Gender in TV Drama

Gender in TV Drama

The representation of gender is portrayed in many different ways across all aspects of media. The type of media with the largest variety is TV.

Many different stereotypes of male and female characters are used to give a certain element to add to the TV drama. For example a common stereotype for a dominant man in a TV drama would be someone who is physically athletic and attractive to a female. In the majority of TV dramas and other forms of media a female is shown as being weaker compared to the male characters and usually ends up falling for one. It is rare in media that a women character would be dominant and not need a male to accompany her or fall in love with her at one point in the drama. Many people believe this affects real life, males thinking they are dominant and females thinking less of themselves.

Laura Mulvey came up with the term “Male Gaze” that shows how women are represented in media purely to please men. Many TV dramas show this in the form of many characters across many shows, in these shows the female characters aim to please a certain male character by being overly sexual by using facial expressions and gestures. An example character of this could be Rebecca Bowman from Banshee, who regularly aims to please Proctor by sexual means.

The opposite of these characters would be dominant male characters that the women are shown to want to please. The male character is often supposedly attractive, powerful and dominant over females. These characters also can affect people’s views on society. Men may think they have to be attractive in order to make a women like them or they may start to treat women as objects as the supposedly “good looking” characters on the television do.  Many characters across media are represented like this, such as ‘Jax’ from sons of anarchy that is attractive and seems to be a dominant male character that appeals to women. 

Many see the dominance towards male characters in TV as being sexist and that it reflects in the way women see themselves