Today, I can watch programming as recent as the early oughts and still be astonished at the routine misogyny that i was raised with and that was absolutely invisible to me at the time because it was presented so ubiquitously. It genuinely horrifies me.
And none of this is to say things are all better now, of course. But i love that the girls/young women in my family take it for granted that girls/young women are presented as the heroes in lots of media.
2 stories: we showed my (boy) child Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade several years ago, & his first reply when we asked him what he thought of it was, ‘Wow, that was REALLY SEXIST! There were NO women, except the love interest, so that doesn’t count, & she was a Nazi so that REALLY doesn’t count!’
Even me, watching it now, didn’t really register that issue. It was front & center obvious to him! Similarly, some junior faculty women came to me about a talk we’d all attended & they were really mad that it was sexist. I had to replay the moments in my mind & initially was thinking, ‘Was it…
Really sexist? Like, how many talks have I been in that said similar things…’ but as I was going over the actual words, I realized, ‘YES, YES THAT REALLY IS HORRIBLY SEXIST AND I ALWAYS SHRUGGED IT OFF!’ Bc if I hadn’t I wouldn’t have survived! (We went together to confront the speaker… who kinda
Got at least some of the issues and did fix stuff going forward…) But my junior colleagues were honestly LIVID, while I was just… irritated. Bc that stuff was just wallpaper when I was coming up. I was so pleased that they could afford to be livid & wish I could see things as fast as them.
Just to say—older women often developed strategies to ignore sexism as a survival strategy, bc if I had been that livid every time something like that happened… well, I would never have had time to do my job. 🤷🏻♀️ And sometimes that translates into passing down the abuse—which I try hard not to do!!!
legit
although the one that makes me really really mad is raiders, because Marion is a fantastic character who is constantly treated as a doofus by the script, the paradoxical "strong woman" that is simultaneously a message to women that they cannot be the hero and will only be a liability to him but sexy
I didn’t watch tv most of my life. I would try, but it felt meh. I never knew why. Recently I tried again. Suddenly I saw why. Unending skinny women with perfect make up. The ceaseless stream of raped women. The men centered in nearly every story. The heavy handed gender roles. It’s not fun.