Blog Post 9

Hannah Dickie

4/3/15

Blog post 9

Women in TV

This week we read articles that discussed women’s roles and positions in TV shows. When we began talking about it I had never given much thought to the different TV shows I was watching and how the women were being portrayed or even what race of women were being casted. After the discussions I began to look back at the TV shows I watch and was able to see that women are not being portrayed well, or even at all. In almost every show the mother is in charge of the cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the kids, and if she isn’t then she’s a mom who doesn’t really care about her kids and only cares about her work position. There is no in between no mom can be both on the TV shows, even though they sometimes try in the end they fail at one of the two. In a majority of the shows the women’s lives revolve around gossiping to each other, shopping, or being in a relationship with a man. They never show the real struggles that are out there. TV shows can seem relatable in one section, such as girl not getting accepted to her ideal college, we can relate to that if we did not all get accepted to our first choice schools. But then it takes that and makes the ending something that would never happen to us, such as not even really caring or getting gifts to make you feel better. TV shows never really deal with real life problems in a realistic way. They never talk about all the stresses teenagers are under, women’s cycles, how to get good paying jobs (without having to cheat your way in). They make it seem like life for younger people isn’t as hard as it actually is. Another thing we talked about was that there really are never people of different races in the shows, a majority of actors in these TV shows are white. I never really noticed this because it didn’t really relate to me there was always someone on the shows with blond hair and blue eyes that I could relate to. Hearing from different classmates though I found that they had very different experiences. Until looking back now there really are no people of different races especially African American actors. I can only think of two shows in which the cast is almost completely African American, which also doesn’t stay true to what reality is because there is never really an experience (unless in a home) that you will not encounter people of different races. This also is true for Asian, and Latino actors they are even less represented then African Americans. When there are people of different races however they become stereotyped. The African American women is either a nanny, house keeper, never in a roll of real power. These women are also stereotyped as being sexual, loud, and not speaking proper English. The Latino women are also seen as yelling, speaking Spanish and English in the same sentence, and not being very smart. The Asian women are being stereotyped as angry, always pushing their children and never being completely happy. I don’t understand why the shows have to follow the very old stereotypes. Why can’t these women be portrayed as they are in real life, and like the white women are in other TV shows? To make shows more relatable for everyone they need to start dealing with real life situations and not turning them around into something that would never happen. They also need women of different races to show multiple perspectives on a topic, making it seem more realistic.