Sexism in Television
By: Madison Mallory
Tags: Media Criticism, Sexism, Media, Television, Misogyny

The Research

For our project, we intentionally chose television shows of varying genres targeting varying age groups. Johnny Bravo, a children’s cartoon. Saved By the Bell, a bubblegum teen comedy from the 1990s. Gossip Girl, a raunchier teen drama from the mid 2000s aimed at young women. That 70’s Show and The Big Bang Theory, two more adult comedies. And finally Mad Men, a critically-acclaimed period drama. We explicitly wanted an array to demonstrate the ways in which their unique streams of misogyny all flow to the same ocean.

Johnny Bravo is a classic example of misogyny as a punchline. Although Johnny is often the butt of the joke, the female characters are blank slates for him to harass for laughs. The typical women (with the exception of his child sister and mother) in this show are illustrated as thin blonde white women with near identical faces and interchangeable personalities. When addressing the Maisy Test, a version of the Bechdel Test for children’s media, Johnny Bravo fails with flying colors. Questions on The Maisy Test include: are boys and girls treated respectfully? While Johnny is frequently rejected, the show itself hinges on his remarkable lack of respect for women. Another question asked is: are body shapes healthy and realistic? In this show, the answer is a resounding no for both Johnny and the objects of his affections. This phenomenon in specific is noted in “Watching Gender: How Stereotypes in Movies and on TV Impact Kid’s Development”:

“An international study involving 24 countries that analyzed over 26,000 characters in over 6,000 children’s fictional programs for children under 12 years old documented the prevalence of the unrealistically thin and sexualized body shape of animated girl characters and the large, muscular chest.”

As for Gossip Girl, That 70s Show, and Saved By the Bell, we wanted to use mixed-gender ensemble shows targeted at the tween to young adult age group to demonstrate how sexist messaging looks in the space between childhood and fully realized adult media. With juvenile themes juxtaposing hypersexualization and objectification of underage female characters, these shows represent an interesting cultural intersection and speak to a disturbing cultural obsession with underaged girls as sex objects. While Saved By the Bell is the most chaste of the three, the girls and their bodies are often made prizes to the male characters. In the other two, the sexualization of the main female characters often reaches disturbing levels of dehumanization. This is even truer of the less central female characters. “Bit characters” as they are called are often thrown in as plot devices, existing only for the sexual gratification and plot advancement of men via sex. In a recent study, it found minor or “bit” female characters were “sexually objectified more often, and to a greater degree than the leading characters […]” (Murphy, 2015, p. 19). This can be seen with Lori Forman in earlier seasons of That 70s Show and innumerable girls across Gossip Girl.

The Big Bang Theory is guilty of a technique referred to as “lampshading.” This term refers to the phenomenon of writers “making something obvious to viewers, intended to let us know the writers are self aware and make us feel like we’re all in on the joke.” (The Adorkable Misogyny of The Big Bang Theory, 14:05). Yet lampshading doesn’t challenge or critique sexism, it simply acknowledges it in a humorous way. The punchlines always assert bigotry as comical, lighthearted, even innocent. “A critical approach to humour urges researchers to consider the potentially negative aspects of humour (e.g. ridicule), and to consider the role of humour in establishing or challenging power relations” (Drakett, et al, 2018, p. 111)The purpose of having “nerdy” men deliver classically macho brand misogyny is a two part goal: 1) to mock their failure to perform masculinity, and thus reinforce strict standards for it 2) to give bigoted messaging a more harmless appearance. Seemingly ironic subversion of bigotry is continually used to downplay its severity and champion its supposed comedic value.

Mad Men follows the happenings of a parasitic advertising firm in the 1960s. The men of the office reign over the women, and select them for employment based on their attractiveness. In It’s a mad, mad, mad, ad world: A feminist critique of Mad Men, they note that even the supposedly strong female characters are written to conceive of happiness as marriage and subservience to powerful men. “Men create the ideal life for both genders. […] This theme clearly illustrates, both explicitly and implicitly, that men can succeed without women, but to succeed, a woman needs a man” (Ferrucci, Schauster, & Shoenberger, 2014, p. 98). Ironically, the advertising industry’s misogyny hasn’t changed much from the 1960s today. “Not only do women appear in adverts four times less than men, they’re also more likely to be spoken over by their male counterparts and to appear partially or completely naked: men speak seven times more than women, while women are twice as likely to be naked” (Rosseinsky, 2017).

Within the media overall, women are found to have less prominent roles and jobs. A study compiled by Omri Bezalel and Kirsi Goldynia discusses how within the news alone “women only make up 26 percent of op-ed authors in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times” (Bezalel & Goldynia, 2016, p.118). Furthermore, the lack of female representation in television shows is also not very high. The “total representation of female characters (17.8% in 1990 and 23.8% in 1992) was very disappointing” (Swan, 1995, p. 8). Positive representation of women in television shows, as well as the absence of sexism and misogyny within those shows, is often hard to find. From the start of the 2010’s onwards, an introduction of “difficult women” characters have been introduced into television to help fight back against the stereotypes, sexism, and misogyny towards women characters (Hohenstein & Thalmann, 2019). “TV shows of the 2010s undermine and work against traditional and stereotypical portrayals of women on TV and instead establish feminist discourses” (Hohenstein & Thalmann, 2019, p. 113). However, there are still years of content on television with these sexist ideals to be pushed back against. So, while the push back has started, it still has a long way to go before we can expect to see these stereotypes, tropes, and sexist ideals completely leave the screen, if they ever will. “Women are portrayed as dependent on other characters, over-emotional, and confined to low-status jobs […] Even films aimed at a female audience often disappoint in depictions of independent women […]” (Murphy, 2015, p. 8). Even the media directed specifically towards women share these stereotypes and sexism, with women being portrayed as lesser than men, and the enforcement of stereotypical gender roles. Young women especially need to be shown media that does not put them down (Genz & Brabon, 2018).

Parents have also grown concerned with the content being shared to their children, which is shown within many other projects. The primary focus is on the messages of sexism and misogyny that are directed towards children, enforcing gender roles into the content that children are being exposed to. A parent on the website Sacraparental goes on to suggest a “Maisy Test’’ for children shows; a test very similar to the Bechdel test in the thought process. “[…] programmes (and games and movies) need to promote healthy gender messages in three key ways: gender representation, gender freedom and gender safety” (thaliakr, 2015). The next project is also directed towards parents, discussing the role of television and television messages in the development of children. In its study, it is discussed how “Around age 2, children begin to label their own sex and that of other people and begin to categorize and sort the world by gender,” which is incredibly dangerous when the messages in children’s television and movies are that of sexist and misognyistic ideals (Ward & Aubrey, 2017, p. 21). “A recent study by Haines, Deaux and Lofaro (2016) indicates that gender stereotyping is still strongly embedded in today’s society and can influence our judgements, choices and actions’’ (Gregori-Signes, 2016, p. 22).