Jade Keller

I just read an interesting post on Bitch, PhD about the show, Weeds, and how, at its core, it is about a working mom dealing (perhaps not so perfectly) with the balance of her job and raising children on her own – and how there’s an implicit symmetry about the illicit nature of her work and the illicit joy and guilt working moms might have when they have success at work at the expense of being at home with their kids. The comment stream after the post was interesting too, as several commenters debated whether the racial stereotypes in the show were satirical (and thus highlighting the absurdity of stereotypes) or non-judgmental (and thus implicitly condoning them).

It reminded me of a conversation between my hubby and good friends of ours about the show, Glee.
One side was contending that the stereotypes in Glee were pretty outrageous, and the other was arguing that they were of the satirical sort. The producers were blatantly pushing the stereotypes to make a point about them.

It makes me wonder how audiences can tell whether stereotypes are an unwitting function of the producers’ biases and whether they are meant as satire. If you’ve watched old movies, it’s clear blatancy, consistency, and humorousness of the stereotypes are not particularly helpful measures. So what can we use that doesn’t ultimately boil down to 1) whether or not you like the show (or movie or book or whatever) or 2) how sensitive you are to that particular stereotype? First, I suspect that oftentimes, if you like a show you’ll be willing to defend it (oh, selective perception and cognitive dissonance…can we never escape thee?), and if you don’t really like it, you’ll be more inclined to see it less positively. Secondly, I did a bit of a Google search on the subject fearing that this might be a stupid question and came up with all kinds of responses where people like satire on some subjects but not others. Isaac Hayes, who played Chef on South Park is one such example: he had no problem satirizing any number of religions, but left the show in protest against the show poking fun at his own, Scientology.

We can laugh at the apparent hypocrisy of people, but I think somewhere in there, there is probably a legitimate question of how and when satire is actually really useful (perhaps related to how well it is executed) and when it is just in poor taste – and when you can recognize real biases where they exist.

I wonder, even if the stereotype is satirical, doesn’t that at some point become a one-liner? Stereotypes can be bad. Well, no sh*t. (The mere fact that people complain about whether a show should be watched or not because it employs stereotypes demonstrates that, in our heads at least, we know that stereotypes are to be avoided.) But the question is: why are they bad?* Instead of having a knee-jerk reaction: oh, stereotype! – oh, bad!, how do we recognize problematic biases in ourselves? How do we overcome them – and still maintain a healthy sense of humor about life? I think maintaining a sense of humor about it all is important too, because it’s not helpful if we all have sticks up our asses about it all either. Because, if we’re honest with ourselves about it, stereotypes have become stereotypes because there is a kernel (note I said kernel!) of truth to them. They are humorous to us because they resonate with personal experience. And maybe the real question is whether we are laughing to put someone else down, or whether really we are laughing at all of ourselves: for the human condition, for what we all have to put up with in this crazy thing called life.

I think the only way we can begin to answer these questions starts with breaking down the stereotypes.

But how do we do that? One way is to provide characters that defy stereotypes (or alternatively provide prejudiced characters who end up the fool), thus showing why the act of stereotyping is problematic. Another, I imagine, is to have a stereotypical character who somehow shows how the stereotype is itself problematic. Let’s take, for example, the stereotype that gay men are “pussies”, implying they are easily frightened and unable or unwilling to “man up”. This stereotype completely neglects to consider the real courage that people often must have when coming out of the closet, for example.

Or let’s take the “quiet Asian” stereotype (one, incidentally, my own FIL has subjected me to repeatedly). In that stereotype, at least how I’ve seen it applied, there is the implicit assumption that because one is not talking, one is not thinking. Besides the fact that not talking might actually mean one is listening, weighing, considering, and learning rather than trying to simply prove one’s point, this stereotype runs in complete contradiction against the other usual Asian stereotype: the high performer. (Though perhaps it doesn’t entirely: that stereotype seems to assume that Asian success is due at least as much to over-driven, hard work and perhaps a predisposition towards the hard maths and sciences – brain as calculator images come to mind – as it does to any actual intelligence.)

So, getting back to the shows, I think in both cases the shows intend the stereotypes to be satirical, but the extent to which they are useful and don’t just further stereotypes, I think depends on whether they make attempts to break down the stereotypes one way or another or tell us something useful about how to deal with them. But maybe that is too high a bar, and then it just pushes the shows to become too ‘preachy’?

Or maybe we as a society are dripping so much in irony the satire loses its effect?

Or maybe we as a society just need to get over ourselves? What do you think?

* There are some fascinating books in political science, psychology and in the mainstream (for example, Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell) that suggests that the way the human mind works, in seeking out patterns (which arguably is partly responsible for our ability to create stereotypes) can actually be beneficial in a lot of ways. Unfortunately, I don’t have the space to address this point much here.