Ways the TV series 'Friends' was anti-feminist

[darleneoconnor]

comes from another thread

-There are lots of references to porn, which totally normalises it

• The women are unhealthily skinny
• The 'fat Monica' running joke
• Joey's womanising
• Phoebe being used as a womb for hire
• Monica was riddiculed for dating someone 7 years younger than her but it was ok for Ross to date someone 10 years younger then him
• All the girls' desire to get married (especially Monica's bridzillaness), as opposed to the boys
• the anti-single mother rant Monica had at her wedding
• Rachel's birth was very medicalised and disempowering (but in context of USA healthcare system I suppose)
• Chandler having to be 'taught' how to have a relationship
• Monicas getting slagged off for having 'lots' of lovers
• In the episode where Rachel, Phoebe and Joey make an issue of earning less than the others no-one mentions the gender split
• They do quite gender-specific jobs, Monica/cooking, Joey/acting (which is 2/3 male), Ross/Paleontologist, Phoebe/massuese, Rachel/waitress/fashion buyer, Chandler/IT(?)
• they get a stripper for a stag do then glamourise it by her saying how well she is paid
• Ross's homophobia and his lack of equal parenting of his child
• Monica's obsession with cleaning
• the rich Monica and Chandler adopting the babies of someone too poor to keep them herself
• Chandler pretending to watch tv so he doesn't have to do his fair share of the thanksgiving cooking
• The football game where Rachel is a 'useless' girl, Phoebe flashes her breasts to win a point and Monica is ridiculed for being as competitive as the boys

I'm sure there's more...

I agree with most of this but am unsure as to what the problem is with Monica and Chandler adopting Erica's baby?

And we do have a welfare system.

I see. Sort of? Well. Not really

I mean, I understand that it's different but I don't see how the system is bad or wrong.

Coherent argument there Steve.

Steve, I feel you may have a point, perhaps you'd like to elaborate? We can help you with the longer words (like 'wheelbarrow')

I loved Susan, she had the measure of whiny, controlling Ross from the beginning.

However my greatest love was Janice. Far too good for Chandler IMO.

The football game was FANTASTIC!

Marking place

Haven't seen the Marking Place episode. (?)

I remember reading an article about the scriptwriting team became more male-dominated and traditional in their outlook as time went on, which would explain the change in their attitudes.

At the beginning it took quite a feminist/modern approach to Monica and Rachel's sex lives (eg. fighting over condoms in the loo, Monica sleeping with Paul the Wine Guy) but then reverted back into the typical sexist tropes (normalization of porn, chandler being an emotional illiterate).

Sometimes I feel like the scriptwriters had a copy of "Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus" at their table as they used all the annoying stereotypes promoted by that shitty book.

Ooooh the bit that annoyed me the most was when they had the poker game. Rachel was portrayed as a right princess whilst Ross was the poor lovelorn self-sacrificing hero that "let" her think she'd won and prance about like a diva. Vomit...

The poker game episode was brilliant!

Oh, happy anniversary, thread!

Gosh, I will look at friends in a different way now. Although I love the show. I think the buying the baby off the single mum thing has a moralistic message and is indicative that life is much harder for a single mum in the USA than in the UK.

Yeah I loved the poker game episode too. There were so many things about Friends that was good, feminist even, but then so many pernicious status quo stereotypes...

I think that's how it happens, mix it all up and it makes it harder to deconstruct.

Has anyone seen "Happy Endings" BTW? That's really funny, a bit like Friends. It has an element of sexual stereotyping but then the characters are far more complex than in Friends and the female characters at least get their share of the funny lines.

I do think an awful lot of the childish/sexist stuff was poking fun at it though. Like a less extreme version of 'Men Behaving Badly' which had the clue in the title!
I think it was a mixed bag - good and bad influences really.
Some of your points like Monica - cooking as a career don't really work as most top chefs are in fact male and it is a good role model to see a woman in this position! A few other points are slightly dodgy too...but I think you may be half-right!

I don't think it's still the case that 'most top chefs are male'.There's a Bistro near us and it's a woman who does the cooking!

I think more top chefs are male than female - women seem to be 'cooks' (Nigella, Rachel Khoo, Lorraine Pascale) who like to bake and feed their families, whilst the cheffier types (Jamie, Gordon Ramsay, Heston) are blokes.

Monica cooking for a living could be read as a good role model, but I think it's problematized by the fact that it also ties in with her past obesity, and her obsessive desire to feed and to host. And as she says to reassure Chandler, 'just so you know, it goes 'you' [up here in importance], 'job' [down there in importance]'.

"I understand why analysis of real life situations is necessary, light entertainment is just that."

But entertainment, unless it is meant to be satirical and undermining to the status quo (and god knows Friends wasn't that!), reflects the society we live in. If feminists dislike the way society is and want it to change, they have to question anything that unquestioningly and approvingly portrays the aspects of society they object to. And being 'funny' (and I debate whether Friends was funny anyway) doesn't justify it.

Light entertainment is a real life situation. It comes out of real life, and its in real life, and its a part of society that we should explore and engage with and discuss. That doesn't stop anyone else from just watching and laughing without thinking, though.

I kept laughing when I was watching Friends (particularly 'the one with Joey's new brain') so it must have been funny,mustn't it?

I thought the stuff to do with the Monica/Chandler marriage was more to do with poking fun at heteronormative expectations and how they struggled to fit in with some of them.

Yes,that was 'the one with the unfulfilled heteronormative expectations' episode.

Ethelb, hmmm in a way a lot of it was poking fun at patriarchal stuff but at the same time perpetuating it.

One of the main themes was how the men were made fun of whenever they did something "girly". Even the women joined in with their "grow a pair" comments. It showed the boys as being more complex than mere bloke stereotypes but at the same time kept within a firm patriarchal "girly is bad" narrative.

Ok I admit. I watched it waaaayyy too much!