Respect my Authorita: South Park and Gender roles.

  

Media culture plays a large part in the way we think of gender and class. What is thought of as “proper gender roles” within a nuclear family is largely due to the portrayal of families in the media. The ideal is considered to be the male as the head of the household, with the stay at home wife and homemaker. Father knows best, The Dick Van Dyke show and Leave it to Beaver are examples of the ideal patriarchy within the American family. In the 1960s and extending into today, gender and class became more intertwined. More affluent men were being shown as successful and happy, while working class men are shown as a caricature of cartoonish idiocy. There was an emergence of lower class men being portrayed as lazy and/or uneducated, and the rhetoric behind this character development suggests that the poor are poor because of their own shortcomings and decisions. In America there is the belief that there is social mobility and Americans can better themselves through hard work and persistence. Beyond the satire of the bumbling working class father figure, the reality of poverty and the increasing wealth gap are ignored as economic factors affecting real Americans status in life.

                In class we have been focusing on sitcoms and the changing male gender roles within them. I personally don’t like sitcoms, I find laugh tracks extremely cheesy and offensive to the intellect of the audience (I don’t need to be told when to laugh, thank you). In the spirit of sitcom hatred I have decided to look at male gender and class roles within cartoons, more specifically, South Park.

                “Poor” and working class Americans in shows tend to be employed in blue collar occupations. Peter Griffin, for example, embodies the clumsy stupid working class man who has a factory job at a toy manufacturing plant. He is constantly messing up, and after Opie (obviously mentally handicapped employee) is put in charge of training Peter, thus making the suggestion that Peter is so dumb a retard could do his job. Homer Simpson is another example of the buffoon like working class male character. Both are constantly getting hired, and fired, job stability really isn’t their thing.

                South Park manages to show representations of all classes, and the heads of all the families in the show are part of different social classes. Randy Marsh is the epitome of the middle class working father. He works in a semi-blue collar job as a geologist, while not being very smart in most situations. Kyle’s dad, Gerald Broflovski, is a very successful lawyer, which is also in contrast to Kenny’s dad, who is a raging alcoholic with way too many children. Alternately Cartman, who doesn’t have a dad at all (except for a hermaphrodite mom), may be viewed as the “product” of a single parent household: loud, fat, and always in trouble. While South Park is obviously mocking gender and class roles, the fear of children becoming incompliant due to a lack of father figure is embodied in Cartman, and is a general fear expressed in a society with an increasing number of single parent households. I don’t think mothers in the real world actually worry about their children becoming Cartman. Personally, I have never heard anyone say “Oh my God I need a man because my child might turn out like Cartman,” however his character may play on the fears of society as to the consequences of raising a child without a dominant male figure in their life.

Cartman getting a lesson in male dominance

                Both Peter and Randy also have to deal with the issue of raising a teenage daughter (that they may or may not hate). On several occasions Randy and Peter don’t know how to deal with their teenage daughter (who does?), and they don’t seem to be very loving towards them either way. Both characters appear clueless when dealing with females, whether they are their daughter or not. The mothers are expected to deal with their daughters, while the fathers deal with their sons. Also it is worth noting that all the women in South Park are stay at home mothers, with the exception of Cartman's mom, who has made a career being on the cover of “Crackwhore Magazine”, although arguably this might not be considered gainful employment.

                The father-son relationship is also emphasized in South Park. Traditionally boys are more “wanted” then girls and the relationships between the father figures and their children reflect that. Randy is constantly trying to be cool to his son. Back in the day, fathers and sons were shown fishing and hunting; in South Park, their father-son activities include World of Warcraft and boy bands, either way this shows the ideal bond between father and son. The male figures in South Park are also responsible for discussing sexuality with their sons (as shown in the Backdoor sluts 9 episode), while women’s sexuality isn’t directly addressed until the “Eat, Pray, Queef” episode, which didn’t air until season 13 episode 4.

World of Warcraft bonding 

                Finally, it is considered the role of the male to make decisions that make their family more “ideal”. One could argue that increasingly it is women who make these decisions, however within the media women are not portrayed as such. Since male gender roles in the media is what I’m writing about, the reality of the increasing power of women in the household is a moot point. This is also an example of how the media does not always reflect life in the real world. An example of Randy trying to build the ideal family is in the episode “All About the Mormons.” When the Marshes have dinner with Stan's new friends family, Randy wants to look good compared to the “perfect” Mormon family they are dining with. He makes sure his family looks nice and plays nice, and even finds himself embarrassed when Stan calls him out on this fact at dinner. Another character, Kenny’s mom, is also constantly nagging her husband over money, presumably because she also wants to live the “American dream.” Kenny’s dad, as a raging alcoholic, doesn’t ever seem to be able to provide for his family in a non-sketchy way.  In contrast Gerald Broflovski is able to better his family because he is considered an affluent character. He starts taking on sexual harassment lawsuits in public schools, and as a result is able to build an even bigger and bigger house, albeit at the expense of others (Gerald is pretty much the 1% of South Park). This goes back to Kenny’s dad being portrayed as poor because of his drinking and poor work ethic, whereas Gerald is educated and able to get ahead in life. Stan’s dad just never knows what’s going on and falls somewhere in the middle.

Kenny's dad vs. Kyle's dad 

                Despite the fact that Randy and Sharon Marsh are based on Trey Parkers parents Randy and Sharon, the plotlines in South Park are not fully representative of American life, but it is a good example of gender and class roles and their portrayal in the T.V. media.