ASSIGNMENT – Pop Culture Research Project Wiki

I used this assignment for my Spring 2011 sections of WRTG 3020. You can find some of the projects produced for this assignment in the Research Projects category on my Rhetoric of Gender and Sexuality blog.

NOTE: Given that I simply copied and pasted the assignment over from my class web site, some of the links below may not work.

OVERVIEW

In the first unit of the course, we will use both informal and formal research methods to explore one of the most common and influential sources of knowledge about gender and sexuality: popular culture.

Informal Methods: the Student Conversations Blog

We will use informal methods to gather a diverse collection of pop culture artifacts that we’ve encountered in our everyday lives that seem to convey messages about gender norms and/or sexual orientation. We’ll post these artifacts, along with citations, rhetorical analyses, content analyses, and commentaries, on the Student Conversations blog for your section, and we’ll discuss the artifacts both in class and on the blog.

We will also continue to contribute to the blog even after we finish the Pop Culture Research Project, so that it functions as a kind of semester-long chronicle of the messages about gender and sexuality we regularly come into contact with. But we will not draw conclusions about pop culture in general based on the artifacts we collect, given that we will not be using academic methods to collect them.

Formal Methods: the Pop Culture Research Project

You will identify a particular, narrowly defined category of pop culture to study, and you will then use a scaled-down version of formal, academic methods to collect a representative sample of artifacts from this category. You will publish your collection of artifacts on a web page on the main site.

After you’ve published the artifacts in your collection, you will use academic methods to interpret, analyze, and classify your artifacts, in order to determine what kinds of messages the artifacts convey about gender norms and/or sexual orientation.

You will then write a paper that follows the conventions for social science research reports to present your findings. The paper will include an abstract, an introduction, an explanation of your methods, a description of your results, a discussion of your conclusions, and some suggestions for areas in need of further research. You will publish this paper on a web page on the main site, along with your collection of artifacts.

STEP 1: RESEARCH

The kind of research we’re about to do is considerably scaled down from what you would be expected to do as a graduate student or professor. If you were a graduate student or professor in the early stages of developing a research project, the scope of your project would be determined by a variety of factors, such as whether the study was preliminary or full scale, what kind of funding and time frame you had available, where you wanted to publish the study results, what you needed to accomplish in terms of getting credit for the publication, and so on.

One factor that would not influence the scope of a grad student’s or professor’s project is whether the amount of time it would take him or her to do the research is similar to the amount of time it would take other researchers to do something similar. That would not be relevant in a post-undergraduate setting. But for our class, I’ve used precisely that factor to limit the scope of your project, so that those who choose to research categories with artifacts that take a lot of time to watch, like movies, won’t be required to spend significantly more time on their research than those who choose to research categories with artifacts that take almost no time to “watch,” like ads.

Limitations on Scope

Everyone will work within the same limitations on the scope of the project: the amount of time it takes you to complete the research process should be around 8-12 hours, no matter what topic you choose. The research process includes collecting the artifacts that will make up your representative sample, recording citation info on each of them, getting digital copies of them (such as image files or links to videos), and viewing them once. (You will almost certainly end up needing to “view” your artifacts more than once, but I’m only including one viewing in the estimated time range of 8-12 hours given that everyone absorbs material at different rates, and the number of times each person may need to “view” an artifact varies from person to person.)

Because of the 8-12 hour time limit, those who want to study categories with “long” artifacts in them will need to narrow down their categories considerably more than those who want to study categories with “short” artifacts. For example, if Student A wants to study movies, she will probably only be able to include about 6-8 movies in her representative sample, given that movies average between 70-100 minutes each and she will also need some time to record citation info and find digital copies. If the representative sample can only include, say, 7 movies, then the larger category can only include around 28 movies (given that the representative sample should contain about 25% of the total number of artifacts in the category).

On the other end of the time scale is Student B, who wants to study magazine ads. If we factor in the time it will take him to track down each magazine he’s including in his representative sample, to scan or photograph each ad, to record citation info on each ad, and to take a good “look” at each ad, he might be able to include around 80 ads in his representative sample. If the representative sample includes 80 ads, and that’s roughly 25% of the total number of ads in the larger category, then the larger category should include around 320 ads.

