T. Wood Outline
Tyler Wood
Senior Essay Outline
Thesis: Men’s Health and Women’s Health, two hugely popular and widely circulated men and women’s lifestyle magazines today, present advertisements to consumers that reinforce gendered attitudes and behaviors and thus contribute to gender-divergent approaches to recognizing and dealing with mental health problems.
Part I: Background information on existing literature concerning gender & advertising and gender & mental health.
A) Advertising
-Brief history of the rise of advertising with the rise of industrial society
-Discussion of shift to image-based advertising to sell “non-essential goods”
– Comparison between early approach to advertising to simply explain a product and current approaches using text and imagery to communicate sub-textual messages (“Image-Based Culture” – Sut Jhally)
– How advertising uses ideology to ‘educate’ consumers on how to be (“Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture” – Douglass Kellner & “Reading Images Critically” – Douglass Kellner)
o Discussion of concept of “dominant ideologies” and inherent assumptions
o Discussion of how ideologies are encoded in cultural texts
– How advertising uses gender ideology to sell products
o Manifestations of femininity and masculinity in history of advertising
- “Beauty and the Beast of Advertising” – Jean Kilbourne
- “Advertising and the Construction of Violent White Masculinity” – Jackson Katz
- “In Spite of Women: Esquire Magazine and the Construction of the Male Consumer” – Kenon Bezeale
- “Constructing and Addressing the Audience as Commodity” – Robert Goldman
B) Mental Health and Gender
– Discussion of how gender differences are ‘essentialized” in pop culture
o Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus – John Gray
- Hugely popular primary source that promotes idea of basic differences in emotionality and behavior of men and women
– Discussion of hypermasculinity and how it relates to negative male health outcomes (physical and mental)
o “Socialized to Die Younger? Hypermasculinity and Men’s Mental Health” – Christine Meinecke
o “Masculinity and Men’s Mental Health” – Gary Brooks
– Discussion of different types of masculinities and how they encompass ‘hegemonic masculinity’
o “Investigating Hegemonic Masculinity: Portrayals of Masculinity in Men’s Lifestyle Magazines”
– Discussion of gendered expressions of mental health
o Brief history of changes in popular conceptions of gender differences in mental health over time to show the fluidity of ideas concerning gender and mental health
- “Rethinking Gender and Mental Health” – Hill and Needham
o Claim: Masculine ideals prevent many males from acknowledging and addressing mental health problems
- Reason: there are gendered ways of expressing mental health problems and typically male expression/behavior are not conventionally linked to depression
- Evidence: diagnostic criteria of DSM IV are biased toward “acting-in” behaviors which are culturally associated with women and deemphasize “acting-out” behaviors culturally associated with men
- Evidence: men are diagnosed with personality disorders and substance abuse disorders significantly more often than women – external versus internal expression
- Evidence: men are more than four times more likely to commit suicide than women while women are twice as likely to report depression than men
- Evidence: Male farmers in psyc study reported pride as a main barrier to seeking help for psychological distress and that help-seeking is legitimated through certain contexts (divorce, psychosocial crisis) and by ‘alignment with particular male ideals’
o Overcoming Masculine Depression – Lynch et al
o “Gender, Mental Health, and Intersectionality” – Samir Jeraj
o “Help-seeking among Male Farmers: Connecting Masculinities and Mental Health” – Phillipe Roy
Claim: Women are better suited to deal with mental health problems than men
Reason: Feminine ideals promote expression/behavior more conducive to addressing/dealing with mental health
Evidence: connection between femininity and emotional expression and connection between masculinity and emotional isolation/detachment
–Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus
–Overcoming Masculine Depression
Claim: Women are culturally perceived to be more vulnerable than men to mental health issues
Reason: Femininity is understood as the opposite of masculinity, which symbolizes strength, power, and independence.
Evidence: WHO research on gender disparities in mental health cites ‘low rank’ and vulnerability to social and economic shocks as major risk factor for female depression
Evidence: WHO research shows that doctors are more likely to treat females rather than males for depression, even when they present with identical symptoms
o “Gender, Mental Health, and Intersectionality” – Samir Jeraj
Part II: Deconstruction of gendered advertisements in three issues of Women’s Health magazine
Claim: Numerous texts and images attached to advertisements directed at women invoke feminine ideals conducive to a productive approach to handling mental health problems
Reason: feminine ideals highlight introspection, non-competitive attitudes, helping others, and feeling/emotion-oriented mentalities, expressions, and behaviors.
