The battle of the sexes is a concept as old as time itself. And really, it makes sense. At the end of the day, most of the people on this planet are straight and those who aren’t grew up under the unfair expectation they would be straight. So we grow up thinking that these mysterious people with different genitals and hormones and cultural upbringings must be in some way out to get us. When we are disillusioned in the other sex, or hurt by a member of it, we find it hard to disassociate that incident with half of humanity.
But the media doesn’t help here at all. Where they should be taking our troubled thoughts about the other sex and showing us that life isn’t all that bad, films and TV shows latch onto those fears and run with them, trying to get our emotions high, make us keep watching their show, hanging onto every word and cliff hanger. So here are five ways that films and TV shows definitely aren’t helping the sexes to see each other as… well, as people.
1: Men are instructed to treat women as objects.
The first one is the most obvious one, and one we are currently working really hard on already. We all know that the way porn films women displays them as objects instead of people. But a lot of other films geared towards men treat women as objects as well. Camera angles are used to focus on the bodies of women. Female characters are bland and designed to be as unrealistically perfect as possible. And the guy always wins the girl, or she turns out to be “wrong” for him. Women are literally prizes.
2: Women are told that non-sexual objectification doesn’t count.
But that doesn’t mean women are exempt from treating men as objects. Of course, the focus is not quite so much on the body, but, statistically speaking, women aren’t as into bodies and visual arousal as men are. Instead, male characters in films geared towards women rank men based on a few key traits: wealth, dominance or authority, and reliability. The male characters are quite simple and plain again, and the girl wins when she either ditches the poor, low-status or unreliable guy, or when she completely transforms him into an entirely different person. Again, this is a human, not a trophy!
3: Our failures are condensed and displayed prominently to get us to relate to a character.
The reason a lot of these films resonate so much is because they take common concerns and life experiences and blow them up into something enormous. That experience of being shot down in high school would probably have faded into the background a little, if it wasn’t for films using it to show how downtrodden our underdog romantic lead is. Likewise for the mean ex, or the person who’s trying to “steal” your partner. By putting our failures on centre-stage, the media encourages us to focus on the negative and to bond with their characters over these negative experiences.
4: We are taught that we are never in the wrong in love and relationships.
This ties into the last one. In films and TV it’s almost always black and white. The hero or heroine is right, and they deserve to get the perfect girl or guy at the end. So when they don’t get them it’s because the girl or guy was misled by someone or mistaken, because they were stolen away, or because they were terrible people to begin with. We are set up to fail when we are told that the good guys always win. Because in real life, sometimes people just don’t “click”. And that’s actually OK.
5: We are all encouraged to think of people who are different from us as mysterious.
Finally, the crux of the matter. At the end of the day, however much on a complicated level we are quite different, most people are actually pretty similar. We all share the human experience, just on a spectrum. But rather than portraying it as that “an attractive person with a lot of options might be a bit pickier about who they date”, the media chooses to portray it as “the other sex is an alien creature set out to destroy you”. This lack of understanding about our minor differences obscures our major similarities and pits us against each other as though we were literally fighting to survive.