Again, I want to emphasize that thinking about what category to study based on how long it will take you to gather 25% of the artifacts in that category is not a customary practice for researchers working at the graduate or professorial level, although of course researchers at those levels do have to consider their time frame to some extent. A graduate student designing a dissertation does not have have the same amount of time to gather artifacts (or other research material) as a tenured professor who is willing to extend a research project across five or six years or more. But even the professor who is willing to take a very long time in order to gather and study a rather large representative sample of pop culture artifacts is not going to be able to study the general category of “pop culture,” as it’s simply too large. That’s why you don’t come across academic writers making claims about “society today” or “American pop culture” in general, and why you too should avoid making those kinds of sweeping and unsupportable claims.

CHOOSING A CATEGORY

Keeping what you learned in the lecture notes above as well as on Monday’s calendar entry in mind, start thinking about which category of American pop culture you might like to study and how you might narrow the category down so that it includes a total number of artifacts of which you might reasonably be able to gather 25%.

Here are the criteria your category must follow:

(1) The category must be made up of artifacts that represent some aspect of American pop culture from 2000 to the present. In other words, the artifacts in the category must have been distributed to American audiences between 2000 and the present through a recognized source of mass distribution, such as mainstream magazines, newspapers, TV channels, movies, radio, music sales, toy or game sales, and so on. Ideally at least several million Americans should’ve been exposed to the artifacts, although this number might be slightly smaller for some distribution sources, such as magazines, given that even the most popular magazines have circulation numbers that hover around only a million. Toy or game sales might also be in lower numbers, given that they’re targeted to such a narrow segment of the population.

(2) The category must be one made up of artifacts that are definable as a genre or a type. In other words, the category should represent a genre like daytime soap operas, children’s movies, hip-hip music videos, ads in sport’s magazines, and so on. The category should not include artifacts of a variety of unrelated genres, even if all the artifacts are of the same type. For example, commercials that air during prime-time network sit-coms count as an appropriate category, whereas commercials you find on YouTube do not. You might be able to find copies of the prime-time sit-com commercials on YouTube, which would be fine, but “commercials on YouTube” is not itself an appropriate category.

(3) The category must include a finite and countable number of artifacts. You might already know the number, or if not, you should be able to easily find the number with a little research. You need to know the total number so that you can figure out how many artifacts would amount to roughly 25% of that number.

(4) The category must not be based on anything having to do with gender or sexual orientation. In other words, your goal is to study what kind of messages about gender and/or sexual orientation the average American is exposed to through a general category of popular culture. If you selected, for example, a category of movies based on the fact that they all feature lesbian relationships, then you wouldn’t be studying what average Americans are exposed to.

(5) The category must include artifacts that you can reproduce digitally, so that you can post them on the web site for your project. You might create original digital versions, such as scanning in ads from magazines, taking photographs of toys in stores, grabbing screen shots or screen capture videos of commercials, TV shows, or movies, or copying portions of a DVD. Or you might find digital versions already available online, as images or videos you can embed onto your web page, as lyrics you can copy and paste, or as material you can provide links to (such as TV shows available only through a network’s own web site).

Sample Categories

Start by thinking about which broader categories of pop culture you’re interested in studying, and then develop some criteria for narrowing the category down to a segment within that larger category that meets the criteria above. Here are some broad categories: movies, TV shows, commercials, magazine ads (or other parts of magazines), music lyrics, music videos, comic strips, editorial cartoons, comic books, toys, and games. If you have a suggestion for another category to add to the list, please send it to me.

Some of these categories are obviously much broader than others. Movies can be further categorized by genres, such as comedies, dramas, thrillers, action/adventure, horror, science-fiction, fantasy, animated, children’s, and so on. TV shows can be further categorized into those genres as well, and also into other genres, such as daytime soap operas, sit-coms, reality shows, talk shows, and so on. Magazines also fall into categories by genre, such as women’s, fashion, entertainment, sports, news, etc.

You will most likely need to narrow down a category even further in order for it to meet the criteria above, but you don’t necessarily need to break it down into sub-genres. Instead, you might break it down by factors such as popularity, time period, rankings, and so on. For example, the genre of American action/adventure movies from 2000 to the present is too big, but you could narrow it down several ways. One way might be: the three highest grossing American action/adventure movies from each year, from 2000 to 2009. That would give you a category with a total of 30 movies in it, and then you’d need to devise a way to randomly select 25% of those movies. (I’ll explain in a later calendar entry how to come up with random selection methods.)