Evidence: my descriptions and decoding of advertisements
Part III: Deconstruction of gendered advertisements in three issues of Men’s Health magazine
Claim: Numerous texts and images attached to advertisements directed at men invoke masculine ideals that run contrary to a productive approach to handling mental health problems
Reason: masculine ideals highlight independence, self-focus, sexual callousness, risky behavior, and emotional control rather than emotional expression
Evidence: my descriptions and decoding of advertisements
Part IV: Analysis and comparison of different advertisements from the same companies in Women’s Health and Men’s Health
Claim: Male-directed advertisements encourage destructive behavior from a mental health perspective while female-directed advertisements encourage productive behavior.
Reason: differences in presentations of gender ideals correspond to differences in gendered expressions, behaviors, and conceptions regarding mental health
Evidence: advertisers from companies that have inserted two different versions of an advertisement for male and female audiences and the contrasting ideals they espouse
Example: Ford Motor Company
Male ad reads: “Clean or Jerk?”
Female ad reads: “Body or Soul?
Conclusion:
The male audience of Men’s Health receives encouragement to act in ways counter to healthy emotional expression and well-being and the female audience of Women’s Health receives encouragement to act in ways beneficial to healthy emotional expression and well-being.
Bibliography
Primary:
Men’s Health, June 2013; Vol. 28 (6)
Men’s Health, April 2014; Vol. 29 (3)
Men’s Health, October 2014; Vol. 29 (9)
Women’s Health, June 2013; Vol. 9 (5)
Women’s Health, April 2014; Vol. 10 (3)
Women’s Health, October 2014; Vol. 10 (7)
Gray, John. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers, 1992.
Secondary:
Breazeale, Kenon. “In Spite of Women: ‘Esquire’ Magazine and the Construction of the Male Consumer.” Signs 20, no. 1 (October 1, 1994): 1–22.
Brooks, Gary R. “Masculinity and Men’s Mental Health.” ReVision 25, no. 4 (2003): 24+.
Dines, Gail, and Jean McMahon Humez, eds. Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Text-Reader. Sage Publications, 1995.
Goldman, Robert. “Constructing and Addressing the Audience as Commodity.” In Reading Ads Socially. London: Routledge, 1992.
Hill, Terrence D., and Belinda L. Needham. “Rethinking Gender and Mental Health: A Critical Analysis of Three Propositions.” Social Science & Medicine 92 (September 2013): 83–91. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2013.05.025.
Jally, Sut. “Image-Based Culture.” In Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Text Reader, 648. Sage Publications, 1995.
Jeraj, Samir. “Gender, Mental Health, and Intersectionality.” September 24, 2013, sec. 50.50. http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.middlebury.edu/docview/1435589009?pq-origsite=summon.
Kellner, Douglas. “Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture.” In Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Text Reader, 648. Sage Publications, 1995.
———. “Reading Images Critically: Toward a Postmodern Pedagogy.” The Journal of Education 170, no. 3 (January 1, 1988): 31–52.
Kilbourne, Jean. “Beauty and the Beast of Advertising.” In Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Text Reader, 648. Sage Publications, 1995.
Lynch, John, John R. Lynch, and Christopher Kilmartin. Overcoming Masculine Depression : The Pain Behind the Mask. 2nd ed. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013.
MacMillan, Jennifer. “Of Magazines and Mental Health:: [Final Edition].” September 3, 2005, sec. The Ticket.
Meinecke, Christine E. “Socialized to Die Younger? Hypermasculinity and Men’s Health.” The Personnel and Guidance Journal 60, no. 4 (December 1, 1981): 241–45. doi:10.1002/j.2164-4918.1981.tb00291.x.
Ricciardelli, Rosemary, Kimberley A. Clow, and Philip White. “Investigating Hegemonic Masculinity: Portrayals of Masculinity in Men’s Lifestyle Magazines.” Sex Roles 63, no. 1–2 (July 2010): 64–78. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11199-010-9764-8.
Roy, Philippe, Gilles Tremblay, and Steven Robertson. “Help-Seeking among Male Farmers: Connecting Masculinities and Mental Health.” Sociologia Ruralis, May 1, 2014, n/a – n/a. doi:10.1111/soru.12045.
Stibbe, Arran. “Health and the Social Construction of Masculinity in Men’s Health Magazine.” Men and Masculinities 7, no. 1 (July 1, 2004): 31–51. doi:10.1177/1097184X03257441.
Wilhelm, Kay A. “Gender and Mental Health.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 48, no. 7 (July 1, 2014): 603–5. doi:10.1177/0004867414538678.