Last season, I wrote about how Heroes, an awesome show in so many respects, could stand to work on its portrayal of women in big ways. I had heard they were paying some attention to the common criticism of gender imbalance and they’ve responded this season by adding some female characters. They’ve made one major improvement that I’ll talk about in a post tomorrow, but there is a long list of their continued shortcomings (I’m also a few episodes behind, … READ MORE

A couple of weeks ago, on this thread, I mentioned that men are constantly portrayed as competing for women in a way that makes the woman essentially irrelevant. We use game metaphors to describe the system, but the winner and loser–the agents of participation–are always just the men. The women, I said, are the ball, the object you score with.

How I Met Your Mother decided to construct an entire episode (”The Belt”) around proving this point for me, throwing in … READ MORE

Having watched the first couple of episodes of Chuck, for the most part, I’m pretty impressed. It’s a fun show, with a neat concept–the basic premise of it is that a supremely regular guy, a somewhat underachieving geek, suddenly finds himself in possession of all of the state secrets anyone could ever want. It’s an unsubtle male-geek fantasy fulfillment show, creating a set of circumstances that place a guy they relate to in the role of video-game style hero. A … READ MORE

The original mission of The Hathor Legacy was to demonstrate that plenty of people want to see better portrayals of women and women’s issues in the media. We have a few voices here, but to help turn up the volume, we have a few announcements.

First, head on over to our new links site, Celluloid Sally’s (where all the good women characters hang after work). We’re going to be collecting any links we find that help to make the point that … READ MORE

I’ve been extremely disappointed with the Grey’s Anatomy spinoff, Private Practice for a number of reasons, but I crossed over to ‘pissed off’ at the underlying message of the ‘patient of the week’ story in last week’s episode.

Brief summary, spoilers included: After a couple discovers that their baby girl, a few months old, is sick with a genetic illness, a series of highly improbable, only on television events reveal that she was switched at birth. The parents of the … READ MORE

I really feel like Brothers & Sisters managed to start on a feminist high note with this year’s season premiere. The ‘mother’ and ‘wife’ status issues, and the identity questions women have with respect to family roles, have always been a theme on the show, though I’ve felt that they haven’t always been the best at dealing with them thoughtfully. But this episode highlights each of the women feeling torn and constrained by roles, and the ways the identities are … READ MORE

I’ve been meaning to write about this episode for a while, and given that MaggieCat’s just given an overview of the character, now is as good a time as any.

As MaggieCat’s article suggests, Lyla Garrity becomes an extremely complex character in ways that my reduced expectations of television shows have come to see as rather unique. Being punished for sexual choices is different for girls, and this show gets that. While both Lyla and Tim are punished, made aware of … READ MORE

The pilot of Gossip Girl contains an attempted rape scene full of the standard problems with the portrayal of sexual violence on TV. By coincidence, immediately after watching this episode, I finally got around to watching the episode of Friday Night Lights containing the attempted rape scene (discussed by MaggieCat here and here). The contrast between the two really highlights a lot of what many of us have been trying to say about the acceptable vs. unacceptable ways to write … READ MORE

I initiated this series back in August, (see intro here) but the real world got in the way of my ability to continue it. The comments were packed with good examples of this kind of character, many from shows I haven’t watched, and which actually included very few of the ones I was going to highlight.

I both love Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and fully admit that the show had serious shortcomings from a feminist perspective. While it was far from … READ MORE

Anyone who’s spent more than 30 seconds publicly identifying as a feminist has gotten into a conversation with someone expressing the thought “But what about the men?” The television/media geek version is “There are no good male role models on television, either” (citations to prove this point include Homer Simpson, Al Bundy, and Everybody Loves Raymond in the “doofus husband” category, and the entire male guest cast of such so-called feminist shows as Sex and the City in the “sex-obsessed … READ MORE