Wednesday: “Don’t worry. We’re getting out of here.”
Joel: “But…it’s Disney.”
Wednesday: (takes a deep breath)
~Addams Family Values (1993)
This is part three of a multi-part series on the dangers of sexism in the mass media. If you haven’t already, you should read Part 1 and Part 2 first.
The Mass Media and Normalization
In Part 1 we covered several cognitive biases that make people susceptible to mass media influence, and in Part 2 we looked at how damaging mass media messages have pushed susceptible people over the edge.
Yet, there are still those in the absolutist free-speech movement who would claim that these are only harmless words. For them, considerations for a minority will always take a back seat to personal sovereignty.
And when the calls for respect come from minority groups (women, ethnic minorities, survivors of sexual violence, the disabled, or anyone else regularly targeted by South Park[1] ) you’ll find that the number of people taking the absolutist position will increase dramatically, but I digress.
Those who take the absolutist position on free-speech typically treat bigoted and abusive media stories as isolated incidents. As if it was only one violent story, or one sexist video game, or a few backhanded comments made by one celebrity in isolation.
But bigotry is never spoken in isolation. It’s never one novel with an assaulted female lead, or one bigoted opinion article, or one damsel in distress, or one dick with a web comic/expo. This shit comes in droves, from all sides.
But don’t take my word for it. You can see it for yourself by taking a slightly broader look at the Damsel In Distress trope:
- First, as Anita Sarkeesian has demonstrated, the trope is ubiquitous in all types of video games from old to new, AAA to indie.
- Second, the video game version of the trope originated in movies, where the trope is used all the time (here’s a list of 100+ movies with damsels in distress from Screened, and 700+ movies from IMDB).
- The trope has also featured in over 100 TV shows…
- …and that’s not including children’s cartoons (April O’Neil is captured so often in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that the turtles can recognize her by the sound of her gagged mumbles, while Daphne in Scooby Doo was captured so often that she got the fan nickname “danger-prone Daphne”, and Olive Oil’s capture is the plot for nearly every episode of Popeye).
- It’s been a staple of fairy tales (Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, etc.)…
- …which were then ported into many of the troubling female role models in Disney cartoons. Disney has also created their own original versions of the trope as well (Jasmine in Aladdin, or Kida in Atlantis: The Lost Empire, etc.).
- It’s featured in anime (Karou getting captured in Rurouni Kenshin/Samurai-X, and at least one woman in nearly every episode of Lupin and Sailor Moon, etc.) and of course comics.
- It’s in many popular fiction novels (Ginny in Harry Potter, Bella in Twilight, all the female leads in Peter Pan at one time or another, etc.)…
- …but it’s also older than dirt (Eurydice in Orpheus, Sarah who is besieged by a demon in the Bible, etc.)
- And it’s echoed in popular music (from Ella May Bowen’s Holding Out for a Hero, to I Will Rescue You by Plus One).
And when you’ve gotten through all that, you can buy the fucking t-shirts!
When the messages in movies, TV shows, and video games match the messages in music…when those messages get repeated over and over in print…when even the stuff you buy carries the same messages from everywhere else…when everything around you says the exact same thing, everyone becomes susceptible to the message.
Yes, everyone! Once mass media has reached this scope and scale, it is no longer just a few on the edge who are susceptible. At this scale and uniformity, the mass media can steer trends across all of society.
The Normalization of Smoking
Take cigarettes. The tobacco industry constantly needs to hook young people to replace the ones getting killed by their product [2], and the mass media has been their hook for decades. First, they had their close relationship to Hollywood. Back in the 1960s, it was common to see popular cartoon characters selling cigarettes in direct ads after a cartoon show. Like this ad for cigarettes (and unpaid domestic labor) from The Flintstones that aired as part of the cartoon:
And like all mass media products, it wasn’t isolated to one or two incidents. Here’s Tom & Jerry enjoying 5 not-Marlboro cigarettes at once:
And in the original Superman movies, they made it a point to have Lois Lane smoke Marlboros on screen, and Superman has a fight scene centered around a Marlboro truck:
And don’t think for a second that this is coincidental. Marlboro paid for Superman’s support just like Winston did for the Flintstones. To quote an internal speech from the president of Philip Morris in 1983:
“Smoking is being positioned as an unfashionable, as well as unhealthy, custom. We must use every creative means at our disposal to reverse this destructive trend. I do feel heartened at the increasing number of occasions when I go to a movie and see a pack of cigarettes in the hands of the leading lady. This is in sharp contrast to the state of affairs just a few years ago when cigarettes rarely showed up on camera. We must continue to exploit new opportunities to get cigarettes on screen and into the hands of smokers.”
