Men Are Portrayed Negative or Positive Way in Mass Media

Media Image Women have long faced media images that create unrealistic images of themselves to live up to, but a lesser known fact is that men face the same problem. In today's mass media, men are dunderheaded, philandering imbeciles, or impossibly perfect heroes. These are equivalent to the slut and the Barbie images that women face in the media, and such false, unrealistic images of men are just as dangerous as their female equivalents. The portrayal of men in the mass media is negative and needs to be changed.

In a landmark study, Macnamara (2006) examined over 2000 mass media instances and found that 69% of them portrayed men in a negative light, and much of the rest was dismissive about the positive coverage. On their own, such images can be foolish and absurd, but as occurs with the negative images of women, the negative images of men have negative consequences in the real world. Macnamara cites negative health outcomes, suicide and family disintegration as some of the consequences of media's negative portrayals of men.

In his book This is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz highlights the challenges men face in adapting to real world reality, after being raised in an environment surrounded by such negative imagery. Boys learn at a young age from their surroundings what is expected of them in society. Usually, those expectations amount to very little. As Diaz notes, "it is assumed that guys value sexuality over relationship and commitment." In his book, Diaz covers this issue, and the protagonist must figure out his own views of women.

This becomes a process where the narrator must overcome his upbringing to become reveal the man that he always was. Men often face this struggle, and some simply succumb to the media imagery and fulfill the low expectations that society has for them. In addition to damaging men's ability to relate to women as full human beings rather than just sexual objects, Petersen (2013) notes that men also suffer from media imagery surrounding their role in the family.

The trend towards portraying fathers as bumbling doofuses entirely irrelevant to the family's functioning provides little in the way of a realistic role model for boys. If society adopts this view as well, boys grow up learning that they are not needed as fathers. This in turn is likely to decrease the commitment level of boys to fatherhood, leading to the next generation having absentee fathers, reinforcing that lesson.

When the image of the father as doofus, mentally if not physically absent from the family, is the only image that society understands, this becomes the expectation and it becomes what young boys learn. When we lower the expectations for men in society, it is only natural that boys will only live down to the low expectations. When the man's ability to relate to women and family is damaged by negative stereotypes in the media, we are all affected.

Women are further reduced to sex objects, as the man is expected to have no other role with regards to the opposite gender. This works against what women have been fighting for these past decades. The disintegration of the family exacerbates the problem of raising boys who can break free from stereotypes, because men at that point become the stereotypes that society expects them to be.

But a society where boys are raised with few if any positive male role models is going to be dysfunctional, overly violent, where males in leadership positions in particular behave in juvenile ways unconducive to good governance and those outside of leadership positions drift through life unable to serve any real purpose other than work. At its worst, an absence of male role models increases the likelihood of antisocial and criminal behavior.

It is almost refreshing at this point to find a character on television on in the movies that breaks the stereotype. I like the character of Angel on Dexter as a good example of this. The character is a Cuban-American, and he is initially portrayed in a fairly stereotypical manner as a womanizer and partier, devoid of responsibility even though he is well beyond his twenties.

At a point, he becomes married (to his boss) and this forces him to reevaluate a lot of his upbringing and the pre-defined gender role that is expected of him. He is challenged in particular by the idea that his wife is his boss, since he is expected to be the dominant member of the household.

Redefining his own gender ideals is something that reminds me directly of Diaz's book, which also feature a Latino male seeking to re-learn about women and relationships as an adult, to break out of his gender stereotype. The subject is not often addressed in the mainstream media, and certainly not tackled with a character that is supposed to be.