The example above uses the following factors to narrow down the category of American action-adventure movies: amount of gross revenue generated, time period, and the “top three” of each year. Those factors could be used to narrow down a number of categories, including other types of movies as well as music and maybe even toys and games. For example, in this case, the time period is ten years, but the time period could be something much smaller, like three or four years, or even a span of months or weeks. Other factors that can help to narrow down a category include: award-winning, number of viewers, ranking in terms of viewers, time slot (such as when a TV show, commercial, or radio show is aired), and so on.

Here are a few examples:

• Academy Award winners and nominees for “Best Picture” for the years between 2004 and 2008. (I picked this time span because in each of these years only five movies were nominated, whereas in 2009 and 2010, more than five were nominated, which would skew the results.) The total category includes 25 movies, so a representative sample would include 6 or 7 movies, which is an appropriate number for our scope of 8-12 hours.
• Three highest-rated sit-coms on NBC over the past two years. (Or some other configuration of the number of highest-rated and/or the span of years.) If each sit-com airs 20 episodes per year, the total category would include 120 episodes. A representative sample (25%) would contain 30 episodes. Each “half hour” episode runs for 22 minutes, which works out to about 11 hours of viewing. That’s within our scope of 8-12 hours, but perhaps a bit on the high side. So the category could be adjusted a bit to bring the viewing time down to 9-10 hours.
• Commercials that play during the three highest-rated daytime soap operas on network TV, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays over a period of two weeks. Roughly 20 minutes of each “one hour” episode contains commercials, so that works out to a larger category that includes 360 minutes of commercials. A representative sample would contain 90 minutes of commercials. That amounts to only an hour and a half of commercial watching, but that might be appropriate given the difficulty of isolating only the commercials from each episode as well as the difficulty of tracking down digital versions of each commercial. That part of the process could easily extend into the 8-12 range.

CLARIFYING YOUR TERMS AND SOURCES

Something else you’ll need to keep in mind as you start to formulate a possible category is that you may need to define certain terms and/or find authoritative sources for certain types of information, such as rankings. Consider this earlier sample category: the three highest grossing American action/adventure movies from each year, from 2000 to 2009.

A careful thinker will immediately recognize that at least two terms need to be defined: what “grossing” refers to and what counts as an “action/adventure” movie. The amount a movie “grosses” can be based on ticket sales, DVD sales, DVD rentals, pay per view showings, merchandising, or some combination, so which will the researcher use? And whose rankings of “top grossing” movies will the researcher use? The source should be the one considered most authoritative in the movie industry.

The researcher will also need to find out which movies have already been classified by an authoritative source into the genre of “action/adventure” movie. If no such classification already exists, then the researcher will need to find an authoritative set of criteria that must be present for a movie to be considered an “action/adventure” movie and then apply those criteria to the available movies.

WHY SO NITPICKY?

If the process seems nitpicky to you, consider the consequences of NOT taking such care to define your terms. Consider this hypothetical scenario: Two researchers at different institutions each decided to study the category of prime-time police dramas. They each further narrowed the category down to the three most popular police dramas over the past two years. They each then gathered a representative sample of the episodes that fell into that category and studied them to see what kinds of gender messages they convey. They each came to certain conclusions about those messages, which they then claimed were true of the larger category of recently popular prime-time police dramas. But those conclusions were completely different.

Same Category, Different Conclusions

An undergraduate student in a writing and rhetoric class much like this one discovered the two articles, each published in different journals, in the process of working on a research paper and became curious about why the conclusions were so different. Researcher A found that the majority of prime-time police dramas feature strong women as police captains, include at least one gay or lesbian character among the regulars, and show as many women as perpetrators of crime as men. Researcher B found that the majority of prime-time police dramas feature men as police captains, feature no gay or lesbian characters among the regulars, and show more men than women as perpetrators of crime. How is it possible, the student wondered, for the researchers to come to such different conclusions about the same category of pop culture?

One of These Things is Not Like the Other

After a little digging around, what the student discovered was that the researchers were not in fact studying the same category. Researcher A’s category included shows on both network and cable channels, defined prime time as 7-11pm, used the TV Guide classification for what counts as a “police drama,” and used the Fanpop web site’s rankings for which were “most popular.” By contrast, Researcher B included shows only on network channels, defined prime time as 8-10pm, classified any show that included the police as a “police drama,” and used Nielsen ratings to determine which were “most popular.”

