Gender Roles in Political Cartoons

Gender equality has been one of main debatable issues around the world. One of the factors that satires the gender inequality is political cartoons. I have been looking through variety of political cartons, and I noticed that some of them depict how kids are taught about wrong gender roles. This causes these kids to have limited thoughts about gender and hence have lower or higher self-esteem depending on their gender. It can be seen in most cartoons that boys have more advantages then the girls as they live throughout their lives, and depict male-oriented society.

Kids are continually taught that boys have more authority and capability in achieving significant goals while girls are told that they have no power to be successful in doing the same stuff. The political cartoon on the left includes this information. In the text bubble, the adults (not shown) start off the advices in same words. They say “You can be anything you want to be when you grow up”. But do they really mean ANYTHING (not something insane, but things that works in reality)? No. The two kids are in fact told two distinctively opposite meanings.

The boy is told that he can be engineer, firefighter, astronaut, pilot, and dot dot dot. The list of jobs shows how males are presented with variety of occupation in the future, while the punctuation (dot-dot-dot) suggests there are infinite options for the boy. For the girls, on the other hand, is advised that she can become blonde, brunette, and dot-dot-dot. Brunette and blonde are basically descriptions of women with blonde and brown colored hairs. They are not jobs but are just obvious characteristics of women. This is saying indirectly that women basically will become some kind of human, but nothing more than or beyond that. The dot-dot-dot simply means “the other things that are similar to blonde and brunette” (like blue or black hair). This shows how women are not expected to have jobs, and are treated unfairly in academic and occupation fields. Most of you probably have heard blonde or brunette jokes (since even I did numerous of times), and in these jokes the women are illustrated very negatively.

Even before looking at the text though, you can guess the gender representation held in this carton by looking at the kids’ facial expressions. The boy is smiling and looks full of hope. Meanwhile, the girl is absence of expression, looking shocked about what she heard about her future.

These teachings lead the kids to behave in ways that women would have low self-esteem while men have high pride. The cartoon on the right (drawn by the same artist of above cartoon) shows the opposite reactions when a married couple divorces. The man says “there’s something wrong with her”, blaming all faults all the women. We don’t know if it is actually the wife’s fault or not, but we can see that he is permitted to get away from the responsibility because he was taught that way since young age. Most people would think he is selfish, but I think we cannot criticize his personality because it is not his fault that he is half-forced to have a stereotypical perspective. In contrast, the woman is willing to take the whole blame as she is saying “something is wrong with me”. She is not saying this because she is too nice or stupid, but she is just used to and adapt to these environments where men are mostly right while women aren't.  Interestingly, all words in the text are exactly the same except the last word, which changes the whole meaning. The wrong teaching from young age is leading them to behave in ways they shouldn't do, and this is making males more and more powerful, while women are weaker.

3rd Step

After the kids learn about wrong gender roles and see how they react to a problem depending on their genders, the men and women hence becomes authoritative and dependent respectfully. As the men gain more power and realize they have higher status then women, they then decide to become authoritative. For the women on the other hand, they become more and more dependent on the men as they lose confidence about themselves. This is shown in the cartoon on the left (drawn by the same person of the other two). The man is illustrated as taking responsibility to protect their women. I thought it is interesting how the artist used two contrasting objects to depict the characteristics of two genders; the gun represents masculinity, violence, and power, while the handkerchief suggest that females are emotional, weak, and tender.

I found that there are some techniques used commonly in all three political cartoons. Juxtaposition is used as the cartoons compare and contrast the males and females side by side to show how each genders are represented throughout different ages. I like how the artist used sardonic tone in all three to mock the misleading gender teachings held in modern society. The usage of exaggeration is also used to strengthen the sarcastic view, as the characteristics of the people are exaggerated (such as sharp long noses and thin necks).

The whole process I explained above can be seen as a butterfly effect: kids learning wrong information starts to base everything on their gender, and later having stereotypes as they accept their faith and wrong views held in society. These people hence tell their children the false gender roles, forming a whole vicious cycle again. Although many people are shouting out and warning about the gender inequality, there have not been much huge difference from now compared to the past. Yes it is true that women got more rights as human, but they are far from reaching fairness. The first step toward getting away from genderism and forming equality, I believe, is to fix the gender education kids access to. The future generations are the most possible factors who could change the gender discrimination.