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 always hated Joey's predatory nature...and how he once spoke of pulling a "hot single Mom"

We never saw her...she never impacted the stry at all that episode or after...so why was her status as a parent mentioned? Bugged the HELL out of me.

different- Monica's 'inhospitable uterus' is likely to have been age related. But no-one mentioned that fertility declines with age when they talked her out of becoming a single Mum at 28. It sent out the message that becoming a single mother is a bad thing which is anti-feminist.

thevery- yes and there was the party episode where joey's date brought her kids along and he wasn't happy about that.

Rossetti- thank you

Didn't she dump them with him and leave on anoher date? No...that was Ross....he met a single Mother and wanted to date her...then she came round, left her kids and went out....he'd misunderstood.

likely, you know that for sure, do you?

It could be cause by the cervical mucus, scar tissue, endometriosis etc..

I think you are just finding things to complain about. The program was supposed to be light entertainment, not a detailed account of how to live your life. And quite honestly, if people really believe these shows and think they are an accurate reflection of real life they are stupid!

I loved Friends when I was a teenager. Thought it was brilliant.
I'm shocked now (before reading this thread) when I consider how it moulded by idea of sex and relationships. I remember the episode when Rachel got pregnant, Ross was bemoaning to Joey that he hadn't had sex in 6 months. Shock horror.

And then there was the fact that they were constantly (ok maybe not Chandler) meeting strangers who they found attracted, exchanging very few words and going on dates with them. As a naive teen I thought this seemed perfectly normal and would be how I would meet guys

There's actually so much wrong with that show, all 10 seasons of it that I can't watch it the same way again.

And quite honestly, if people watch these shows & really believe and think they are an accurate reflection of real life they are stupid!

differentname, surely the point is that, rather than thinking that the show represents real life, several people on this thread have posted that they didn't realise that so many stereotypes and anti feminist elements the show contained.

The fact that so many of us watched and enjoyed the show and didn't think to challenge these elements of it shows how pedestrian that anti feminist angle is.

xposts with different

What a charming post it was, too.

Right just to get the pedanty bits out of the way first...

• the Chandler/Monica adoption bit - adoption is a lot more common in the US than it is in the UK, probably because of the whole anti-abortion issue
• The apartments were rent controlled, plus I think Chandler earned quite a lot and subsidised Joey

I'm a bit torn about the whole "Ross moving to Paris" thing, because he couldn't really, has he has Ben.

I do think Ross got a bit weird towards the end though, didn't he have some kind of nervous breakdown in one series?

I'm not sure what I think, on one hand yes it was sexist but on the other hand I think if they had made it too consciously un-sexist it wouldn't have seemed true to life (eg. all the women in traditionally male jobs). Am I making sense?

It's not rl, it's not a reflection of rl, but when you look back at the things that seemed to so roundly capture the imagination of a generation, I think it's important to question how and why we laughed at it, what in it appealed to us and how ingrained some motifs were at the time (are still).

Somebody else has mentioned Ross's complaints about not having had sex for a while when Emma is conceived. Well take that angle. There's another throwaway line when Rachel is upset after her father's heart attack where Ross turns her down and says 'I haven't had sex for months, I should get a medal for that'. Cue laughter. Well it's not funny in the slightest. Protecting the feelings and vulnerability of his friend after her father has a serious heart attack is reduced down to 'aren't I wonderfully restrained, not giving into the male urge'. It's not funny but Friends did create characters that highlighted a dichotomy between 'I'm misogynistic' and 'I'm funny and attractive and therefore I can do what I want'. It's interesting. Isn't it? I think it is. It played on stereotypes and easily sold itself in that way. And I laughed. Still do. Tells me a lot about me actually.

YANBU at all - it was also quite xenophobic, so many of the "foreigners" were baddies - that Italian guy dating Rachel, Ross' unreasonable wife Emily, the Latino poet who Monica dated, they made fun of S American soaps - glad you started this thread darlene.

Also, Ross and Rachel's baby was hardly ever seen,.

Acksherley,
I think that Joey was put there as a distraction - his sexist/dim/macho shtick was so full-on that he made the other characters look quite well-rounded/sympathetic/reasonable.
Well that's my excuse anyway!