In other words, while the two researchers were each making claims about what was “true” of the category of prime-time police dramas, they had actually studied two very different groups of shows. In fact, neither group met the criteria for what an authoritative source in the TV industry would consider to be a “prime-time police drama.” Therefore, while each researcher may have had some interesting things to say about specific TV shows, their conclusions about the category of prime-time police dramas were entirely invalid. They failed at the task of producing “knowledge.”

The Special Nature of Academic Knowledge

Hopefully the scenario above would never actually happen in an academic context, but even academic researchers sometimes make mistakes, given the complexities involved in trying to produce knowledge about broad categories of anything. But the “take away” message from this hypothetical scenario is this: The reason academics are so nitpicky about their methods is that the purpose of academic research, as opposed to many other kinds of research, is use the most rigorous methods possible in order to ensure that what they produce comes closer to being considered “knowledge” than other forms of research are able to come.

If you think of information as existing along a spectrum that has “pure opinion” on one end and “knowledge” on the other end, only the most rigorous research methods will enable a researcher to produce something that can be placed near the knowledge end. And the only researchers who use those methods are those with extensive academic training. Certain kinds of serious journalists also undergo a similar degree of extensive training and are therefore in a position to produce “knowledge,” but most of the information we encounter in our daily lives actually falls much closer to the “pure opinion” end of the scale.

Gullible Nation

As long as we’re aware of that, there’s no problem, but unfortunately many people can’t tell the difference and therefore are inclined to give as much weight to “opinion” as to “knowledge.” Many educators argue that one of the primary purposes of a university education should be to help students learn to tell the difference, given that one of the primary purposes of a university is to produce what counts as “knowledge.” But the tendency for large segments of the college-educated population to be so easily swayed by unfounded opinion tells another story.

STEP 2: NOTE TAKING

After you’ve identified a category to study and a random method to use to collect a representative sample of that category, you should start gathering your artifacts. “Gathering” includes locating artifacts, preparing bibliographic citations for them, watching them (if applicable), taking notes on them, and saving digital versions of them (if possible).

Bibliographic Citations

As you gather your artifacts, create bibliographic citations for each of them, which you will eventually compile into a bibliography page that lists all the artifacts in your sample, in alphabetical order. For more information, see the Pop Culture Project: Citing Artifacts page.

Digital Versions

A “digital version” of an artifact includes an image, an audio file, and/or a video clip, as appropriate to the nature of your artifacts. You do not need to have a digital version of every artifact you gather, but do try to find as many digital versions as you can for the artifacts you use as examples in your paper.

If you’re studying ads in magazines, then you can create digital versions of the ads in your sample by scanning them into your computer or photographing them with a digital camera. Be sure to reduce their file size and display size to something appropriate for posting on a web page. See: How do I format images for posting on the web? When you’re ready to post the image to your project page, follow the instructions on: How do I insert an image into a blog entry?

If you’re studying commercials, TV shows, or movies, you might be able to find appropriate clips on YouTube, Vimeo, or other video hosting sites or on the web sites for the networks or products. You can embed video clips from YouTube and Vimeo into your project web page, as described on this handout: How to embed videos into blog entries. You may also be able to embed clips from other video sites, but if that doesn’t work, then you can turn the title of the clip into a hyperlink to its URL. See: How do I insert a link into a blog entry?

Notes

As you view each artifact for the first time, you might want to take notes on it from the perspective of a newcomer to America who wants to learn about social norms for women and for men as well as social norms and attitudes about sexual orientation. Imagine that all you’ll have to go on are the artifacts in your collection: what would you learn about American social norms for gender and sexual orientation from these artifacts? What kind of messages do the artifacts convey about men? about women? about sexual orientation?

You may focus on more specific elements as well, depending on the nature of your artifacts. For example, you might take notes on: body language, clothing, activities, setting, relationship status, prominence, roles, and so on. Consider the kinds of information Stern and Mastro tracked in the commercials they studied and see if any of them might apply to you.

As you get further along in the process and begin studying your notes to see what kind of patterns emerge, consult some of the resources below for more insight into how to interpret messages about gender and/or sexual orientation.

