This Washington Post article by Hank Stuever, ”Bunnies, babies and broads,” about the modern female role in television in the Washington Post  is currently making the rounds of the internet. And for good reason: it calls out, in some very well-spoken terms the ridiculous ways in which women (and actually, also men) are portrayed on television. People are mostly circulating the quote about how ridiculously airheaded and stereotypically adorkable Zooey Deschanel’s new character is, but I like this quote even better:

Whether fictional or quasi-real, TV’s women occupy a world of placation and sublimation through cupcakes and extreme couponing and physically impossible jujitsu. It’s Bravo’s “Housewives” threatening to ruin one another, egged on by fans. It’s a false sense of outspoken independence, shackled by beauty myths and the pretend liberation of promiscuity.

It says so much about the false nature of the message of some of these shows, which is that the gender roles they portray are progressive.  Indeed, women’s TV roles now aren’t the same as the ones in pop culture fifty years ago, but just because they have sex and careers doesn’t mean they aren’t also falling into depressingly caricatured stereotypes of the ultra-gendered cupcake-eating bargain-hunter whose desperation for heteronormative male attention is the drive behind the entire plot of their lives. It also says something about the nature of the “chick flick” genre of modern pop culture, where it’s assumed that the standard to which women aspire and relate as a demographic is a straight, privileged white woman seeking love in the big city. It sterilizes and mocks the actuality of the so-called “female experience” and also the male experience, which is also portrayed in a privileged caricature that rigidly defines manliness. Hank Stuever also points out that: “the laugh-getter this season is for a character to inform a man that he’s being so unmanly that he has acquired female genitalia.”

And do not even let me begin to talk about the miserable idea that is NBC’s new show The Playboy Club.

We as men are called by God to be strong and to chase after the ladies and not to be chased by them. Since when did the princess slay the dragon to save the knight? Yea, didn’t think so. 

Think about it.

Haha. I once had this conversation with a guy who was trying to ask me out, and he said that he thinks women are princesses and he wants to be the knight who saves them from the dragon. I laughed in his face and asked him, “and what if I’m the dragon?”