Some of you may know that Desperate Housewives is presently one of my favorite TV shows, which is saying a lot considering I haven’t watched TV since I was 8. However, the BF got me hooked on it and as of last night I just finished catching up to all 7 seasons and a gazillion episodes. Something I saw last night troubled me.
There is a neighborhood boy who grew up with a single, alcoholic mom. Understandably, anyone who grows up with a drug-using parent is going to have issues, whether it’s battling depression, being subconsciously drawn to dating alcoholics or drugs, or extremely opposed to them. This boy, as it turns out, grows up to being a raging, girl-strangling serial killer. Now, what are the conclusions we’re supposed to draw from that? Because of his selfish, belittling mom (she regularly mocks him and his self-esteem) this boy grows up into a serial girl-killing monster. Something is not quite right here.
Because oppression exists in the world we cannot blindly go about creating art without being aware of the possibility that we may be perpetuating stereotypes by our work, especially if we are in the oppressor group and talking about the oppressed group. For example, if we are men writing about women. In this episode, the creators of the show perpetuated the stereotype that growing up with a single mom will lead to troubled kids—and not just troubled kids, but a serial killer at that. There is also no mention of the belligerent dad who abandoned them and his responsibility.
I commend DH for trying to show the psychological sources of how we can become who we are by how we grew up. However, we should make sure we are not perpetuating sexist stereotypes by doing so. If they still want to keep the teenage serial killer character in the story an alternative background is to have him grow up with abusive parents, at least that way they are not perpetuating a stereotype of “bad single moms.”
