Gender Stereotypes in T.V. Show How I Met Your Mother

My chosen scene is from a popular T.V. show called How I Met Your Mother. This show goes with gender stereotypes and goes against gender stereotypes. The show is about a group of friends, Lily and Marshall being an engaged/married couple, Barney the single “player”, Robin a Canadian tomboy, and Ted the main character, who is a hopeless romantic trying to find true love in New York City. Ted, over the past couple episodes meets a girl and she becomes his girlfriend. In the meantime, he’s spending all of his time with her, Lily and Marshall have a romantic weekend planned leaving Barney and Robin to hang out together, they decide to have a “Bro” date. Robin and Barney do typical guy things, such as; smoking cigars, playing laser tag, and making fun of their other friends for being in relationships, particularly Ted. They make jokes like, “Ted’s to busy being in a lesbian relationship”, and “Ted can’t drink because he’s pregnant, because he’s a girl.” However, Barney praises Robin for being an awesome bro. Robin is a gun enthusiast, hockey loving Canadian, and an expert on cigars. Throughout the series, Ted looks for love as his friends make fun of him, and Robin continuously gets praise for her tomboyish ways. The show uses gender stereotypes for comedy, showing that it’s more socially acceptable for a woman to have more masculine hobbies but a man can’t have “feminine” qualities without being rebuked by his friends. My goal is to look at these studies to determine whether males and females are socially rebuked for being “sissies” and “tomboys” on equal levels, or if their gender makes a difference in how severe the consequences are for not being in the norm.

The purpose of the first study was to do two things. To demonstrate a tech...

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...nity this could be the reason that sissies are discouraged in society and they have emotional outbursts. Society is discouraging their sensitive emotions and their unique tendencies causing them to be social outcasts. While the tomboys continuously get encouraged for have these masculine features. My theory is that tomboys don’t grow out of their ways, but are more socially accepted as their traits become more appreciated by their peers as they age. Causing them to be better behaved and supportive of the people around them because they are being accepted. The sissies don’t have that feeling of acceptance because their peers still have negative feelings towards them even after they become adults, like the adults in the survey. These studies support and show that adults, children, and even teachers think differently of these two and prefer the tomboys to the sissies.