Cartoons

It was a joyful day in the Bon household when the littlest Bon discovered SpongeBob. I think responsible parents bemoan the advent of SpongeBob and all the commensurate gross out obnoxiousness. But I was thrilled to be, at long last, at the end of the screeching aural assault that was Dora the Explorer. I know we're supposed to love her and her sensible shorts, if only she hadn't YELLED EVERY FUCKING THING SHE SAID.

I've blogged elsewhere about my enthusiasm for SpongeBob, but the time came when my SpongeBob passion began to wane. Serendipitously, this was around the point that Laney discovered Phineas and Ferb which hit all my parenting pleasure centers. I loved the way it celebrated these two weird boys and their brains and creativity and odd implacability. And together we watched the genuinely hilarious Phineas and Ferb together until one day it started to tweak at me that the wonderfulness of these boys stands out in relief to their sister, Candace, who is shrill, easily freaked out, and passionate only about her boyfriend (who is also oddly implacable). Candace gets punished for her failure to be as wonderful as the boys to a degree that I started to feel uncomfortable with. Seriously, she takes a startling amount of abuse.

And right as I started to get worried about Phineas and Ferb, Laney became fiercely into classic cartoons; largely, The Jetsons and Looney Toons. I loved it because I thought it would be super fun to revisit my childhood cartoons with my kid. But, you guys, The Jetsons is freaking me out. It's like a cartoon version of Don and Betty Draper, as seen from Don's P.O.V. Women are ridiculous and only have value by merit of their fuckability (sorry to be so crass when we're talking cartoons, but honestly...). I imagine that when the cartoon cameras move away from our exhausted, emaciated 33 year old mother of two (one of whom is meant to be 16 and so, you know, do the math), she's pounding gin straight from the bottle and pondering how many sleeping pills it would take to end the misery. Also, she's a shit driver. Because on The Jetsons, all women are shit drivers even though it's the men in their stupid flying cars who don't just fly ABOVE the fucking traffic jam. God.

On Loony Toons, sometimes women show up. Daffy Duck is married to an emasculating bitch. There's that pretty French cat that Pepe Le Pew gets all rapey at. There are the desperate, man hungry chickens aflutter over Foghorn Leghorn. They will turn into emasculating bitches as soon as they become wives. There's that green witch who eats children. The only likable female in Loony Toons is Bugs in drag.

Unless the Road Runner is a girl. Is she supposed to be a girl? I was never sure. And that might be on point.

All of this has made me wonder about the casual misogyny we ingested as children back in the old days when cartoons were on only one morning a week. And makes me want to turn a more critical eye to the stuff my daughter is watching. I'm honestly not sure if I ought to be concerned about the extreme punishment that Candace Flynn-Fletcher undergoes while her brothers blithely ignore it. I doubt that it's intended to be misogynist. But I also doubt that Daffy Duck's emasculating bitch of a wife was meant to be either. Misogyny is rarely something that's intended, it's just something that is.

The heart of feminism (just as the heart of all critical thought) is to question assumptions. This is sometimes hard since assumptions are things that, you know, you assume and so don't necessarily think to question. Once things have grown stale and dusty we find we can see the bullshit of the old days more easily. But I never thought about Pepe Le Pew's extremely rapey behavior when I was a kid. I thought that was just how men acted who really liked women.

And that, retroactively, freaks me out as a parent.