Dingmin Lin Wrap-Up

The Progression of Gender Roles in Media

            As technology is getting more advance, Human receives a lot of information from the social media, and social Media like files, music, Television show, and advertisement have deeply affect the different gender behavior. Therefore, after finished research on different time and evaluate and understand that the mediating impaction of gender and gender role self-perception on response to different time period of music. The research shows that is different time period, music can reflect human desire. Many female singers (I only did research on woman) put their desire of freedom in to song’s lyrics. So a lot of time, from the song’s lyrics, we can see what woman’s desire at that time period. In this collaborative research blog, from 1960 to early 2000, woman is getting more freedom and more right, because we can easily see that from different time period’s music.

                        As we can see from the music how did women work step by step to become independence from man and have same equal right as man have. At first step, women just asked for the respect from the man in 1960. The music “Respect” by Aretha Franklin, she raised her voice when she singed: “sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me…….” This shows that she is a very confident woman, and demand his “respect” to her. At the second step, women wanted to have same equal right as men have. Music like “I am Woman, “by Helen Reddy and “Want Ads” by Honey Cones between 1970s and 1980s, there is a famous cultural movement called Lesbian feminism. At the third step, woman wanted to be independent from the men. Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” (a song written for the comedy film of the same name), from the song she wants to show that woman can also like man work from 9 o’clock to 5 o’clock. And later on, women wanted the government to create law to protect their right. D.C. Riot Grrrl bands often address issues such as rape, domestic abuse, sexuality, racism, patriarchy and female empowerment.  Finally, in 2000, men and woman both share almost same equal right.

Not only music show that woman was getting more freedom and more equal rights through time, but also from other research group member also show the almost same result. In the 1960, the Velveeta’s advertisement, sellers used woman as a figure to promote household products. And a slogan from the advertisement: “How Velveeta can help you in the big job of being a mother,” this lets men to believe the role of women should be a house wife.

In In this 1970s poster of Honda Civic, the Honda Company use women to promote their product. However, the slogan is “women only drive automatic transmissions,” this also shows that men is better than woman because men can drive automatic and manual, but woman only can drive automatic.

In 1980, in the poster of Budweiser, they used women to sell their product and target the consumer. Men were their main focus of consumer and therefore, they use women as a sex appealing character to purchase the product.

In 1990’s Maidenform’s poster, the company neglects the face of woman and instead, they uses their only the body parts. However, poster uses women’s breast to promote their product of bra lines. And in the past, woman should cover up all their body. But in 1990, Company started to use sex appealing to promote more men or women to purchase the products.

In 2000, Michael Kor’s advertisement, both genders are being placed in the same image. The world today gives more opportunities to women where they become strong powerful force in the advertisement field. And also in 2014’s Tom Ford advertisement uses Esther Heesch as an attraction and also this image depicts the dominance of women in the field where as the model is on top of men and men are to support her. From those advertisement we can see that woman has become more and more independent from the men. And woman can also be the center of advertisement. Although there are some small different between how music and advertisement reflect the gender role in society from 1960 to 2000, we still can see that women is getting more freedom and less sexual discrimination from the society.

 The result of my research actually surprises me, because at beginning of writing the proposal of this collaborative research blog, media (music) is one of way to influence people’s thinking and behavior. But I never thought media and human are co-influence. Artist put down their desire and think in to their lyrics and the song influence people to think way. From this, it creates more research need to done to answer what causes this kind of co-influence exists, and does this kind of co-influence relationship provide a positive effect or negative effect?