What would be your first reaction if your friend said they walked downtown last night by them self? I know my first words would be something along the lines of “did you get mugged?” or “why would you do that you could have been killed???” Is this a normal reaction? Why couldn’t I have said, “Oh that’s nice how was it?” or “did you see anything interesting?” I mean thousands of people walk downtown by themselves every night and some might have some trouble but it shouldn’t be the first thing you’d assume was going to happen should it? I’ve just grown accustomed to assuming bad things are going to happen if you are alone at night walking, well pretty much anywhere. This is probably because I’ve seen so many shows and movies about people being mugged or attacked or worse, I just immediately assume it’s going to happen every time.  This phenomenon is called the cultivation theory, and it creates a pseudo-reality that changes our views of the real world based on things we see in the media.

            Cultivation theory is the concept that things we see in movies and television (such as downtown muggings, shootings in bad neighborhoods, or crimes committed by certain groups of people) have a direct effect of how we view those situations in real life. For example, ever since 9/11 films and TV shows have taken the opportunity to make middle eastern people be seen as terrorists and villains, which causes people in real life to assume that all middle eastern people are potentially dangerous which is obviously not true. The same goes for crime shows that have situations where people get kidnapped or assaulted, especially when the person committing the crime is a minority. People viewing these shows may begin to believe that these events happen more often than they actually do, or that certain races are more dangerous than others, creating an unnecessary yet real sense of fear for an exaggerated occurrence.

            Cultivation theory doesn’t always have to do with fear however. Some of the most common examples have nothing to do with fear at all. Instead they deal with things like how men and women should look or behave in society. We’ve all seen ads depicting women in scandalous clothing, looking sexy and ready for action, and then we look down and see they are holding something like a golf ball or can of beer. Like this commercial:

Is this how women were meant to look? Apparently all women in society must have huge breasts and be ridiculously attractive, while men are in power (all but one committee members are men, as well as all but one lawyer). After watching those women for two minutes you almost forget that the commercial is for website domain names, and I for one never knew that people thought a website for naming websites was sexy before. For men, the cultivation theory isn't usually exampled in steamy ads (except sometimes for clothing), but more often shown in how men behave in movies and TV shows. The movie Tough Guise focuses on how media depict men and how it can effect how men in real life act because they want to fit into this unreal identity of “manliness”. The strong, macho, testosterone-filled, always ready for a fight guys in action movies create a sense of false reality that guys might begin to associate with lest they be ridiculed by other men who have already fallen into this unfortunate trap:

Blood, gigantic muscles, protecting a helpless women; all characteristics of a “real man” while at the same time showing minorities as villains. The continuous depiction of racial stereotypes, sexy women and tough men reinforce the cultivation theory and further create an untrue reality that people adopt into their real life, thereby making it into a real reality, not because of experience, but simply because someone else told them it was true.



"Man":