s gap has narrowed, our society retains a tendency to imply that maleness, after all, is the standard for normalcy. This unwritten standard society uses to judge people dates back thousands of years and is clearly depicted in the quotes of some of the most famous people in history. Aristotle described women as "a deformity, a misbegotten male," St. Thomas Aquinas argued that god should not have created women, craniologists of the nineteenth century argued that women's smaller heads justified their subordinate position in society, and Freud believed women had "little sense of justice," the list goes on.The history of male supremacy in communication and life is unfortunate, but it is past, what does the future hold? Only the media will tell. Mass mediated messages offer the most contemporary, powerful, technological and influential strategies for shaping cultural reality. The beauty, diet, and advertising industries are the most obvious, and the best researched examples of contemporary, self-conscious myth-makers who control cultural concepts and acceptable images of gender. These industries set the standard for true masculinity and femininity, offering the law on what is male and what is female behavior.As we begin the twenty first century we enter a world of rules and regulations, a world where what we say and do is controlled by cultural stereo-types, some age old, some contemporary, and some that are deciding factors in how we live our lives. Through recent research we have learned that gender differences in communication are not something that we are born with, theyre not due to differences in brain matter, and theyre certainly not due to the two sexes being from different planets. We are who we are and we communicate how we communicate because it is what society and culture demand of us. Although this sounds like a simple difference that can easily be resolved you might be surprised; disregarding everything youve ever learned ...
