Of witches, babes and wife bashers: Images of gender in Zimbabwean tabloids

‘Woman “auctions” hubby’s big organ, sex prowess’, ‘Witches undo act: Use herbs to remove the juju they planted in victim’s body’, or ‘Woman ditches husband over enlarged manhood’ is a typical headline in the popular tabloids, the B-Metro and the H-Metro, in Zimbabwe. A closer scrutiny though into the stories reveals a lot of gender stereotyping: witchcraft, supernatural phenomena, sex, sexual deviancy, love triangles, and sexual violence against women are some of the issues that dominate the tabloids. The portrayal of women and men in these papers enforces certain negative images such as witches, gossips, adulterers and prostitutes. The focus of this article is on the portrayal of gender. This article takes an analytical look to uncover the various images that these papers portray the argument being that the media plays an important role in the construction of male and female identities and hence these negative images can distort identity, and disadvantage both men and women. A textual analysis of both the H-Metro and B-Metro was done to uncover these images, and the sample was randomly selected from January 2015 to January 2016.