Читать книгу Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know - Barbara Angelis De - Страница 16

As young children, most of us learned how to view ourselves as males and females not only from our parents but from the thousands of hours we spent watching television. There have been some fascinating studies of how men and women are portrayed on TV, and the results are disturbing:

Male characters are generally shown in ambitious, adventuresome, strong, and dominant roles, while females are cast in dependent, submissive, and weak roles.

Males are engaged in exciting activities for which they receive great rewards, while females are involved in activities that support or are less important than the men’s, and for which they receive little reward.

Television commercials present women as worried, tense, and concerned about problems such as toilet bowl odor, migraine headaches, and ring around the collar, while men are shown as authoritative, knowledgeable, and macho.

The TV Western, a favorite with young boys in the 1950s and 60s, portrayed the all-American hero, the cowboy, as a loner, doing what needed to be done, riding off into the sunset alone, with no commitments, no ties – free.

Picture the man in your life during the years when he was a little boy, sprawled in front of the TV set watching program after program, and commercials in between, all depicting men as strong, cool, unemotional, always in control, afraid of nothing. Whether his hero was the Lone Ranger, Zorro, Batman, Maverick, the boys of Bonanza, Peter Gunn, or any larger-than-life cowboy, detective or tough guy, your man knew how he wanted to be when he grew up. By the way, these programs never showed Zorro’s wife, or the Lone Ranger’s girlfriend. No, for these TV role models, intimacy meant having a horse, or maybe a male sidekick, but never a woman.

In case the man in your life grew up with radio rather than TV, he isn’t off the hook – radio dramas contained the same kinds of stereotypes as TV programs, which grew out of the radio days.