And exploit them they did! And Hollywood was always happy to help. To quote a letter from an executive at Motion Pictures Television Productions to R.J. Reynolds in 1972:
“If there’s any interest from your company, and I’m sure there must be, the film is better than any commercial that has been run on television or in any magazine, because the audience is totally unaware of any sponsor involvement.”
Of course, not all smoking scenes had to be the product of paid collusion for the public to be manipulated. All they have to do is start a trend of acceptability. Once they get the ball rolling, they can let the rest of the mass media snowball naturally:
James D. Sargent, 2005.)
Beyond direct studies, we can see the link in the overall smoking rates in the United States. From the heady days of the Flintstones cigarette ads in the 1960s to today, the smoking rate in the United States has generally gone down, except for an interesting period from 1992 to 1998, when smoking rates plateaued and youth smoking skyrocketed:
So what happened during those six years? The health effects of smoking were already well-known by the 1990s, so knowledge wasn’t enough to curb smoking. Those anti-smoking after school specials weren’t helpful either. They had a tiny fraction of Big Tobacco’s advertising budget and a proportionately tiny reach. Worse, anti-smoking ads were hypocritical and tended to talk down to kids. They were largely mute on the subject of adult smoking, and wanted teenagers to stop smoking simply because they were told not to. The anti-smoking ads practically encouraged teenagers to smoke (and in some cases, were created by tobacco companies to encourage smoking [4]). However, regardless of their influence, their tiny budgets and limited reach certainly wasn’t responsible for the huge spike in youth smoking.
Nope, that honor goes to this guy:
Recognize him? If you were alive in the 1990s, you know him as Joe Camel. This multibillion-dollar mascot was everywhere when I was a kid, and I do mean everywhere:
Joe Camel arrived in 1988, and with it the spike in youth smoking. Of course, he wasn’t the only big star smoking at the time:
Adding to the Joe Camel effect was the fact that hollywood protagonists (and cool antagonists) smoked all the time in movies. It was completely normalized back then. Something that adults just did all the time.
The Normalization of Non-Smoking
That is, until around 1998, when we reach the youth smoking peak on the graph above. At that time, the movement against Big Tobacco finally reached a tipping point, and a lot changed. Under pressure from congress, R. J. Reynolds “voluntarily” ended its Joe Camel campaign in 1997. A year later, the major tobacco corporations entered into the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, which prohibited the tobacco industry from putting cigarettes in entertainment media. And in 2002, the Smoke-Free Movies Project and other initiatives called on Hollywood to end the promotion of smoking in movies. With the normalization of smoking being removed from much of the mass media, youth smoking rates declined.
Of course, Hollywood’s promotion of tobacco continues to this day (both legally and illegally), but there is a big difference now. First, excessive smoking in movies is now controversial, to the point that the MPAA has added smoking to its ratings system. Second, the relationship between Hollywood and big tobacco is no longer as tight as it once was. Today, it’s rare to see a cool movie character who smokes. They’re even removing smoking scenes from classic cartoons. Smoking has been relegated to characters that the audience isn’t suppose to relate to, and that has greatly diminished the appeal.
The spike in youth smoking in the 1990s, and the drop afterwards has provides a textbook example on how the mass media can move society, for good or for ill.
When everyone says the same thing together in a way that only the mass media can deliver, when the message compounds on itself in a way that only the mass media can perpetuate, when it’s all-pervasive and homogenous, then it’s no longer just a few people on the fringe who are affected. It’s everyone.
But cigarettes are a success story. There was at least an effective pushback to the media’s glamorization of cigarettes [5]. Unfortunately, the heyday of mass media misogyny is far from over.