Gender and Television
Essay Preview: Gender and Television
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In a two-part article written for TV Guide in 1964, best-selling author of The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan claimed that television has represented the American woman as a “stupid, unattractive, insecure little household drudge who spends her martyred, mindless, boring days dreaming of love–and plotting nasty revenge against her husband.” Almost thirty years later, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Susan Faludi suggested that the practices and programming of network television in the 1980s were an attempt to get back to those earlier stereotypes of women, thereby countering the effects of the womens movement that Friedans messages had inspired in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Although the analyses of Friedan and Faludi are undeniable on many levels, it is important to remember that television provides less than realistic stereotypes of men as well (although these stereotypes embody qualities–courage, stoicism, rationality–that society values) and the images of femininity justifiably disturbing to Friedan and Faludi are not necessarily read by female viewers in the ways intended by program producers and advertisers. Recent scholarship has studied not only female fan groups that rework television texts in their own writings, but has also suggested that narratives and images are polyvalent and dependent on contextual situations for meaning. For example, television scholar Andrea Press studied womens responses to I Love Lucy, finding that middle-class women drew strength from Lucy Ricardos subversion of her husbands dominance and Lucille Balls performing talents, while working-class women tended to find Ball as Lucy Ricardo funny, but thought the character was silly, unrealistic, and manipulative.
While scholarship such as Presss, motivated by an agenda of understanding cultural products and practices, attempts to understand how audiences negotiate the meanings of gender and class in their encounters with television, commercial broadcasting also has a history of research into audience composition and desires. Of course its agenda is mainly focused on understanding the audience as consumers, since the economic basis of commercial broadcasting is selling consumers to advertisers. As early as the late 1920s, market research suggested to advertisers the importance of the middle-class female consumer in terms of her primary role in making decisions regarding family purchases. Early radio programs included some targeted to the female listener. Advertisers found success with how-to and self-help programs that could highlight the use of a food, cosmetic, or cleaning product in their generous doses of advice patter. By the early 1930s, household product advertisers successfully underwrote serialized dramas (“soap operas”) in the daytime hours, and their assumptions that women were the primary listeners during those hours meant that narratives often revolved around central female characters and that segmentation of story and commercial must conform to the working womans activities as she listened.
Several of the popular radio soap operas made the transition to television, with many new ones created for the medium which would eventually eclipse radio in audience numbers. As with their radio predecessors, these shows were programmed for the daytime hours and featured commercials aimed at the housewife, that “drudge” Friedan described as the stereotype of the post-war American culture. Daytime hours on television also included game and talk/advice shows, whose rhetorical strategies assumed womens capacity as caretaker of the familys economic and emotional resources. The make-up of daytime programming on the broadcast networks has stayed remarkably the same over the years, although soap opera plots seem to take into account the presence of male viewers (not only making male characters more important, but mixing action genre ingredients into the narratives). Perhaps even more significantly as programming strategy, game shows have given way on the schedule to talk shows.
This latter trend began with the tremendous success of Donahue, which started in 1967 as a local, Dayton call-in talk show aimed at women. Host Phil Donahue was interested in serving the needs of the woman at home who was intelligent and politically sophisticated, but unrecognized by other media. Appearing at a time of considerable political and gender unrest and change, by 1980 it was carried on 218 stations around the country, delivering the “right numbers” to advertisers–women aged 18 to 49. Oprah Winfrey also started locally (in Chicago) and two years later, in 1986, The Oprah Winfrey Show went national, not only beating Donahue in the ratings, but also becoming the third-highest rated show in syndication. Winfrey is now one of the wealthiest working women in the country, and has her own production company to produce theatrical and television films, often about African American women. Like Donahue, Winfrey aims her show at intelligent women at home, but she attempts more intimacy with her viewers by relating her guests problems to her own difficulties with weight, drugs, and sexual abuse. The success of Donahue and Winfrey led to a glut of talk shows on daytime television, and the fierce competition among them has resulted in an exploration (some would say exploitation) of once-unspoken or repressed experiences of gender and sexuality (transvestitism, homosexuality, prostitution, incest, adultery, abortion, etc.).
Ironically, primetime television, once considered more “serious” than daytime programming, has continued to cause controversy in the 1980s and 1990s when dealing with issues (abortion, homosexuality) now regularly discussed on daytime talk shows. Primetime television has been considered by the networks and media critics and historians as more serious because of the presumedly “adult” dramas, mostly with male characters as central figures, scheduled during the late, 9:00-11:00 P.M. time slots. Of course, the unspoken here is that these shows are serious because they appeal to male viewers, who are stereotyped as more interested in violence, the law, and the sometimes socially relevant aspects of nighttime
drama.
Many primetime dramas of the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s drew on the “masculine” emphasis of genres successful in other, prior media forms–novels, films, and radio. The western, the detective/police thriller, science fiction, and the medical drama featured controlling male characters, having adventures, braving danger, solving problems through reason and/or violence. Many critics have pointed to the goal-oriented nature of these