Stereotypes Of Gender Roles

Sariyya Nuriyeva

April 15, 2018

Noticing gender

One of the most important factors that affect our view of the world is stereotypes. Stereotypes are socially constructed either by ourselves or by people around us such as friends, family, teachers or media. Most of the time stereotypes are negative, deep-rooted and hard to change. The most obvious example of stereotypes is gender stereotypes to which we are exposed in our everyday lives. Throughout the history domination of men over women prevailed. Even though in hunting-gathering societies men and women had equal power in society, with the beginning of the agrarian era where the ownership of private property emerged men gained more power over women. Women’s participation in workplace declined

Another term introduced by Cornell is emphasized femininity which is about women complying with gender inequality by confirming men’s dominance and accepting themselves as intimate objects of males by constantly feeling a pressure to feed men’s sexual desires. Although the concept of hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity do not necessarily reflect actualities of gender relationships, they are overly emphasized and conveyed in mass media through tv shows, ads, cartoons or

One of such films is “Spider-Man” which is about a man namely Peter Parker who got superpowers after being bitten by a super spider in a laboratory. Peter Parker has to fight against an evil character Green Goblin and win Mary Jane Watson’s heart who is his classmate and love interest.Towards the end, Peter fights the evil and rescues Mary along with other civilians from death. Mary confesses her feelings to Peter, however, Peter understands he has a new responsibility of being Spider-Man and fighting the evil which can bring danger to Mary’s life, therefore, he says that they can only be friends. We can see very clear images of stereotypical gender roles: Peter as a hero, strong character who understands his responsibility as an agent fighting against evil whereas Mary as an emotional character who needs to be loved and saved by Peter. Another example of such films could be “Snow White” animated by Disney. In this film princess Snow White who is pretty, kind, gentle, caring, weak and a bit afraid escapes into the forest from her evil stepmother who wants to kill her because she is jealous of the fact that Snow White is more beautiful than her. She settles in the house of seven dwarves who are doing jewel mining and have no time to clean their house. Here she does all the chores and cares about them, in return dwarves