Gender and Image: Going Beyond Stereotypes in Visual Media

RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

Gender and Image Going beyond gender stereotypes in visual media

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Roshini Teresa Pochont PG Graphic Design, Semester 4 Faculty: Immanuel Suresh National Institute of Design, 2013

What are little boys made of?

Frogs and snails and puppy-dogs' tails, That's what little boys are made of.

What are little girls made of?

Sugar and spice and everything nice, That's what little girls are made of.

Old English nursery rhyme, c. 1850

When a baby comes into the world, there is always one troublesome guest at the welcome party.

Society arrives bearing a complex and cumbersome gift, one that will do its best to wrest control of the child’s will and steer the course of its future. Gender is the first and most important social construct in human life; bestowed upon unwilling shoulders, it shapes the way we interact with and navigate the world around us. And everything we encounter then on, as we grow – from language and education to recreation and relationships – is infused with the various complexities that gender brings in its wake.

The colours that the baby gets wrapped in, the toys that clutter its playroom, the name it is given and even the tone in which it is spoken to are all coded by gender, which had already dictated how the parents and other adults would think and behave around the child. And one of the strongest ways in which gender first makes us aware of its all-encompassing presence is through the sense of sight. As John Berger states in his seminal work Ways of Seeing: “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.” Through observed behaviours, images and actions, the child learns to recognize and stay within the invisible territories and boundaries that gender lays out for it.

In this paper, I hope to undertake an exploration into the relationship between gender and image, and attempt to understand how the two feed off and sustain each other in an increasingly gendersensitive society. A troubling trend is that as we grow more dependent on sight as a tool to negotiate the world, the more we stop questioning how deep and unconscious an effect ‘gendered images’ can have on the way we perceive ourselves and others.

Throughout history and across cultures, photographs, paintings, posters, advertisements, movies, and other forms of visual media, being the most accessible and readily available modes of communication, have not only been influenced by gender stereotypes but have also been influential

in shaping our perceptions about gender. Over time, however, and with changing social norms, designers and image-makers have been handed the responsibility of making informed choices about portraying gender in a sensitive and balanced manner.

Some of the questions raised during research, which I hope to address in this paper, include: 

How is gender portrayed in the visual media?

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Is the relationship between gender and image a cycle? Does our understanding of gender influence how we portray it in media, or do the images that are presented to us shape our ideas about gender?

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By continuing to fall back on gender stereotypes, are image-makers and designers furthering or hindering a sensitive perception of gender?

While the answers may not yet exist, I hope that fleshing the issues out as a debate, supplemented by examples drawn from recent advertising and popular culture, can generate further thought and study into the topic.

A MAN’S WORLD: WHY GENDER MATTERS When did we first become aware of the word ‘gender’? It has in fact existed for a very long time, but in a different sense: several world languages that developed quite early in the history of the human race made use of a grammatical ‘gendered’ system to attribute masculine, feminine and neuter gender categories to nouns. French and Hindi are just two of the many languages that still use grammatical gender. However, gender as we understand it – as a form of identity – came into consciousness only as late as 1955, when American sexologist John Money used the term to define the difference between biological sex and gender identity. With subsequent global changes in perception, along with the mass onset of the Feminism movement in the 1970s and 80s, gender has been variously defined as a ‘social construct and role’, a ‘range of characteristics’, or a ‘set of learned attributes’.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines gender as “the result of socially constructed ideas about the behaviour, actions, and roles a particular sex performs. The beliefs, values and attitudes taken up and exhibited by them are as per the agreeable norms of society and the personal opinions of the person are not taken into the primary consideration of assignment of gender and imposition of gender roles as per the assigned gender.” This definition highlights how rigidly society determines an individual’s gender role – personal opinion has no say in a situation governed by the ‘agreeable norms of society’. And society has shown how little tolerance it

possesses for those who stray from the established path, as it continues to treat homosexuality, gender ambiguity, gender fluidity and bisexuality/bi-curiosity with suspicion and scorn.

In his book The Gendered Society, Michael Kimmel states: “Biology constructs the sexes, and culture constructs gender difference.” Scientists are still debating whether these ‘biological constructs’ include brain coding, where it is argued that the male and female brain are wired differently. Science also continues to explore the possible existence of a ‘gay gene’, which, if found, could change the way we perceive homosexuality. But gender dichotomy, as Kimmel explains, has nothing to do with the sex organs and is not determined in the womb: it manifests itself in various aspects of human behaviour like demeanour, activities, professions, clothing and self-image, tone of voice, and even in personal preferences and tastes.

