Family Guy Stereotypes

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What makes a person feminine? Is it their gender? Their choice in clothing? Their personal traits? In season two, episode eight of Family Guy, Peter, one of the main characters, gets in touch with his feminine side. His portrayal of the typical American woman is quite insulting and frankly inaccurate. The episode only becomes more disrespectful once Peter regains his manhood. Throughout the episode gender inequalities are certainly portrayed. After finishing this episode, one questioned remained, what does femininity mean to the media?
The show starts off with a commercial of two overly sexualized women. Lois, Peter’s wife, reacts to this commercial by saying “of course a man made this.” While Peter responds with “it’s a commercial not a Thanksgiving …show more content…

He says “Why do women have boobs, so you have something to look at while you’re talking to them.” Offended, she went to the head of the company and filed a complaint. During the meeting with the head of the company, Peter says yet another insulting comment, “Women are not people, they are devices built by the Lord Jesus Christ for our entertainment.” Appalled by the comments Peter made, he was sent to an all women’s retreat to receive sexual harassment training and get in touch with his feminine side. After falling from a tree at the retreat and hitting the grown hard, Peter regains consciousness as a whole new person. Peter claims that from this fall, he has felt women’s pain, and from there on out he is going to be a changed man. If you ask me, Peter takes on this extreme stereotype of what …show more content…

I would say that our modern society still holds old views. As it was portrayed in the documentary The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, women weren’t treated fairly even when having the skills needed for a particular job. They were told that they were only good for being married and having babies, they weren’t cut for the job, and the only thing they can really operate is the kitchen. The same rhetoric being used during WW2, is being used today in shows like Family Guy! Although, they may try to make these things comical, it shows that these views really are still out there. Femininity often gets associated with words like beauty and desirableness. In fact, Google uses this sentence to put femininity into context: “She celebrates her femininity by wearing makeup and high heals.” This idea of attractiveness is so essential to our societal views of women that we rarely attribute traits of strength and motivation with women. Can you imagine what that does to their psyches? Personally, I think there needs to be a major reevaluation of what it means to be a woman in our society. As can be seen, in the movie The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, women can accomplish things just as much as men can, if not

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