Amanda's Third Article Review

Amanda Blohm

Professor Currans

Blog Topic: Gender and Popular Films

Article Review #3

Lauzen, M. M., & Dozier, D. M. (2005). Maintaining the double standard: Portrayals of age and gender in popular films. Sex Roles, 52(7-8), 437-446. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11199-005-3710-1

            In “Maintaining the Double Standard: Portrayals of Age and Gender in Popular Films”, Lauzen and Dozier discuss the double standard for aging male and female characters. Within this study, they came to the understanding that men generally are allowed to appear older on screen where women are not allowed to do so. Besides this, the majority of characters were male, at least in a staggering number when compared with female characters that hold the major character spots. They conducted their study in order to see whether or not popular films currently also perpetuate the double standard that older films have put on. Therefore, this study was conducted in order to “illuminate the complex systems of expectations and perceptions regarding individuals young and old, male and female,” through media’s representations (438).

            In order for Lauzen and Dozier to support this argument about the double standard being maintained in contemporary popular films, the study had to be conducted in a way that gave enough results to conclude from. Before the details of the method and results were given, however, they talk about how media portrays gender and age. From a work of literature talking about the same subject, the author noted “that frequently men’s success is measured by what they do, whereas women’s success is measured by how they look” (438). Moving further on this note, you could assume that then women lose success as they grow older and lose their beauty by society’s standards whereas men may continue to be successful despite aging physically. As they say several times throughout the article, men then are allowed to enjoy longer screen lives than women. In most cases, while men are represented as older on screen, or at least represented at more varying ages, women are limited to an age when they are seen as their more attractive. This means that “female characters in prime time are younger than male characters” and in a study, they “found little change in the portrayal of gender and age over the three decades” (439). In order to conduct the study, Lauzen and Dozier coded several traits. The codes were as follows: gender of character, type of character (major or minor), age, leadership, occupational power, goal, and effectiveness in achieving that goal” (440). Unsurprisingly, women only made up 28% of the characters were men made up 72%. The percentages are similar when it comes to women that make up the major characters and men that make up the same category. When looking at the age of these characters in films, women made up much of the younger ages where men made up more of the older characters.

            The results of the study were used in order to answer several questions that the researchers had asked prior to coding and conducting the study. Firstly, it was asked if “popular films continue to misrepresent the age distribution of the US population” (441). Within the male population, younger boys were underrepresented, men in their thirties and forties were highly overrepresented and men older than that were also underrepresented. Women faced a similar but opposite trend, where their younger ages overrepresented and older ages were underrepresented, but the age of women in their forties actually matched the population. Another questions asked “whether gender interacts with age to influence a character’s leadership status, occupational power, possession of goals, and effectiveness in achieving those goals” (442). For men, leadership increased with age but for women, it did not. Where males had goals across all ages, women did not and it seemed to drop as they grew older. However, effectiveness was not significant in either gender according to the study. From all this, however, we can assume that films do still perpetuate the double standard of gender and age. Female characters were overrepresented at ages between twenty thirty where male characters were overrepresented slightly older than them. As well, “portrayals of characters aged 60 and older were scarce”, which suggests that it is not only gender involved in younger women being portrayed but an age bias as well (443). But simply from this study we can gain, “women enjoy a shorter screen life than men; they effectively disappear from the screen at an earlier age” and that these “popular images reinforce cultural beliefs that women’s value continues to reside in their youthful appearance” (443). All of this is extremely harmful towards children’s and in general society’s perception of gender and age in relation to each other.

            This article relates to my topic of gender and popular films, due to its subject concerning gender relating to age on the screen. Following my previous articles, we can see that even in this small subset of categories in films, women are still represented unfairly. Beyond that, even men are represented incorrectly, only well in one area of age as women are. Even then, both genders are overrepresented in one age rather than others, in fact they are underrepresented in the rest of their ages and especially in ages exceeding sixty. Relating to the previous article I reviewed, these two are only slightly similar. Both take a look at the two genders and certain traits they relate to, but each are very different when it comes down to exactly what they are looking for. The previous article was interested in the feminine and masculine traits put on by several characters over time, where this article focuses primarily on how successful and goal-oriented characters are, especially when connected to their ages.