpreted this ad slightly different. To me I saw this ad as a representation of multiple men trying to get the attention of the same women. However, after being completely ignored and shut down, in the end she decides she was better on her own. This ad displays a woman making the choice to be independent, a trait not commonly associated with women, even today. This ad portrays a message that can subliminally provide its viewers with the message that women can make that choice to live life on their own without the support of anyone else.

My second example is actually the next scene from the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air episode that I had mentioned earlier. In this scene Hilary comes back from the second day of doing activities with the girl scouts. She brings them all to her home and they all trail behind her mimicking her every move. They had it down from the dramatically girlish walk to even the makeup and hairdo. This reminded me of the discussion of the social construction of gender that we had in class. According to our textbook, Women’s Lives, social constructionism is “the idea that our gender, race and sexual orientation are defined by human beings and can vary, depending on cultural and historical contexts.” This is clearly displayed in the sense that Hilary had convinced these girls that this is how they needed to act and dress if they wanted to consider themselves young ladies. They all obliged, quickly leaving behind their old personalities and interests behind, which before, had varied between them all. This is a perfect example of how the ideas we have about how a woman or girl should act or dress is socially constructed.

The last advertisement I will be discussing in this writing is one that I enjoyed viewing the most out of any other that I had came across during my research. This ad starts of by showing a young boy cutting and styling the hair on a stuffed lion doll, he seems to really be enjoying playing hair stylist. The then moves on to a stuffed gorilla, and then to two baby dolls. Then the mother then comes by and easily cleans up the doll hair mess with her Swiffer Sweeper. In class we had a discussion about the way our families treated young boys versus young girls, and most of the people who had shared their personal stories included that they had parents or family members who disapproved of the young buys of the family participating in any activity which was stereo typically considered an activity only for girls or women. Most families in today’s society discourage their young boys to play with dolls and most disapprove of them having an interest in hair styling or cosmetology. However this ad challenges the gender roles in our society that are taught to boys at a very young age.

Overall, this experiment has allowed me to become more aware of the fact that there is definitely more than what meets the eye when it comes to the messages being portrayed on television. So what’s your opinion? Do our television stations display messages that challenge the gender norm society has created that we all can benefit from, or do we need to become more cautious of the negative influences that advertisers and television producers attempt to relay into our subconscious? In my opinion, this is surely a question worth asking.