media: tv/movies

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

Alicia S. sent in an image of the poster for the movie Life as We Know It, featuring Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel. Heigl appears to be in her familiar role as responsible, career-oriented, but uptight and ultimately unfulfilled woman who falls for an irresponsible or immature guy. In the movie, the two main characters end up raising a child together after the death of the baby’s parents. The poster pretty much sums up the messages you’re going to get about gender:

Want more? Here’s the trailer:

So women are responsible — they can even get themselves dressed — and nurturing while men are childish boors. Alicia says,

While Heigl is presented as a warm, caring motherly figure, her male costar is likened to a baby: immature and irresponsible, just another child in the family. He reflects the stereotype represented in so many romantic comedies and Monday night sitcoms alike that men are messy, careless, and juvenile.

They’re repeatedly presented as messy, careless, and juvenile…and yet still ultimately get the mature, caring, nurturing, attractive woman.

These stereotypes are offensive to women and men. Women are supposed to settle — to fall in love with the equivalent of a child, and to find that endearing, as opposed to insulting or creepy. That means, of course, she’ll have to be primarily responsible for childcare and running the household, since you can’t trust an immature, careless person to do important things (think of every sitcom or commercial that shows a hapless man messing everything up when he’s left to care for the house on his own).

And men are depicted as ridiculous oafs. I’m always surprised that more men aren’t offended by this representation of manhood: men as incompetent pigs who treat women badly (setting up another date in front of his current one at the beginning of the trailer) who can barely take care of themselves, much less anyone else. Of course, the stereotype does have benefits from those men willing to draw on it: if you are incapable of taking care of children and doing housework without causing a major disaster, you’re relieved from those tasks, or your partner has to fight constantly to get you to do them. So while the gender stereotypes on display here are insulting to both men and women, they reinforce a gendered division of parenting labor that justifies putting the burden of that labor on women rather than men.

Please accept this newest edition of violence is sexy, courtesy of Lisa R.  The promo below, designed to advertise two shows about female murderers (Deadly Women and Wicked Attraction), sexualizes murder. The narration goes:

In the heat of summer, temperatures rise, passions erupt, and sometimes, things… turn… deadly.

They “erupt.” Get it? Get it!?

The thing is, these are stories about real women who actually murdered people. Lisa writes:

…the crimes they’re talking about on these shows are not all sex-related, and I’m just going to go out on a limb and say none of them are sexy, either. The only reason I can even fathom for a promo like this is just the notion that women are sex personified, like the green M&M. Even committing horrible, gruesome murders can’t change that.

In other words, if women are involved, best to sexify. If a man murders a man, it’s just violence. But if a man murders a woman or a woman murders a man, it’s sexy, sexy violence. If a woman murders a woman, will the murder be sexualized? I bet it would.

This calls into question the idea that we sexualize violence against women because we find pleasure in harming her. Instead, maybe we sexualize violence against women simply because we sexualize women.

Also in random, bizarre things sold with sex, see our post on using sex to sell the most unlikely things.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

My friend Matt M. let me know about this video from The Second City Network that nicely sums up some of the disturbing messages about love, dating, and gender in animated movies such as Beauty and the Beast. Enjoy!

Also watch an earlier on on The Little Mermaid.

Using the top grossing films between 1940 and now, John Graham-Cumming has documented a rise in the percent of movies that include murder (of people or animals that can talk).  Here’s the data going from today (on the left) to the 1940s (on the right):

Shall we speculate explanations for the rise in lethal violence?

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Last month the cast of Jersey Shore rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The public responded negatively.  Says one snarky observer on the NYSE’s Facebook page:

The kids of the Jersey Shore rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange this week.  In a related story, civilization is down 500 points.

The trouble, it seems, comes from the weirdness of bringing together trivial-and-fake-“reality”-stars with the very-important-and-really-real-U.S.-financial-market.

Economic sociologist Brooke Harrington, however, thinks the two are less incongruent than they seem.  She writes:

I’d like to suggest that what seems so wrong with that picture of Snooki and company ringing the opening bell actually makes a lot of sense sociologically. If this meeting of worlds—entertainment and the stock market—seems strange, it may be because we’re so used to regarding the markets as “real,” rather than as a performance (or even as entertainment in their own right).

Markets, she explains, aren’t “more ‘real’ than ‘reality TV.'”  Instead, both the characters on Jersey Shore and markets are playing themselves.   The reality show stars respond to expectations of “Guido” and “Guidette” personalities.  Likewise, the market responds to  economists whose predictions often create the very reality that they anticipate.

Harrington brings in a fancy concept:

Both are engaged in producing what French sociologist and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard calls “the simulacrum:” a copy without an original, a pretense that replaces and ultimately negates “reality” so successfully that we no longer care about what is real.

