Was the Show I Love Lucy Demeaning Towards Women – Or Did It Help In The End?

Back in the days of TV sit-coms (situational comedies) with a lesson there was Lavern and Shirley, Gilligan’s Island, Brady Bunch, Happy Days and I Love Lucy. These were much different than today’s sit-coms or our hard to figure out reality TV shows (pointless). Some event in the beginning was played out and by the end of the sit-com there was a lesson of what happened to the individuals in the end – usually they made a mistake, a moral error, or stupid move and they paid for it. Okay so, let’s talk.

Gilligan’s Island, which might even be the predecessor to the current reality TV series where people are kicked off the island had some class warfare in it, and lessons of arrogance, hard-headedness, vainness, and other human behavioral attributes considered to be on the negative side of the psychological or social balance sheet.

Another show was I Love Lucy, and in it Lucy Ricardo was a bit of a shallow bubble head and tricky Ricky was demeaning towards women, but in a way being able to laugh at that old show did probably show sexist male behavior as a mean-spirited way to play it, so, I guess in the end it did do some good, sure beats some of the nonsense on TV today – sit-coms, reality TV, etc. – but in the present period we’ve slipped into a bit of a Facebook nation, hopefully we can get beyond the dehumanizing relationships and people in the digital search for self-validation on social networking sites?

Oh, back to the point I’d like to make. By showing both sides of the equation at the extreme, Ricky’s disdain for Lucy’s shenanigans and his male macho belief that men are better than women – along with Lucy’s sneaky maneuvers and gossipy games we saw that these negative personality flaws made their lives tougher, and in the end we saw that they both meant well, but had misunderstood each other, always making up in the end.

Today, these shows would be called sexist, racist, class warfare, age discriminatory – and politically correct groups would scream out, perhaps like they do today with the show Family Guy, even though the show’s producers hammer on each and all stereotypes equally. Things have changed a lot in television over the years – I am not so sure they are for the better. I mention this because it is often evident when we look at people in public mimic some of the garbage we all too often see on TV. Please consider all this and think on it.