Good point SoH re the Attractiveness=license aspect.

have thought of more:

• the one where rachel is so much of a 'princess' that she doesn't know how to use a washing machine so Ross (her knight in shining armour, who finds her ignornace endearing rather than inept) has to show her.
• Ross making the list about rachel and it being ok for him to perve on her dancing naked
• the 'breastmilk is weird/icky/bad' tone of the babysitting ben episode
• the 'hug and roll' to get rid of a clingy woman in bed
• where chandler starts 'acting like a women' (undertone=that is a bad thing) when he listens to a hypnosis tape
• Their hobbies/interests are quite gender stereotyped eg monica and the doll's house, cooking, baking, weddings, Ross and dinosaurs, rocks, space, Rachel and shopping, reading vogue, chandler and porn and computers, Joey and eating lots of meat, Phoebe and singing, candles, animal rights.
• Where Joey is ballroom dancing and automatically turns down a date with someone purely because she is fat
• Joey is ridiculed for liking a 'woman's' bag (it wasnt)
• the playboy joke (normalising playboy)
• in 'the one that could have been' Ross talks about pestering Carol for sex when she clearly doesn't want to. Coerced sex is rape but he is portrayed as a 'victim' of a 'frigid' wife. In this episode there is also the suggestion that Joey is a 'good guy' for not 'taking advantage' ie raping rachel when she passes out on his couch. It is painted that it would have been reasonable and acceptable for him to have done that ie raped her! Also if Monica was still fat then she is a 30yo virgin because of course no-one wants to sleep with a fat girl! WTF!
• rachel hires tag because she fancies him and breaks sex discrimination in employment laws by not hiring the more capable woman. There is an insinuation that she could sleep her way to the top of Ralph Lauren.
• it is ok for Ross and Chandler to be leering over Denise Richards
• Chandler is ridiculed for being 'like a woman' by enjoying a bath (undertone that is is bad for men to enjoy 'feminine' thing)
• when they have a baby shower for Rachel and she doesn't know what anything is, but it's ok because Ross her knight in shining armour (yet again!) swoops in because 'he knows best' and that he will be more help than her Mum (yeah, right!)
• it is painted as 'unreasonable' for Rachel to not want Ross to date anyone else when she is in the later stages of pregnancy

I think it was supposed to be like that though - they weren't characters, so much as caricatures. Which is OK - I don't think anyone watching it really mistook it for anything really resembling real life???

No one thought they were watching a documentary, of course not.

But the comedy wasn't satirical either.

It's a very insidious type of sexism - making it okay because it's funny.

And as another feminist who chortled her way through much of Friends the sexism didn't especially occur to me either.

All very normalised.

Which is rather sinister, when you start to think about it.

Different- the causes of 'inhospitable uterus' you mention are associated with age so my point still holds that she probably missed her chance to get pregnant when she was 28.

Also, read my previous post. Friends had a huge impact on people's REAL LIFE habits eg the HAIR. You'd have to have been blind in the 90s not to have noticed that. Lots of people are stupid, and this show will normalise anti-feminism for them and lots of not so stupid people.

bucaneve- yes there are significant cultural differences between the UK and US, adoption/abortion being one. It is telling that despite all the pregnancies the 'abortion' word is never used. Too much of a political hot potato over there. As for adoption I think it's very sad that the lack of a welfare system in America means that women like that birth mum are forced into giving their babies up, to the convenience of rich couples like M&C.

The show 'Roseanne' was deliberatly feminist and had higher viewer figures than Friends. The 'commercial' excuse for sexism doesn't exist. It is just lazy. In 50 years we will be embarassed to tell out grandchildren we watched and enjoyed Friends. I think it will date very badly.

A really interesting thread....

Not a feminist point but if anyone has any doubt about the cultural influence of friends, just think about some of the following -

The way it influenced the cadences of peoples speech "could I BE wearing any more clothes?" etc

The phrases that became ingrained into our vocabulary from it -
Going commando, on a break,

Am sure there are more....?

Wow. Really really interesting thread. Always thought Ross was such a controlling weirdo.

The one that I always shout at if I catch it on, although don't know if it is anti-feminist/relevant here, is Phoebe giving birth vaginally and easily to triplets. Is that at all likely? Genuine question.

re. the talking MOnica out of single-parenthood - it is Joey who is key in this. He tells her he's always imagined her married to a big blonde guy named Hoight (sp?) who will wrap the kids up in a big towel when they come out of their own pool. So it's basically because of a spurious daydream by Joey that she cans the idea - a daydream of a physically imposing but somewhat shadowy bloke who can wrap up two kids at once with his massive arms. Nice.

Interesting thread, I've lurked here but never posted before.

When Phoebe was having the triplets Chandler mocked a male nurse who was interested in Monica for being girly. The nurse however retaliated that he'd been a nurse in the Gulf war and was only doing it to put himself through medical training. He couldn't possibly just be an ordinary male nurse, he had to be on his way to being a doctor, totally reinforcing the stereotype.

Stewie, Chandler dates a woman with one leg. Comically, Joey turns out once to have burned an earlier prosthesis at an earlier date.