Sitcom Singles: The Differential Portrayal of Single Men and Women in the Modern American Sitcom

2022 Words5 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: How media can influence an individual identity

The average America watches more than 150 hours of television every month, or about five hours each day (“Americans,” 2009). Of the 25 top-rated shows for the week of February 8-14, 2010, six were sitcoms, averaging 5.84 million live viewers each (Seidman, 2010), to say nothing for the millions more who watched later on the Internet or their Digital Video Recorders. The modern sitcom is an undeniable force in America, and its influence extends beyond giving viewers new jokes to repeat at the water cooler the next day: whether Americans realize it or not, the media continues to socialize them, even as adults. It may appear at first glance that sitcoms are a relatively benign force in entertainment. However, the modern sitcom is more than just a compilation of one-liners and running gags. It is an agent of gender socialization, reinforcing age-old stereotypes and sending concrete messages about how, and who, to be. While in reality, people of both sexes have myriad personality traits that do not fall neatly along gender lines, the sitcom spurns this diversity in favor of representing the same characters again and again: sex-crazed, domestically incompetent single men enjoying their lives as wild bachelors, and neurotic, lonely, and insecure single women pining desperately to settle down with Prince Charming and have babies. Sitcoms reinforce our ideas about what it is “normal” to be, and perhaps more importantly feed us inaccurate ideas about the opposite sex: that women are marriage-crazed, high-maintenance, and obsessed with the ticking of their biological clocks, while men are hapless sex addicts whose motives can’t be trusted. The way that singles are portrayed in sitcoms is harmful to viewers’ understanding of themselves...

... middle of paper ...

... as a society, we are still allowing, even encouraging, the reproduction of the patriarchy through our choice of entertainment. We are allowing ourselves to be socialized into old-fashioned, out-of-date roles. While sitcoms make us laugh and provide us an escape from our troubles, they may be creating problems all their own – problems that, as a society, we cannot easily escape from. Certainly, that is no laughing matter.

Works Cited
Americans watching more tv than ever; web and mobile video up too. (2009, May 20). Retrieved from http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/americans-watching-more-tv-than- ever/

Seidman, R. (2010, February 17). TV ratings top 25: Olympics and and American idol battle for weekly supremacy. Retrieved from http://tvbythenumbers.com/2010/02/17/tv-ratings-top- 25-olympics-and-american-idol-battle-for-weekly-supremacy/42196

Show More
Related

  • Male Bashing On Tv Analysis

    985 Words  | 2 Pages

    Michael Abernathy’s article “Male Bashing on TV” uses many television sources and percentages to explain how men are treated like idiots inside of the media. Abernathy is a television reviewer, cultural critic, and queer culture commentator (350). While Heather Havrilesky's article “TV’s New Wave of Women:Smart, Strong, Borderline Insane” is the opposite and uses television sources to explain how women are treated as smart yet crazy inside of the media. These two articles describe how men and women are portrayed differently in television shows and the media. The articles have smaller subtopics in common which are the portrayal of men and women in the media, the comparison of men and women in each article, and how Abernathy and Havrilesky want

    Read More

  • Hayden Fox: A Man's Man

    1058 Words  | 3 Pages

    Klumas, Amy L., and Thomas Marchant. “Images of Men in Popular Sitcoms”. Journal of Men’s Studies 2.3 (1994): 269. ProQuest. Web. 27 Jan. 2014.

    Read More

  • Socially Constructed Stereotypes in All in the Family, The Jefferson’s and The Cosby Show.

    1311 Words  | 3 Pages

    McCarthy, Tyler. “Sitcom success a reflection of changing society.” Daily Campus. 29 Jan. 2012. Web. 17 Nov. 2013.

    Read More

  • Does Homer Know Best?

    1615 Words  | 4 Pages

    Sitcoms." Fathering: A Journal of Theory, Research, and Practice about Men as Fathers 7.2 (2009): 114-39. Print. 17 April 2014.

    Read More

  • The Media And Gender Stereotypes In The Media

    2330 Words  | 5 Pages

    The media, through its many outlets, has a lasting effect on the values and social structure evident in modern day society. Television, in particular, has the ability to influence the social structure of society with its subjective content. As Dwight E. Brooks and Lisa P. Hébert write in their article, “GENDER, RACE, AND MEDIA REPRESENTATION”, the basis of our accepted social identities is heavily controlled by the media we consume. One of the social identities that is heavily influenced is gender: Brooks and Hébert conclude, “While sex differences are rooted in biology, how we come to understand and perform gender is based on culture” (Brooks, Hébert 297). With gender being shaped so profusely by our culture, it is important to be aware of how social identities, such as gender, are being constructed in the media.

    Read More

  • Modern Day Females: The Mary Tyler Moore Show

    1870 Words  | 4 Pages

    In American culture today, women continue the struggle of identifying what their roles in society are supposed to be. Our culture has been sending mixed messages to the modern day female, creating a sense of uneasiness to an already confusing and stressful world. Although women today are encouraged more than ever to be independent, educated, and successful, they are often times shamed for having done just that. Career driven females are frequently at risk of being labeled as bossy, unfeminine, or selfish for competing in many career paths that were once dominated by men. A popular medium in our culture such as television continues to have significant influences as to how people should aspire to live their lives. Viewers develop connections with relatable characters and to relationship dynamics displayed within their favorite shows. Fictional characters and relationships can ultimately influence a viewer’s fashion sense, social and political opinion, and attitude towards gender norms. Since the days of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeanie, where women were commonly portrayed as being the endearing mischievous housewife, television shows have evolved in order to reflect real life women who were becoming increasingly more independent, educated, and career oriented throughout the subsequent decades. New genres of television are introduced, such as the workplace comedy, where women are not only career oriented, but eventually transition into positions of power.