Philosopher Michel Foucault, however, ascribes to gender a higher significance, describing it as “a vehicle for social division of power.” This is a vehicle that, when used excessively by one sex, upsets the ideal balance and wields power to manipulate the other into a state of subordination. It was thus when power crept into the realm of gender that the equation changed: imbalance and inequality began to rear their heads only when one sex decided to use gender difference to control the other. In this sense, the world of today, fostered by years of skewed perceptions, is indeed a man’s world, built up and nurtured by the rules of patriarchy that advocate the supremacy of one gender over all others.

Feminism, which rose to a peak in the last several decades, began in reaction to these patriarchal norms that had governed perceptions of gender and gender roles until then. And while it is easy to fall into the repetitive trap of considering feminism as a movement of ‘raging women pitted against men and masculinity’, a better understanding of the terms ‘feminism’, ‘femininity’, ‘masculinity’ and ‘patriarchy’ could paint a clearer picture.

The primary argument is that masculinity is uni-dimensional: it is defined through the negation of the other, and its meaning therefore lies not only in what it is but in what it is not as well. Put simply, being masculine not only means being strong, aggressive, powerful, rough and competitive, but it also means being not weak, not passive, not powerless, not gentle and not cooperative.

Femininity, on the other hand, is all-encompassing: feminism believes not in the supremacy of one gender over another but in the equal coexistence of all genders within society. The feminist movement, therefore, looks to overthrow patriarchy in order to make way for a more balanced, dualistic system of perception rather than a tyrannical, monopolizing one that allows for no other value except its own.

Patriarchy, however, has nevertheless flourished unchecked over history and across continents, and has led us to a state today when the struggle to escape its hold is harder than ever. Patriarchal norms were rooted in notions of gendered families, which, for example, during the World Wars, began changing the way gender roles were perceived, with the father gaining status as the ‘head’ of the family. The institution of marriage became gendered as well: the roles of wife and husband became clearly defined with respect to housework, professions, education, child-care and decisionmaking. Images of women and the “woman’s place in the kitchen”, during the ‘Mad Men’-dominated world of 1950s advertising, only reinforced these constructed roles.

Even intimacies and love did not escape the grip of patriarchal norms: gender roles were clearly defined in relationships and companionships, and these roles often dictated some level of dominance and subservience. This could explain the reluctance and ignorance with which society has viewed homosexual marriages and LGBT families in recent times, having trouble coming to terms with gender roles that go beyond what is defined as ‘normal’.

Being forced to live in a man’s world also meant surrendering the freedom of choice and opinion.

Ancient misconceptions about the cave-dweller’s roles as the ‘hunting man’ and ‘stay-at-home woman’, having gone through very little filtration over time, continue to dictate gender roles with regard to workplaces and professions. Women constantly toil beneath the glass ceiling, a feminist metaphor that aptly portrays the struggle of women in positions of power and how an invisible boundary prevents them from climbing the professional ladder.

Patriarchal gender bias, having used power to further its cause, could not have done it so consistently and aggressively over the years without the assistance of various means of communication that were aggressive and compelling in themselves. Images and the visual media have long been the primary disseminators of perceptions about identity and culture, and continue to bombard our receptive eyes and minds with a few changing but mostly unchanged notions of gender and social power.

WHAT MAKES A BOY AND WHAT MAKES A GIRL? How does one define what it means to feel feminine, and to feel masculine? Androgyny is found to be the natural state of gender identity in humans, with most participants who have taken the gender determination test known as the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) identifying as androgynous, with individual leanings towards the masculine or feminine categories. Studies have shown that gender identity begins to emerge between 18 months and the age of three, when a child

begins to become aware of itself and others’ interactions with it. However, when can we say that a person starts feeling ‘like a boy’ or ‘like a girl’? Is it our actions that determine our genders, or our way of thinking? Is it choices in colour and clothing, or the way we speak and the tone we employ?

Is it attributes that we have now come to associate with particular genders, such as ‘fragility’ being feminine and ‘strength’ being masculine? Or is our gender identity defined simply by what we are told to be?

It becomes increasingly evident that image has a vital role to play in how we negotiate gender for our own understanding. We learn to make distinctions early on, either being told by adults to generate certain gender images (“Boys don’t play with dolls”; “Girls should be seen, not heard”) or through observed actions (watching other children interact with other, or being bullied in school) that build up perceptions over time. Some schools in the U.S. have been controversial for advocating gender policing and sex-separated classrooms, so that boys and girls learn according to their particular genders; as a result, girls are put into environments that are more calming and have different subjects when compared to the boys, whose classes adopt a boisterous approach as the teachers feel they learn better that way. As adolescence approaches, however, gender divergence takes precedence, with gender roles either getting cemented into lasting ones or getting opened up for experimentation and exploration.

