Unit C - Blog 19

Geena Davis raises the issue with children’s TV programs being gendered. She points out that both current and past cartoons and television shows were extremely unbalanced as far as the male to female ratio. As she was speaking a lot of the audience was laughing at her examples that she gave, not only about the lack of women, but how they were portrayed. I think the laughter alone shows a sort of acceptance to this socialization. Some of the portrayals included women and shopping and women and their looks. This is a great example of our society being shaped and socialized from something as early and as basic as cartoons. This is easily transferable to the gender socialization of prisons. As Britton talks about in At Work in the Iron Cage, these same socializations take place in the media towards enforcement officers and prisons. Again, the violence is the highlighted gender trait for these two elements of the prison system. These socializations automatically discourage women from these fields. Women are then deterred from the highlighted violence and brutality during the training. For the few that make beyond these two barriers, they have to deal with even more gender issues. They have to deal with the perception that they are emotional when dealing with violence. Then they have to fight the notion that they are not physically capable, especially with male inmates. Britton discusses how the male officers have the specialized role of dealing with women inmates while at women facilities. Many of the female officers agree with this too and say that they need the men there. They themselves believe the socialization and don’t even see it. This brings me back to Davis. She and her colleagues approached the companies that produced and displayed these cartoons and informed them of the lopsided numbers. Many of these production companies had no clue and were “Thunderstruck” when they noticed the imbalance. A lot of the women officers don’t ever realize that they are socialized. Overall, the few women that are the small statistic of a correctional officer are socialized themselves in a lot ways.