Resources for Interpreting Pop Culture Artifacts

• “Killing Us Softly 3: Advertising’s Image of Women,” by Jean Kilbourne (documentary video)
• “Codes of Gender: Identity and Performance in Pop Culture” (documentary video — only available for free in the small “preview” mode)
• “Selling of Gender Identity,” by Judith Waters and George Ellis (analysis of commercials using Erving Gofffman’s analytical categories)
• “How to Read Ads,” by Scott Lukas
• “Advertising, Gender & Sex: What’s Wrong with a Little Objectification,” by Sut Jhally (who is the producer of “Codes of Gender”)
• “GoffmanÕs Gender Advertisements revisited: combining content analysis with semiotic analysis,” by Philip Bell and Marko Milic
• “Mean Girls? The Influence of Gender Portrayals in Teen Movies on Emerging Adults’ Gender-Based Attitudes and Beliefs,” by Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz and Dana E. Mastro
• “Playing it Straight: Reality Dating Shows and the Construction of Heterosexuality,” by Stephen Tropiano
• “Re-Reading Sex and the City: Exposing the Hegemonic Feminist Narrative,” by Rebecca Brasfield
• “Sex in Advertising: Gender Differences and the Role of Relationship Commitment,” by Darren W. Dahl, Jaideep Sengupta, and Kathleen D. Vohs

CITING ARTIFACTS

A “bibliographic citation” for a pop culture artifact includes the kind of information you would put on a bibliography for a paper, such as the author or creator, the title of the piece, the publication it appeared in, the date of publication, the URL, and the date you accessed the artifact. Each citation should be for the artifact in its original format, not for a digital version you found online. If you want to include online video clips of particular artifacts in your paper in order to use them as examples, you will provide links to the clips within the paper and do not need to provide a bibliographic citation for them.

You may format your bibliographic citations in either APA format (American Psychological Association, used for social sciences) or MLA format (Modern Language Association, used for English and most humanities), depending on your major and your preferences. Each style puts emphasis on different components of the citation, depending on what aspect of an author’s sources is more important in the disciplines that use that style.

For details on how to format citations for some of the most common artifacts, see this Guide to APA References entry format or this Guide to MLA Works Cited entry format. Both pages contain information on how to format citations for material such as advertisements, television, online audio or video, film, and so on.

If you can’t find a specific entry on the MLA or APA handbook page that applies to your artifact, read the material near the top of the handbook page in order to better understand the general principles of what goes in a citation and adapt them to your needs. No one handbook can provide examples of every conceivable type of source you might come across, so college students are expected to study and apply the general principles of each citation style, rather than to memorize specific formats. You’re also expected to know how to look search Google for information on citation styles, as needed.

You might also try using an online bibliographic formatter, like EasyBib.com, Citation Machine, or BibMe.org, but keep in mind that these services will only output correctly formatted entries if you input the correct information in the correct spots.

Note: Because you will be posted your bibliography on a web page instead of in a print document, the entries do not need to be in hanging indent format, as is customary for a print bibliography.

SAMPLE MLA BIBLIOGRAPHY

You can see a sample artifact bibliography in MLA style on your class blog. Follow the link on the sidebar to the Final Versions category: Final Pop Culture Projects: Bibliographies, and open the post titled Sassy's Demo Pop Culture Artifact Bibliography.

SAMPLE APA BIBLIOGRAPHY

Most of these examples were taken from the APA list of references page on Bedford’s Research and Documentation online handbook. The Coca-Cola example is for a commercial, the Guggenheim example is for a movie, the Smith example is for an episode of a TV show, and the Xbox example is for a magazine ad.

STEP 3: WRITE RESEARCH REPORT

Note: This page is subject to further revision.

Divide your report into the sections common to research reports in the social sciences: Introduction, Methods, Results/Discussion, and Conclusion. Use headers for each section, formatted in ALL CAPS and bold.

Formatting

When you post text on a web page, do not indent the first line of each paragraph and skip a full line between paragraphs. See this handout: How do I format text for posting on the web?

If you plan to embed artifacts in the form of images, make sure you read this handout: How do I format images for posting on the web?

Introduction

In the introduction, provide your target audience with the information they will need in order to understand the purpose of your report. You might briefly describe what area of pop culture you were interested in studying and why, as well as what you thought you might find in your sample (i.e, your hypothesis) and the extent to which your findings confirmed your expectations or surprised you.

In the last sentence(s) of the introduction, provide readers with a preview of the main points you’ll cover in the results section. This sentence (or group of sentences) will serve as your thesis, and it will shape your readers’ expectations for the rest of the paper. Because you’ll be using sub-headers, and because your paper is in the genre of social science research report, you do not need to preview the Methods section. Readers will be prepared for it when they see the sub-header.

