Hegemony: The Dominant Ideology.

The concept of hegemony within the media helps us to understand the development of sexism in society and its acceptance by people. Hegemony is the idea that the dominant ideology is made to seem natural. Since Biblical times, women have been seen as passive and, in most ways, "weaker" than men, and at the same time, men are given pressure to be the stronger sex, and therefore, they attempt to depict that image through physical means, often leading to violent or unnecessary actions. As they described in Killing Us Softly and Tough Guise, this ideology has morphed into such a ridiculous stereotype that women are expected to be extremely vulnerable and dependent, and that in turn is what men use to describe attractiveness. On the flip side, everyone expects men to be strong and dominant, but it has gone so far that most of the violent crimes committed within society now are at the hands of men.

For example, nowadays, children and teenagers make jokes such as, "Woman, go make me a sammich (sandwich)!" or "Big men don't cry." From the very beginning, boys and girls are placed into stereotypes that reflect later on what they will be expecting of themselves and other people to fall under. If we try so hard to break out of our racial stereotypes (because Asians aren't really all such terrible drivers, and some of us really are not very good at math, Blacks aren't truly verbally deficient and all "gangsters", and Indians don't just eat curry all the time), who says that we should continue to succumb to these gender stereotypes?