In a New York Times article titled What’s So Bad About A Boy Who Wants To Wear A Dress?, Ruth Padawer makes an investigation into the world of gender variance and gender-fluid children: these are young boys who like to dress up as and behave like girls, and girls who do the same with boys’ clothing and activities. Often this behaviour is observed to be temporary and fleeting, waning or disappearing entirely as the child grows up. On occasion, however, the variance is more conscious and intense, building up to a state where parents and children struggle to deal with the controversially termed ‘disorder’ in a socially acceptable manner. And even gender-fluid children find themselves snagged in the claws of patriarchal norms. As a San Francisco psychologist, interviewed for the article, sums it up: “There’s a lot more privilege to being a man in our society…when a boy wants to act like a girl, it subconsciously shakes our foundation, because why would someone want to be the lesser gender?”

This perception of femininity as the ‘lesser gender’ is precisely what makes it acceptable, in our current states of mind, for a young girl to be ‘tomboyish’ – adopting male mannerisms, behaviour and clothing – but taboo for a young boy to behave in a feminine manner. Nowhere is this deep-set attitude more revealing than in our visceral reactions to images of boys in female clothing – and

even those of transgendered people, like the hijrahs we so often encounter in India – versus images of girls in male clothing. While the latter may appear perfectly normal, the former sets off alarm bells in our pre-conditioned minds.

The ‘gendering’ of clothing and attitudes can be traced well back into history, with interesting and thought-provoking realizations: dresses were originally considered unisex, adorning both male and female children. The colour blue initially stood for femininity, and pink for masculinity, as pink was considered to be a ‘strong’ colour and blue a ‘delicate’ one. A recent exploration into the relationship between gender and clothing was made by Canadian photographer Hana Pesut, who conducted the ‘Switcheroo’ experiment in which couples were asked to exchange clothing.

Not only do the changes in clothing make for a humorous take on gender identities, even the exchange of poses – the woman with crossed legs and the man with arms folded, and with their positions reversed – add to the realization that even posture and mannerisms can contribute to our unconscious perceptions of masculinity and femininity.

The idea of femininity as the lesser gender contributes to other small but significant perceptions, such as the emphasis on women looking good not for their own sakes but to complete the perfect image that society has of them. In her book The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, Naomi Wolf explains how women are taught to devalue themselves: “There is no legitimate historical or biological justification for the beauty myth; what it is doing to women today is a result of nothing more exalted than the need of today’s power structure, economy, and culture to mount a counteroffensive against women…The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men’s institutions and institutional power.”

The myth finds resonance across cultures: Chinese foot-binding was a means to achieve an ideal of beauty despite pain and physical deformation, carried out from when a girl is as young as twoyears-old. High heels are on the other end of the spectrum, where elevation and altered gait are supposed to instil a sense of power in the woman. It is interesting to note, however, that high heels too were a male fashion accessory till the 1800s, giving men a sense of aggressiveness and virility, having originated in the heeled shoes of ‘masculine’ Mongolian horse-riders. Concerning a woman’s self-image and her projected image to society, Berger summarizes: “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.”

Advertisements and visual media have over the years unquestioningly followed these tropes of masculinity and femininity advocated by patriarchy, which has always controlled the gaze of the consumer. As Berger explains: “Men look at women; women watch themselves being looked at.”

Most of the common stereotypes that advertisements use to slot men and women into categories follow the ideas of the beauty and lesser gender myths as well: for example, passive actions are always attributed to femininity, while activeness corresponds to masculinity. Women appear; men do. Men are on the move, alert, confident and all-powerful; women appear lazy, distracted, fragile, irrational, and almost always cater to a very definite male gaze. Even a mainstream and renowned magazine like Rolling Stone – and one might hope that music could be considered a rather genderneutral field – falls prey to gender stereotypes in its portrayal of musicians.

Despite grim realities, one cannot to negate the rare, creative attempts made by image-makers and designers to move away from stereotypes and tackle gender-role portrayals differently. It is encouraging to note that visual media today have become more accommodative of homosexuality,

women in non-traditional situations, and depiction of gender in a new and sensitive light. Sadly, however, the few that take a shot at showing women and femininity in a positive manner often stumble back into easily avoidable pitfalls, which do nothing to change pre-determined gender perceptions. Even recent interpretations of women in positions of power and leadership, for example, tend to follow a pattern:

The first image, an advertisement for a magazine that calls its readers to ‘Feel like a Woman’, shows a young, smartly dressed lady in heels breaking out of the cage of her former self, who is engrossed in housework. The message is clear: to feel like a woman, one must break out of traditional gender roles associated with femininity. The second and third images, meanwhile, culled from an internet search for depictions of ‘women at work’, show the woman entrepreneur engrossed in dealing with what patriarchy assumes to be the eternal struggle a woman wages between motherhood and independent, self-sufficient work. The images are implying that she must make a choice, a decision based on what role she is more suited to, and the emphasis on the crying babies makes it clear that she owes an obligation to the family first.

