Blog 19

Geena Davis spoke at the National Conference for Media Reform about “gender imbalance.” She began speaking about how when she was younger media still had female and male inequality. In the cartoons when she was younger and still today, she speaks about how there were not that many female characters in the shows. There were mostly male characters. She explains how these programs for children from the past and now, “show highly stereotyped sexualize female characters.” For an example, the smurfs there began with 100 smurfs with no female smurf. When there were one smurf created she was ugly, then one day the female smurf was the blonde beautiful. Then after she was beautiful the fellow smurfs accepted her. The media sends a very disturbing message to young kids which creates a problem for children while growing up. Geena Davis followed up with statistics which resulted in “3 out of 4 character in g rated movies were male.” From 1900 - 2005, characters that were in groups in a movie or film, only 17 percent were women. Throughout history there had only been a few female characters. There has not been any improvement in females being highly stereotyped. That raises a question what messages do these programs and the media send to kids? The message that Davis argued that is being promoted, is “women and girls are worth less then men and boys.” There is a massive unbalance between men and women. Even in the prison system there is still an unbalance in gender. Employment in men and women prisons, there are still more male prison guards then women guards. Also, those who serve as supervisors or wardens consist of mostly men. Male colleagues perceive women to be weaker. They feel that women have to business being there and the job is too dangerous and threatening for women. Male colleagues believe that the workplace is to violent for women. They question the physical strength of a women. Therefore, that put a disadvantage to women working as a correctional officer because women have to take actions in showing that they “can handle violence.” Therefore, women “volunteer for dangerous assignments” (PowerPoint) to prove that they can handle dangerous situations.