Is our Media Feeding our Children Outdated Gender Views?

I grew up watching Barbie, Cinderella, Bob the Builder, and all sorts of inane make believe. Everyday, I would run home giddily after school, excited to sit for hours without end in front of the television watching little figures dance across the screen. And then the next day at school, they would still be in my life, me and my little clique of friends would go around reenacting the previous episode, or continue delving into its world of fantastical deception. And I’m sure all of you, each and every one of you, had a similar phase.

Clearly these shows were quite cardinal in the childhood of many. However, the degree of work that is put in to ensure their quality in terms of moral and gender values is disproportionately less, rendering our children in vulnerable positions.

Society tells us that the ‘perfect’ women have very specific traits: they’re beautiful, they’re gently submissive, and are able to keep their households a perfect scene. Let’s take a look at Snow White.

Throughout the whole tale, we never know who she is - to us, she’s merely a nameless, faceless girl with beautiful pale skin. It suggests that it doesn’t matter who she is on the inside, it doesn’t matter whether she’s optimistic and friendly and loving, because all those things were not what made up her identity. Instead, the story tells us that the value of women, what distinguishes you and I, are merely our exterior shells.

And this is what we’re telling our children; we’re painting an outdated and stereotyped world, where beauty equates to goodness and ugliness a sinful monstrosity; at a young age, we’re already instilling into them that it’s beauty over brawn over brains, willingly submitting them to the scrutinization of society’s unachievable beauty standards.

But we have to understand the context of the problem. Most fairy tales were written in the 1800s: when society was a place of rigid social hierarchy, filled with the limitations of gender roles. Thus, perhaps the gender stereotypes expressed in these countless fairytales were normalized at the time, they are surely less applicable to the amended world of today. In every fairy tale we see, they all have one thing in common: the ending, the stereotypical ‘happily ever after’ matrimonial ending.

But in today’s society, is marriage really the ultimate goal that we all need to seek? Apparently not. From the 1980s to 2015 today, the amount of unmarried women above the age of 30 have quadrupled from 12% to 48% in the United States. With the rising trends in gender equal education, the increase in entertainment available, the busy frantic lifestyle that has arisen as a result of rapid globalisation, we simply all have so much more to do. Unlike the 1800s, when the only means of transport were by carriages, the only means of communication by pigeon post, today we have social media, jet planes, robots, and all sorts of unimaginable technology. It is no longer necessary for us to fill our long dreary hours with the only available occupation: marriage.

And recognizing this change, understanding that under the circumstances of today, there are so many more ways one can be content in life without matrimony. We need to change our sources of entertainment accordingly. We need to stop force-feeding our children the idea that marriage and family is everything, and although those aspects are nevertheless still of paramount importance, it is also important for our media to reflect the truth - that there are so many more paths in life outside of marriage.

We have gone so far as a society, taking leaps and bounds in our fight for equality: the 1848 Suffragette movement, the 1963 Equal Pay act, the 2018 MeToo movement, all of it. But are we really going to let something, something like Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella and Barbie with their pristine immaculate blonde hair - blue eyes drag us down? Instilling the heretical concepts of gender stereotypes - the very thing we have been fighting- into future generations? No! We can’t! I’m not saying we should go back and forget years and years of prized literature and the childish joy they offered for a lot of us.

All I’m saying is that we need to call for a change, where parents and educators begin to incorporate the right concepts of gender equality into education, where film producers continue to produce films like Moana and Brave - which completely trample gender roles while still maintaining the usual level of Disney magic, where even we, as students, recognize that our media for children - and even for ourselves - is feeding us outdated gender views.