The Feminist Filter: Ted

[gabrielleabelle]

I wanted to post this on Weds or Thurs, but LJ was going wonky. Now it's not. So here! :)

Mission Statement:This series is intended to outline the feminist text of each episode so as to provoke and encourage open discussion. It's not so much about making value judgments about events and/or characters but about analyzing the series from a feminist

Comments

[norwie2010]

Ted is a robot from the 50s, a period with notably distinct gender roles. What can we take away from Ted's behavior in light of this context? As noted in the Feminist Fine-Toothed Comb, Ted comes from a time when family dynamics revolved around a patriarchal assumption, literally a “rule of the fathers”.

Ted "from the fifties" is very successful economically, as well as socially (so to speak) in the nineties. In fact, people admire and love him (or are jealous of him): his work colleagues, Joyce, the Scoobies, etcpp.

I think that says a lot about how not very different our times are from the fifties on the gender front. I think the whole "from the fifties" metaphor is a cover, it makes it easier to tell this story and brings some "creep" factor in as well for good fun. At the end of the day, the ideology Ted represents is very much alive now. (Otherwise Buffy wouldn't challenge it day in, day out

[gabrielleabelle]

Fantastic point, yes!

I think there's an added subversion in that Joyce and the Scoobies loved Ted specifically because he drugged them. The drugs, in this case, being symbolic of cultural misogyny.

[doublemeat]

The drugs also emphasize that Ted is wholly fake. The Ted of this episode, having been constructed by long-dead and unseen human Ted, is pure artifice. As a robot, he doesn't even have agency of his own; all he does is carry out programmed instructions corresponding to desires he can never understand or fulfill, and manipulate others to do the same by removing their agency. That's a pretty obvious metaphor for the constraints imposed by socially inherited ideas (specifically patriarchal culture).

[gabrielleabelle]

Very good point. *nods*

[beer_good_foamy]

I love this point.