Television is a widespread influence upon society and the animated sitcom holds potential for progress within its colorful content. It’s evident with on-air shows such as Family Guy, The Simpsons, and South Park that there is an appeal that has been able to hold onto audiences no matter the time or age. Children and adults are able to enjoy cartoons and the satirical wit that has been drawn into them. These cartoons have crafted together a perfect balance of reality and fantasy. The audience enjoys seeing a colorful distorted image of themselves on the television screen, this separated similarity allows people to laugh, scoff or admire at themselves. However, cartoon has often fallen at fault to common patriarchal ideologies. There has been
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Women are expected to provide when it comes to sex, on-screen and off. Sexual pleasure is something that must be given to a man rather than felt by the female herself. The audience for film and television is typically assumed to consist entirely of heterosexual, highly masculine men. Movies and television are a way to display the assumed audience’s ideas, the male characters are admirable and emotionally stoic while the women simply exist to provide eye candy. Susan Jeanne Douglas notes in Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media that “women in film [and television] are meant to be looked at; if they do much looking themselves-for information, for sex, for clues-they usually pay the consequences and are hated by all other characters and the entire audience” (Douglas 76). Sexuality is not a dirty concept, it is an essential to life. It affects motivation, personality, and emotion. If a woman is stripped away of sexuality, it is not an act of purity but rather dehumanization. This shame upon female sexuality is what leads to a shallow representation of female characters on-screen. Male sitcom characters, fathers or sons, are typically depicted as moronic. They are blindly driven by a hunger for sex, food, or money. However, while they seem unable to control their desires, their emotional intelligence is nearly nonexistent. The audience is able to identify and laugh along with what the male characters want, but it is never exposed how these male characters feel. Fathers on television are “presented [through] the archetypal image of masculinity in that he places all his professional responsibilities before his family, represses his emotions, and considers all women as nothing more than unpaid sexual and domestic labour” (Feasey 39). Television promotes the idea that the life of a man consists solely of his individual desires. As a father, he is
Women are expected to provide when it comes to sex, on-screen and off. Sexual pleasure is something that must be given to a man rather than felt by the female herself. The audience for film and television is typically assumed to consist entirely of heterosexual, highly masculine men. Movies and television are a way to display the assumed audience’s ideas, the male characters are admirable and emotionally stoic while the women simply exist to provide eye candy. Susan Jeanne Douglas notes in Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media that “women in film [and television] are meant to be looked at; if they do much looking themselves-for information, for sex, for clues-they usually pay the consequences and are hated by all other characters and the entire audience” (Douglas 76). Sexuality is not a dirty concept, it is an essential to life. It affects motivation, personality, and emotion. If a woman is stripped away of sexuality, it is not an act of purity but rather dehumanization. This shame upon female sexuality is what leads to a shallow representation of female characters on-screen. Male sitcom characters, fathers or sons, are typically depicted as moronic. They are blindly driven by a hunger for sex, food, or money. However, while they seem unable to control their desires, their emotional intelligence is nearly nonexistent. The audience is able to identify and laugh along with what the male characters want, but it is never exposed how these male characters feel. Fathers on television are “presented [through] the archetypal image of masculinity in that he places all his professional responsibilities before his family, represses his emotions, and considers all women as nothing more than unpaid sexual and domestic labour” (Feasey 39). Television promotes the idea that the life of a man consists solely of his individual desires. As a father, he is