The modern woman can hardly be blamed for the mixed and misleading signals that images such as these continue to send out. On the one hand, radical feminism calls for a move away from traditional gender roles such as stay-at-home mothers and professions typically considered apt for women, which, it believes, allow women to remain in subordination to the dominant male world.

On the other hand, women who reach positions of power and self-sufficiency are rarely able to do so without a fair amount of grappling with the status quo and being questioned at every step of the way about their ‘duties and obligations’ to their families, children and society. Patriarchy is

evidently still at play in situation like these, which continue to put pressure on the consumer to fall into gender roles that are either this or that – which masculinity dictates – but never both, as femininity would call for.

This invisible but sustained intensity with which patriarchy operates in society and through images eventually waters down to its most instinctive and dangerous externalization: gender violence. The first insults that children use to bully each other are based on gender. “Acting like a girl” and “Boys don’t cry” are two such statements, heard and registered early in life and stocked up for later use.

As we mature, all the insults that saturate our everyday speech and popular culture influences inadvertently end up being women-centric; they are always either directed at the mother, sister or wife of the antagonist, or attribute to the antagonist himself a feminine characteristic. Even women who use expletives against other women unquestioningly make use of the same female-centric words, such as ‘bitch’, ‘whore’ and ‘slut’. While the correlation between images and language with respect to gender may not be immediately apparent, visual media can either reinforce or help change mind-sets in order to get the consumer to think differently. An example of this is a recent and highly successful anti-bullying campaign in college campuses across the U.S., initiated by the Backbone Zone, which calls for rejection of sexist and homophobic language among adolescents.

Gender violence, however, never ends with language. Aided by constant visual reinforcement – and with only minor, negligible changes in perceptions about gender – words can sometimes get translated into actions. Advertisements, movies, videogames and music all play a major role in interpreting violence and power-play with regard to gender in an insensitive, often glorified manner. Image-makers discover that sexualizing violence is the fastest and most attractive means of getting their messages across. And though it has been argued that images and media cannot alone be blamed for contributing to the rising rates of gender crimes – or that their influence hardly matters in the grand scheme of things – the fact that such distorted messages exist to begin with, and in such high volumes, makes it a disturbing trend. The following advertisements, for example, play down the seriousness of a crime like domestic abuse for the sake of tasteless campaigns that make use of sexualized violence in the name of creativity.

Skewed censorship of movies, which allows glamourized scenes of rape and violence to be shown and yet bans portrayals of sex and nudity, also sends the wrong signals to the average movie-goer.

Further, the early and easy accessibility that young people have to pornography – where even lesbian depictions of sex cater exclusively to the male gaze – can slowly but surely manipulate perceptions about gender roles.

Although there is the hope that new generations can bring in more inclusive and gender-sensitive perceptions, we have to seriously start questioning the mechanisms in societies that allow and encourage the extraction of pleasure from displays of violence and the use power as a means of control and masculinity. A controversial videogame known as RapeLay, which was only banned three years after its release and is yet still available online, involves the player immersing himself in the rape and murder of three women in a family. Though the subsequent outrage was widespread and intense, the game continues to draw in a steady stream of fans who describe it as ‘fun to play’. If not anything else, this example could serve as a wake-up call for image-makers and media persons to introspect about the unseen impact they have on gender perceptions and moulding opinion.

SEX SELLS; BUT WHOSE SEX, AND TO WHOM? By now we can perhaps safely assume the following statement: gender permeates everything, and is a deep part of our identities. Advertisements and visual media, therefore, merely use a small variation of the same mantra when they proudly declare that ‘sex sells’. Since gender difference is the most immediate of identity signifiers and can be communicated at a glance, it becomes the easiest theme to adopt in the process of image-making. In a field where time is money and competition is everything, advertisements obsess over gender and rely on persuasion – often to the point of coercion – to get their fleeting messages across. John Berger links publicity images to capitalism, which, he says, cannot survive without the former: “Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible.” Advertisers, in this sense, often focus on simply pushing the client’s interests, however distorted, to an audience that is brainwashed into adjusting to these imposed ideas.

