Beyond the Script: Gender and Media

Dorsey Armstrong's "Gender and the Script/Print Continuum: Caxton's Morte Darthur" made me think a lot about content in terms of accessibility, and how things are written for certain audiences, and why. The printing press obviously offered much more accessibility and readership amongst a larger audience, and it was interesting for Armstrong to point out the differences between Malory and Caxton's versions of Morte Darthur. Accessibility began to go beyond the typical structures of class levels, into a concentration of gender, as shown by multiple examples in this essay. But something that stood out to me was in these examples, the emphasis on the feminine, the damsel in distress, and the stereotypical focus on what interests female readers might have (for example, only having an interest in romance stories). Which caused me to wonder:

Did Caxton's depiction of feminine interests and/or stories form the stereotypes for media framed for women for the following few hundred years? Have these binary and focused stereotypes really existed since the invention of the printing press?