The silent film stars of children's television
There are a few staples in almost every childhood: hide and seek, scraped knees, the awful shriek of plastic recorders as a class of overly enthusiastic eight-year-old’s learn to play hot-cross-buns, and the morning cartoons. I can remember my brothers and I sitting in front of a boxy little television, the three of us lined up in size order like little unstacked babushka dolls, in printed flannelette pyjamas, munching away our bowls of Nutri-grain and watching Ash hunt down some exciting new Pokemon. I’m sure it wouldn’t take much digging for many of you to conjure up similar memories, except that maybe you had sisters instead, and your mum let you eat Coco Pops.
As much as I enjoyed these cartoons as a kid, I never particularly liked the girls. Like many other young girls, I always thought the ones on screen were too ditzy, or snooty, or not nearly as exciting as the boys who saved the day. The immediate issue here is rather clear, being that many female characters for children’s television are poorly written, but another equally sinister issue lurks around these shows too. Evidently, there’s a problem if the female characters we’re creating for children are at worst undeniably sexist caricatures, and at best uninspiring and entirely devoid of personality. However, the problem we might not see is that we’re barely showing our kids any female characters at all.
In a study analysing 70 years of cartoons, it was noted that women only accounted for an average of 16.4 % of characters. Another study which sampled thousands of hours of children’s television found that “just 32 % of the 26,342 main characters in the fictional programmes are female”, with this being a global issue, as no country had an equal representation of female to male characters (the closest being Norway with a ratio of 4:6). Overall, the study concluded that “there are more than twice as many male characters than female characters. In clearly constructed programmes (cartoons, shows with animals etc.) the proportion of females is even lower”, a figure that is particularly frightening when you consider that these programs constitute most of Australian’s children’s television.
If half of the children watching these shows are little girls, and these shows are an important channel through which kids learn about the world, and how to navigate it, then it should be important that the characters on screen reflect those beyond it. I’ll dismiss the argument that it’s too difficult to incorporate female characters when the same study shows that 59% of the characters from Australian television are animals. Between Blinky Bill and The Koala Brothers, there are probably more talking koalas on Australian kids’ TV than female characters with decent story lines.
In film, the disparity is also clear. 10 of Pixar’s 14 movies fail the Bechdel test, and only one of their productions, Brave, features a female protagonist. Girls deserve to see themselves as more than just background characters in someone else’s story. But as well as this, boys need to see it too for the girls around them.
Because in cases where shows are led by a strong female protagonist, marketers seem to immediately strategise their advertising around cries of “girl-power!”, novelising instead of normalising the result. Beck argues that this dissuades young boys from wanting to see, or enjoy, these shows, as they are excluded from the advertiser’s target market, which leaves boys without the opportunity to recognise and respect strong female characters in the television and film of their childhood
By extension, not only are there fewer female main characters (and fewer female characters in general), there is less spoken dialogue from the girls on screen too. Young girls are being taught that they should neither be seen nor heard, and if TV can’t find a place for them counting with the Count on Sesame Street, swimming alongside Dory and Nemo, then what hope do they have of believing that they have a place speaking up in the classroom, at the boardroom table, or in congress- despite that being exactly where we need them.
When this idea is being taught so young to our children across television (as well as almost every other facet of society) it’s no surprise that life in turn will imitate art. Studies conducted by Harvard in their universities showed that in comparison with female students, male students were 50% more likely to volunteer a comment during classes, and 144% more likely to speak voluntarily at least three times. Additionally, in lectures run by a male professor, the male students would also speak for two and a half times longer. The results are rather the same in primary schools too, which shows that it’s not something children grow into, it’s how they’re growing up along the way.
But perhaps the most frightening result is that the silence of women has become so normalised in our public spaces, that men are mistaking equal representation, as dominance. Researcher Dale Spencer’s studies showed that although women’s gauge of gender representation in public dialogue remained rather accurate, men felt as if the conversations were “equally” contributed to when women spoke for 15% of the time, and that the conversations were “dominated” by women when they spoke for 30% of the time.
The minds behind children’s media have an astonishing amount of liberty granted by their audience. They have the freedom to create magic, talking animals, music, folklore and entirely new worlds. It’s rather pathetic to me, that in a genre where creators can create anything they can imagine, they’re choosing to imagine a world which is sexist. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe that the Sunday morning cartoons are the root of all patriarchal evil. All of the righteous casting, script-writing and advertising in the world won’t make up for poor parenting, let alone take down the wage gap, and single-handedly create a utopia of gender equality. But as the people say it takes a village to raise a child. And the media department of that village need to know when they’re doing a poor job.
Children’s television teaches our kids a lot. It helps them learn their colours, and their letters, and why it’s important to share. But whether it means to or not, all I can hope for is that it doesn’t also teach young girls that this world has no place for them.
