All wife and no play
I would like to direct your attention to this most excellent rant by madlori about the trope that women are fun killers. I tried to pick a pull quote, but I would have just ended up copying and pasting the whole thing. So go read it. Highly recommended.
The rant was brought on by some of yesterday's Super Bowl ads, which apparently were egregious examples of the trope. I haven't seen these ads, but I can picture them. Why? Because in my 36 years of life, I have seen approximately a million ads just like them: ads (and sitcoms, and movies) based on the concept that women have no purpose except to suck the joy out of men's lives. (And for women, read "wives", because of course, for a man, getting married is the end; it's nothing but drudgery from that day onward.) It all comes back to the idea that women are something men put up with to get sex. There's also the flip-side: women put up with sex, and men generally, for financial stability and for someone else to mow the lawn and take out the garbage. It couldn't be that marriage is ever a partnership of equals, two people who compromise and negotiate and want one another to be happy, oh no. That never happens!
Fortunately, it happens in my house, most of the time. I know I'm lucky that way. I wish society would teach us to hold out for it, rather than perpetuate destructive stereotypes. And this is why media representations matter. As madlori points out:
And it's everywhere. To the point that sometimes I think some actual women act like this because they've been led to expect it, like it's their role in society. As a woman, it saddens me that my gender is saddled with this perception that we're to be tolerated and endured, instead of enjoyed and appreciated.
Yes. This, exactly. I think that's what leads men to assume that women aren't interested in "guy" things (like videogames, and baseball, and comic books, and science fiction, and...), and it's what leads some women to assume that they aren't interested in them, either. It limits us all, and to what purpose?
The rant was brought on by some of yesterday's Super Bowl ads, which apparently were egregious examples of the trope. I haven't seen these ads, but I can picture them. Why? Because in my 36 years of life, I have seen approximately a million ads just like them: ads (and sitcoms, and movies) based on the concept that women have no purpose except to suck the joy out of men's lives. (And for women, read "wives", because of course, for a man, getting married is the end; it's nothing but drudgery from that day onward.) It all comes back to the idea that women are something men put up with to get sex. There's also the flip-side: women put up with sex, and men generally, for financial stability and for someone else to mow the lawn and take out the garbage. It couldn't be that marriage is ever a partnership of equals, two people who compromise and negotiate and want one another to be happy, oh no. That never happens!
Fortunately, it happens in my house, most of the time. I know I'm lucky that way. I wish society would teach us to hold out for it, rather than perpetuate destructive stereotypes. And this is why media representations matter. As madlori points out:
And it's everywhere. To the point that sometimes I think some actual women act like this because they've been led to expect it, like it's their role in society. As a woman, it saddens me that my gender is saddled with this perception that we're to be tolerated and endured, instead of enjoyed and appreciated.
Yes. This, exactly. I think that's what leads men to assume that women aren't interested in "guy" things (like videogames, and baseball, and comic books, and science fiction, and...), and it's what leads some women to assume that they aren't interested in them, either. It limits us all, and to what purpose?