Use as many paragraphs as you need for the introduction, but keep these two factors in mind:

• By definition, a paragraph is a collection of sentences that focus on a single idea. Just because a few sentences might be presented in paragraph format, that doesn’t mean they necessarily meet this definition, so make sure that your paragraphs do.
• Paragraphs meant to be displayed on the web should be shorter than those in a print document, for easier reading.

Also keep these two factors in mind as you develop the body sections of your report.

Methods

Use this section to describe the methods you used to narrow down to a category and then select a random and representative sample of that category.

The purpose of this section is to show your readers that you took care to use valid research methods, in order to build your credibility and influence your readers to trust you. The section should be as long as it needs to be to accomplish that purpose.

Results/Discussion

(subject to further revision)

This is the “heart” of your paper, so it’s the section you should spend the most time on developing.

To present the “results” of your research, focus on the most common messages or themes that came up across your artifact sample. These should be messages or themes that illustrate what we “know” about gender and/or sexual orientation from your category of pop culture artifacts. In other words, what do we “know” about men and masculinity from horror movies? What do we know about gays and lesbians from prime time commercials? What do we know about women and femininity from ads in sports magazines? And so on. The messages may be about men, about women, about sexual orientation, OR any combination of the three. You will describe the messages and offer examples from your collection that illustrate each message.

Here’s an example to help clarify what I mean by “messages.” Let’s say that most of your artifacts conveyed lots of messages about men and masculinity, and you noticed that these three messages came across the most often: men should be interested in mechanical things, men should not admit weakness, and men should be attracted to younger women. You might’ve noticed many more messages across your artifacts, including messages about women and/or sexual orientation, but if you found the messages about men to be the most interesting, you could build your results section around those messages.

You would divide the results section into three sub-sections, with sub-section headers, one for each message. Then you would describe the nature of each message in terms of how it came up across many of your artifacts. For example, you might refer to the message in general terms and mention that it was conveyed by “more than 65% of the artifacts” you studied, before you then offer several specific examples that illustrate the message. (Note: You can use “I” in this paper, so you can write “more than 65% of the artifacts I studied,” instead of using the awkward passive voice common in some types of social science writing).

How many examples to give for each message depends on how likely you think your readers are to accept your claim that the message is common in the category you studied. The larger and more diverse the category, the more examples you need. Keep in mind that you almost can’t err in the direction of providing too many examples to support a point, but you can certainly err in the other direction, of failing to provide enough examples to be convincing. Each example you give to illustrate a message helps to build your case, even if (indeed, especially if) all the examples contain similar material. The fact that several examples might be very similar actually helps to support your point that the message is common across your category. Just make sure you explain how each example illustrates the message you claim that it does, as this may not be as obvious to your readers as it is to you.

If you have easy access to a digital version of an artifact you use as an example, you can embed it into the page or provide readers a link they can follow to find it. If the artifact is a video that is longer than what you want your readers to pay attention to, direct them to the appropriate section. For example, you might suggest that they watch from minute 4:24 to 6:32 in a particular video clip. If the artifact is a video and you don’t have a video clip to show, you could include screen shots, if you think they would help illustrate your point. You may be able to find screen shots by searching Google, or you can take them yourself, if possible. (Search UsingDigitalTools.net for instructions on taking screen shots.) If you don’t have any digital version to include for a particular example, that’s fine. The digital versions will enhance your paper but are not required in order for you to make convincing points.

My description above is based on the option of combining results with discussion, but if you would prefer to separate these into two different sections, that would be fine also. Using a separate section for results would allow you to more easily present your findings in the form of a table or graph, if you think your readers would find that useful.

Conclusion and Bibliography

See the tips under the Conclusion and Bibliography sections of this handout: Tips for Developing Pop Culture Research Reports

Additional Info

I don’t have a required length in mind for this paper, as required lengths for any writing task are pretty arbitrary. But given the limited amount of time we have left, I would rather see you build a strong case for only a few common messages than barely scratch the surface of many. It’s fine if you focus only on messages about men OR about women OR about lesbians/gays OR about straight people. You certainly don’t need to cover everything in the paper that came up when you were taking notes.

As a very rough estimate, you should probably aim to keep the paper shorter than around six double-spaced pages, but there’s no penalty for going beyond that, if you’d like to go into more depth.