She finishes:

Theorized through this lens, the image of the Jersey Shore cast ringing the opening bell at the NYSE persists in memory not because it is represents a collision of worlds, but because it brings together two genres of performance whose entertainment value depends on their purported “reality.”

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Reel Injun, a new documentary about the portrayal of American Indians in U.S. movies, has been earning high praise and notice from bloggers and film critics. About the film:

Hollywood has made over 4000 films about Native people; over 100 years of movies defining how Indians are seen by the world...

Travelling through the heartland of America, Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond looks at how the myth of “the Injun” has influenced the world’s understanding – and misunderstanding – of Natives.

With candid interviews with directors, writers, actors and activists, including Clint Eastwood, Jim Jarmusch, Robbie Robertson, Sacheen Littlefeather, John Trudell and Russell Means, clips from hundreds of classic and recent films, including Stagecoach, Little Big Man, The Outlaw Josey Wales, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Atanarjuat the Fast Runner, Reel Injun traces the evolution of cinema’s depiction of Native people from the silent film era to today.

I can’t wait to see it.

The trailer:

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The New York Times has a neat interactive graph based on data from the American Time Use Survey that lets you look at hour-by-hour time use broken down by sex, employment status, 3 racial/ethnic groups (White, Black, Hispanic), age, education, and number of children (though, unfortunately, you can’t search by more than one category at once). Here is the breakdown for the entire sample:

For people age 15-24:

Watching TV and movies takes up a lot of the time of those over age 65:

You can also click on a particular activity to get more information about it:

Those with advanced degrees spent the most time participating in sports or watching them in person; I suspect that the data might look a bit different if time spent watching sports on TV went in this category instead of the TV category:

Just a note, the averages for time spent at work seem pretty low, but that’s because they’re averaged over all days of the week, including any days off, rather than only days a person actually went to work.

Presumably the amount of time you’ll spend playing around with the site goes under computer use.

Deepa D. sent in an interesting post from Racebending about the race/ethnicity and gender of stars who get top billing in Paramount movies. Three volunteers at Racebending analyzed relevant data on movies produced or distributed by Paramount Pictures since 2000, as well as those currently in development. They focused on top billing — that is, which stars are most frequently highlighted in promotional materials, whose names appear highest in the credits, and so on. This both reflects power and status in Hollywood (the more prestige you have, the higher you’re likely to be credited compared to lower-status stars with similar screen time) and contributes to it (higher billing leads to more exposure and attention. Racebending explains:

Various types of Credit include Main Title Credit (before the movie starts), End Title Credit (after the movie is over), Paid Advertising Credit (mention during commercials and publicity), Above-the-Title Credit (name shows up on top of the movie name in promos and on screen), and Billing Block Credit (the block of text on posters and trailers.)

Their methodology:

For our review, we simply looked at which actor is listed first on imdb.com. Even if several actors have received top billing or above the title billing, someone is always listed first…

Our review of actors in top billing was necessarily subjective, but the cultural ethnicity and gender of most of Paramount’s top-billed actors like John Travolta, Angelina Jolie, and Samuel L. Jackson are well established in the public sphere. For animated characters like Shrek the Ogre, Spongebob Squarepants, and Eliza Thornberry we looked to the gender and ethnicity of the voice actor. We simply tallied the first actor billed, (for example: Malin Ackerman in Watchmen, Chris Pine in Star Trek, Ben Affleck in The Sum of All Fears, Jamie Foxx in The Soloist, Noah Ringer in The Last Airbender.)

The analysis found that the vast majority of top-billed stars in Paramount films from 2000 to 2009 are male, while movie audiences are about 45% male:

An even higher proportion — 86% — of top-billed stars are White (the green bars show each groups percent of the overall U.S. population):

The category White there specifically includes White non-Hispanics. No Latinos had top billing in Paramount movies during this time period. Also,

Out of 133 movies either produced or distributed, 17 had a black lead actor and only one had an Asian actor–Parry Shen in the film Better Luck Tomorrow (2002). However, Paramount did not produce Better Luck Tomorrow, the company distributed the film to theaters after the film made the independent film circuit.

When the data are broken down by race/ethnicity and gender, we see that the vast majority of top-billed stars who are non-White are men. Non-White women are almost entirely shut out:

The chart on the right represents films currently under development. While Whites predominate in the starring roles in these projects, notice that White women make up only 6% of top-billed stars, and non-White men make up about twice that proportion.

This is, of course, just one studio. If you have links to similar data on other studios, or on movies more generally, send them in!

Related posts: the Bechdel test, the real stars of Glee, underrepresenting women in Hollywood, the Smurfette principle, whitening Heroes, White actors in yellowface, casting cheat sheet, Hollywood’s discomfort with Asian lead characters, race in Transformers II, gender in Pixar films, racist Disney characters, and the gender hierarchy in Bee Movie.