However, here we raise the question: does our understanding of gender come from the very images we consume, or do we create those images based on perceptions already ingrained in our consciousness? The process appears to be cyclical: images are one of the means through which we attempt to understand gender, while the images that are produced as a result of that understanding further add to the perception-building.

Media and culture studies expert Sut Jhally, in his paper titled Advertising, Gender and Sex: What's Wrong with a Little Objectification?, talks about how advertisements do not reflect reality but instead serve to help us ‘learn about gender’: “Ad images are neither false nor true reflections of social reality because they are in fact a part of social reality… they are hyper-ritualizations that emphasize some aspects of gender displays and de-emphasize others. As such advertisements… are part of the process by which we learn about gender.”

So although they depict neither truth nor falsity, image-makers in mass media continue to operate on the notion that ‘hyper-ritualized’ images of gender are the easiest to resort to in the business of selling their products. The trouble begins when those images are more preoccupied with sexual identity than with gender roles. Jhally explains that advertising is not as concerned with gender as it is with sexuality: “In advertising, gender is equated almost exclusively with sexuality. Women especially are defined primarily in sexual terms… viewing women from this narrow and restricted perspective can result in treating women as less than truly human. The concentration on one aspect of behavior detracts from seeing people as people.” It is this

reduction of women and other gender identities to a single attribute – often as an object or an inanimate entity – that irks feminists and advocates of balanced gender portrayals.

Objectification, however, also brings its own complexities along: the radical feminist rejection of femininity is sometimes questioned by women who, while resenting objectification, do not always protest against the male gaze and often welcome it. There is a very fine and shaky line between situations in which women enjoy asserting their sexuality and welcome male appreciation of the same, and situations when this gaze refuses to see beyond that sexuality as the sole aspect of a woman’s appeal. As Jhally points out: “While there is nothing wrong with a little objectification, there is a great deal wrong and dangerous with a lot of objectification – that is, when one is viewed as nothing other than an object.”

If, therefore, visual media begin to put serious effort into moving towards gender-sensitive and balanced image-making, the emphasis should be on appealing to everyone, not just to one gender in particular, and not by reducing gender to stereotypical traits. Product design, for example, often foolishly resorts to the ‘shrink it and pink it’ myth while trying to appeal to women, instead of catering to their needs as people first. In 1955, automobile manufacturer Dodge introduced the La Femme, a pink car that was sold with a matching purse, umbrella, and makeup case. Although the experiment predictably failed, it seems designers have yet to learn from old mistakes, with Honda recently launching the She’s – Fit series, a car supposedly tailor-made for the modern woman.

It is time that image-makers realized that stereotypes, while being easy to communicate and relate to in the shortest span of time, clearly have no place in realistic and balanced depictions of gender.

Design research blogger Sam Ladner calls for decision-makers to “jettison stereotypes and instead employ archetypes.” Archetypes, or as designers like to call them, personas, can instead use realistic models of persons, personalities or behaviours to make informed choices about how products and services might appeal to people.

Eventually, sex has to stop being the only thing that sells. The time has come for the same passion and intensity employed in the cut-throat advertising world to be applied to more innovative and creative ways of talking about and portraying gender. As design researcher Uta Brandes concludes: “Nothing that has been designed – products, symbols, services – is ever gender-neutral, whether we like it, or notice it, or not. Because of this, just as much attention must be devoted to this area as to analysis of materials, resources, aesthetics and so on.”

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Berger, John. (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books.

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Jhally, Sut. (1989). Advertising, Gender and Sex: What's Wrong with a Little Objectification?

Amherst: University of Massachusetts.

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Kimmel, Michael. (2009). The Gendered Society. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Wolf, Naomi. (2002) The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. New York: HarperCollins.

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Heldman, Caroline. (2012) Sexual Objectification: What is it? The Society Pages: Sociological Images. (http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/07/02/sexual-objectification-part-1what-is-it/)

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Ladner, Sam. (2012). Designing for women using archetypes, not stereotypes. Copernicus Consulting. (http://copernicusconsulting.net/designing-for-women-using-archetypes-notstereotypes/)

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Padawer, Ruth. (2012). What’s So Bad About A Boy Who Wants To Wear A Dress? The New York

Times.

(http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/magazine/whats-so-bad-about-a-

boy-who-wants-to-wear-a-dress.html?_r=0) IMAGES 

Google Images (http://images.google.co.in)

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Ads of the World (http://adsoftheworld.com/media/print)

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Hana Pesut, Switcheroo project (http://sincerelyhana.com/projects/switcheroo/)

KEYWORDS: gender, image, stereotypes, media, advertising, visual cognition