    Read More

  • Is In Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement And Nerds

    249 Words  | 1 Pages

    In the essay “Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds,” Arthur Chu argues that society forces the practice of competition between “nerds” and men to see who can prove their masculinity by “winning the girl” (5). Failure to obtain “entitlement” is followed by mockery, leading to misogyny and spiteful acts (32). Chu redundantly lists the television shows and movies that incorporate the idea of competition as their main point of focus. He uses Steve Urkel from Family Matters to provide the reader with a visual image of what the media is promoting: nerds “fixating” on unattainable women only to be shot down once again (6). Society uses the media to spread the illusion of competition that always has the same, perpetual

    Read More

  • Societal Influence on Gender-Based Morality

    1278 Words  | 3 Pages

    When people observe gender roles in a television show it is seen as an ideal—what they should aspire to be. Both men and women look for something to reaffirm what they believe is true, and in our current society, the main medium of providing information to a large public is the media. Should there be any kind of cognitive dissonance, studies have shown that people are more likely to passively agree to something even if they think it is wrong to avoid conflict (Annatucci and Gilligan 225). For example, a young boy is watching a movie with his friends in which a man has an affair. All his friends think the man in the film had every right to cheat on his significant other. Even if the boy does not agree with his friends, he will stay passive and agree with them, which in turn reaffirms and justifies the thoughts his friends are having. In cases such as these, it is not what is taught from families as much as the social interactions that further shape the morality and can change it among an

    Read More

  • Pleasantville

    789 Words  | 2 Pages

    Popular culture is the artistic and creative expression in entertainment and style that appeals to society as whole. It includes music, film, sports, painting, sculpture, and even photography. It can be diffused in many ways, but one of the most powerful and effective ways to address society is through film and television. Broadcasting, radio and television are the primary means by which information and entertainment are delivered to the public in virtually every nation around the world, and they have become a crucial instrument of modern social and political organization. Most of today’s television programming genres are derived from earlier media such as stage, cinema and radio. In the area of comedy, sitcoms have proven the most durable and popular of American broadcasting genres. The sitcom’s success depends on the audience’s familiarity with the habitual characters and the situations

    Read More

  • Stereotypes In The Proud Family

    533 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Disney Channel show The Proud Family and ABC’S show George Lopez are examples that are common between the ages of 10-15. This paper will describe and analyze the stereotypes and gender roles

    Read More

  • Bewitched And I Love Lucy Patriarchy Analysis

    1180 Words  | 3 Pages

    The classic network era is one of the most easily recognizable and distinct eras in television history. Both Bewitched and I Love Lucy were huge sitcoms that took up issues of gender representation and patriarchy in their programs through the representations of the main male and female characters of their respective series. While both of these series pushed boundaries when it came to the representation of women, in the end, the costuming of these men and women, how the main characters are introduced, and the domestic environment that the atmosphere takes place in, all serve to reinforce traditional gender norms and reveals that patriarchy is dependent on maintaining dominant ideas about masculinity and femininity.

    Read More

  • The Bachelor & the Bachelorette: Can’t Buy Me Love?

    916 Words  | 2 Pages

    Do you know the guiltiest pleasure of the American public? Two simple words reveal all—reality TV. This new segment of the TV industry began with pioneering shows like MTV’s The Real World and CBS’s Survivor. Switch on primetime television nowadays, and you will become bombarded by and addicted to numerous shows all based on “real” life. There are the heartwarming tales of childbirth on TLC, melodramas of second-rate celebrities on Celebrity Mole, and a look into a completely dysfunctional family on The Osbornes. Yet, out of all these entertaining reality shows arises the newest low for popular culture, a program based on the idea of a rich man or woman in search of the perfect marriage partner. The Bachelor, and its spin-off The Bachelorette, exemplify capitalist ideology founded on the Marxist base-superstructure model and establish the role of an active American audience.

    Read More

  • Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

    2558 Words  | 6 Pages

    “The ways in which we are watching TV are thus changing, not just in terms of the increased prominence of interactivity but (disposable inco...

    Read More

  • Misrepresentation Of Women Essay

    1007 Words  | 3 Pages

    On a daily basis people are exposed to some sort of misrepresentation of gender; in the things individuals watch, and often the things that are purchased. Women are often the main target of this misrepresentation. “Women still experience actual prejudice and discrimination in terms of unequal treatment, unequal pay, and unequal value in real life, then so too do these themes continue to occur in media portraits.”(Byerly, Carolyn, Ross 35) The media has become so perverted, in especially the way it represents women, that a females can be handled and controlled by men, the individual man may not personally feel this way, but that is how men are characterized in American media. Some may say it doesn’t matter because media isn’t real life, but people are influenced by everything around them, surroundings that are part of daily routine start to change an individual’s perspective.

    Read More

  • Portrayal of Women in the Media

    3135 Words  | 7 Pages

    Another major factor that influences millions of impressionable females and males is television. Not only does the television teach each sex how to act, it also shows how one sex should expect the other sex to act. In the current television broadcasting, stereotypical behavior goes from programming for the very small to adult audiences. In this broadcasting range, females are portrayed as motherly, passive and innocent, sex objects, or they are overlooked completely or seen as unimportant entities. Stereotyping women is not only rampant in the adult world; it also flourishes in the kiddie universe as well.

    Read More

More about Sitcom Singles: The Differential Portrayal of Single Men and Women in the Modern American Sitcom

Open Document