Blatant Heterosexual Masculinity In Mass Media
It's a common stigma in media today to promote an over exaggerated image of perfection in human beings, particularly among the youth and the young adults. Women marvel at petite figures while men chase after the ideal muscle mass. What the public looks past, however, is the foundations of these ideals that are planted in the root of our culture. Society enforces these idealistic images, however subtle, of the heterosexual differences of both male and female through the public domain, normalizing these stereotypes of gender roles through everyday conditioning. This paper will discuss how Deborah Cameron's investigation (2017) reveals the blatant heterosexual masculinity seen in the language used by her informants are perpetuated by the common media as shown in the film Codes of Gender as well as how this is passed on from even the most seemingly neutral perspectives.
The variability of gender identities is stressed in Cameron's article where even speech seemed to be enough to create a barrier between male and female. In the conversations between men that she studied, she found that there was an ideal of qualities that were observed to be more masculine than others and thus "the antithesis of man" was then shunned and treated as a flaw in the gender identity, unable to meet the standards of a culture's version of masculinity or femininity. There was evidence of an unspoken constitution of a gender's image as the males were trying to differentiate themselves from the traits of a female. When speaking of someone of the same gender, young men would refer to their skills rather than their appearances, avoiding the risk of expressing desire for other men. The opposite is true when their topic of conversation is that of women or gay men where they can speak without violating their heterosexual masculinity. Thus to present themselves this way in society, or otherwise enact "performative gender work" they tend to use language that is stereotypically masculine, leading all others to classify the genders by their behavior and language, asserting themselves as the real image of manhood.
These prevalent stereotypes have long been perpetuated by the media, surrounding us with contrasting images of male and female and normalizing ideals for both genders by integrating it into our everyday lives. Erving Goffman defines commercial realism as something advertisers impose on their audience as something that supposedly mirrors reality. While they do not seem strange, with closer inspection, these idealistic patterns begin to reveal themselves and deconstruct society's categorizations of male and female behavior. Goffman describes the gender display as rituals of gender behavior.
