How Woman Are portrayed on Television

            When watching television how many of you think about how woman are actually portrayed? Well I am sure not many of you think about it that much, so I am here to talk about how woman are portrayed in the media. As you know we live in a patriarchal world and it is hard for women to get ahead, or even have a chance at something a man has accomplished. We start to believe that women are less superior then men and that they are only capable of doing certain things because of what we see on television. Throughout this paper I am going to look into the physical appearance, the family life, and the professional life of female characters and show you how they are portrayed.

            First off I want to talk about how most women on television show have that “girl next door” look, they are almost always tall, slim, and beautiful. Which is something that we all wished we looked like, but to be honest most of us are far from the “girl next door” look? The media portrays women as being kind, happy, and very little intelligence. The media makes these beautiful women look dumb, and when the audiences see that they will start to believe that if they have the looks than why work for the intelligence. Now I am going to give you some examples of these “girl next door types” on television.

So when women are portrayed on Television they are either going to play the girl next door like the character’s from Desperate Housewives, or they are going to be playing a “bad ass” but while playing that roll they are going to be highly sexualized. When they have women play heroes on television they don’t make them an average hero, they make her a sex object that comes and saves the day. For example here is a picture of Sarah Michelle Gellar, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer in her costume.

            When you watch television its very rare to see a women in a television show playing a women with an amazing career, who has no worries besides her job and coming home to dinner on the table(wouldn’t that be nice). But, realistically women are not shown having careers, or being intelligent. Instead, “In terms of the importance of family life, most female characters in TV dramas are set in domestic situation. Their ultimate life achievement is supposed to be getting married and giving birth to children, because the home setting is the place where women’s “expertise” is highly valued” (Ingham 2007). When watching Television we never see women talking to other women about careers or important issues in the world, rather we see them gossiping about family issues, and the latest fashion statement. When media does this, it doesn’t show what women really put into raising a family and keeping a house nice. Even when they show women having jobs they don’t show the women performing their second shift (doing housework when you get home from work), or getting any credit for keeping the house clean and having dinner on the table.

            Now moving onto how the media portrays women in their professional lives on television. Television shows have made women look like they are not as good as men when it comes to their professional lives. Female characters’ professional lives are usually ignored, or more often, they are portrayed as housewives who takes care of children and family chores every day, but not ambitious at all in building a career (Ni). But when women are actually shown having jobs on television they are given the traditional feminine jobs like being a nurse, teacher, secretary, etc.  When woman see this on television they start to think that it is normal and that it is ok, but really it is not ok for them to think like that, and they need to not look so much into how women are portrayed on television and focus more on equality between men and women and making a change so our children don’t have to grow up in this male dominated world.

            Now the women that do try to pursue their career they seem to not make it or give up when they reach a road bump. “For the relatively small amount of women who try to further their professional lives, they “invariably seem to fail” (Ingham, 2007). For example on Eastanders, Samantha leaves her husband to pursue a modeling career but fails miserably.

When it comes to how the media portrays women, it comes off as mostly negative and it’s going to stay that way unless women step up and demand to play more powerful roles. Now that we have looked at the ways in which woman’s physical appearance, their family life, and lastly their professional lives are portrayed in the media, we can see the representations that media has given to women.