VA: SpongeBob Squarepants Explains the Nuclear Family of the New Millennium
Sep 21st, 2007
(25 votes, average: 3.24 out of 5)
Loading ...Today I found myself watching an episode of Spongebob Squarepants and becoming increasingly annoyed. Now I know some of you are busy wildly speculating why I would be watching a […]
Original post: SpongeBob Squarepants Explains the Nuclear Family of the New Millennium
That episode was great.
“I don’t need this. I’m going back to work!”
Oh, whatever. There was a Warner Bros. cartoon made back in the ’50s or early ’60s that showed the “typical woman’s day” — wherein she ran herself ragged trying to get errands done, clean the house, cook food, and pretty herself up for the menfolk, only to have oblivious hubby come home, find one thing she didn’t do, and say “Gee, hon, what’d you DO all day!”
The rolling pin came into play about that time, I think.
Anyway, gags about the hard-working housewife and the indolent husband have been around since God invented marriage, basically, and acting like this is the first time anyone’s ever sent this message to Our Children is just ignorant.
The cartoon has figured out and exploited the fact that most people - men and women alike - prefer this stereotype to anything scary like (gulp!) change. The devil you know, etc. Lots of women are getting huge secondary gains from the status quo, even though they may appear tired, overstretched and at the end of their tethers. (Most of them still made a choice to have kids, after all.)
In the status quo - so ably portrayed by Sponge Bob - the woman is a saintly being who does All the important work, and the man is basically a freeloading sperm-donator. The women get endless kudos, and the men get their freedom to veg. The fallout for both from these one-sided viewpoints is up the line somewhere, and probably not pretty. It’s part of what this guy calls the “WAW” effect, and both sexes promote it.
Those of us - of both sexes - who wish to see something more fulfilling and less irritating evolve, think it’s all utter bollocks.
That’s not all the cartoons are doing.
I picked up a copy of Jonny Quest (season 1) on DVD awhile back, the version from the 60s. It was one of my favorites on Saturday mornings when I was a kid.
Let’s just say it didn’t hold up well, but to my 7 or 8 year old self, it was pretty cool.
One line in it caught my attention. Hadji makes some sort of quip about ghosts, and Jonny replies:
“Ghosts? Who still believes in THOSE?”
I think of that when I see commercials for that Ghost Hunters show, or for John “Biggest Douche in the Universe” Edwards. Or when I see people mistaking pseudoscientific claptrap masquerading for real science.
Even on Scooby Doo, it was always some old man in a pirate costume who would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those medding kids. Now it really IS a ghost.
And we wonder why scientific knowledge is declining in this country.
Dude. I fucking love spongebob.
While I’m annoyed that people are nitpicking about cartoons, I suppose it is a valid point. Only because kids seem to be so inundated with steroetypes blah blah blah. I guess if both kids and parents got their heads out of their asses then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
I mean, just look at anything OTHER than the t.v and you can see how the world really is. This all seems petty.
Lighten the hell up - don’t you people recognize satire when you see it? That’s what makes it funny!
I guess the episode was playing with stereotypes. This is quite common. But true there, this will affect the children. Adults should be able to recognize stereotypic aspects from a show, but a child doesn’t have the proper tools for that. But it happens in so many other places as well. In the 80’s there was the Transformers series. It was straight-forward USA (Autobots) versus Soviet Union (Decepticons).
But mostly I’ve noticed that a lot of children’s stories are about abandonment. They play with fear. Fear of being left alone, fear of not being wanted.
Read any brothers Grimm stories. Read HC Andersen. (Then you’ll know the HC doesn’t mean Hans Christian…)
Look at any Disney cartoon movie. Although, they are commonly old stories, like HC Andersen’s Little Mermaid, still there’s a pattern with Disney movies. Ariel, Quasimodo, Tarzan, Dumbo, Cinderella, Snow White, Beast, Simba, whathaveyou is not wanted and/or lost from parents/friends/spouse and has to struggle for acceptance the whole movie but is accepted/found by parents/friends/spouse at the end. - One of the biggest fears of a child - “Nobody loves you and you’ll be all alone”.
How about all the sitcoms that portray the man of the house as a bumbling idiot while the wife is the smart one (who’s also normally way to hot for the guy). Most households I know has the guy as the brains, not to say the wife is a bumbling idiot.. it’s just the guy that has to wire everything and then explain how the remote works ;-) Not that he’d ever giver it up.
V is being melodramatic in this post.
1). It’s just a cartoon.
2). Real-life role-models, e.g., the child’s own father and mother, send a much more powerful message that influences a child’s attitudes and biases. Stop blaming the media.
People should just stop watching so much goddamn tv. That way, we’re forced to stop passing the buck on to cartoons and sitcoms for royally fucking our kids upside the head.
I get it VA, you hate your mother.
I’m waiting for the post where she says that stay at home wives are such bitches that sometimes, their men NEED to beat them, so Domestic Abuse isn’t really a problem.
Glad she’s in therapy.
Have to hand it to you V, you are one of the few women who gets it. I remember this SB episode, and I thought part of it was truthful, and the other part was just reinforcing the woman-are-angels-men-are-assholes stereotype.
If the cartoon reflected reality, Patrick would have had his ass fired for goofing off, and he and SB would be in the projects on welfare dodging bullets and crack dealers.
Of course, cartoonists cannot offend the moms of the world, and they cater to the stereotype that women’s work in the home is so valuable. A recent and complete inept study showed that a housewife’s work was worth $134,000 a year.
In reality, you can get a maid who does all the cooking, cleaning, and babysitting a wife does in South America for $200 a month.
It’s not that housewives aren’t working and aren’t doing important jobs. I am just tired of a society that bends over backwards to praise women and kick men in the butt.
We have spent a generation now with single parents, and the results are in. Single parents don’t do as good of a job as two parents by almost every measurable standard. And one of these days, I hope women get it that by shitting on the father’s role, while possibly feeling good in the short term, is extremely harmful to their kids in the long run.
Saw this, and had the same reaction. Brilliant.