About a year ago, my son got hooked on Disney Jr. At the time, I thought it was ok. It didn’t have commercials (oh, I was so naive) and the shows weren’t awful. We got into a really bad habit when I was pregnant and exhausted for 10 months straight, of him watching tv while I slept on the couch. We’re still trying to wean him off so much tv, with varying degrees of success.

But back to the Disney channel. Now I have a different opinion about it. For one thing, there may not be commercials, per se, but it most certainly has advertising. And it’s all for Disney. As far as I can tell they have built this whole channel just to create a rapt audience to sell their products to. My son has started to say, “Can we go to Disney World? It’s where dreams come alive.” When I stopped gagging and gasping, we talked about how sneaky advertising can be. He was already familiar with commercials, from our watching the Food Network, but the Disney ads aren’t identifiable as commercials. And with all the movie and toy tie-ins, it’s nearly impossible to distinguish between content and advertising. (Of course, with all the product placement, the Food Network is almost as bad, but it has other benefits, which I’ll get to later.)

And what about the content? I’m just beginning to notice the lack of girls. I haven’t done painstaking research, but that’s my general impression. There is Handy Manny where the female character owns the Hardware Store that supplies the star, Handy Manny (a step in the right direction at least?). There is Jake and the Neverland Pirates, which I confess I haven’t actually watched much of. I think one of Jake’s band of friends is a girl. There is Special Agent Oso, who’s a pretty dumb bear who wouldn’t be a quarter as successful at solving problems without his Palm Pilot, who I think is kind of female. I think my son even recently said something about girls not being heroes. It was good he said it, because it meant we could talk about it.

The channel has just started a new show called Tinkerbell, which I confess I haven’t watched, and they play the new Strawberry Shortcake, which is all about managing feelings and making people feel good while carrying on a gendered business like a hair salon, dance studio, clothing boutique, cafe or general store. The only non-gendered business, run by Blueberry Muffin, is a bookstore. There are no boys there, as far as I can tell, except maybe for a Berrykin? (Also, when did Strawberry Shortcake stop farming and move to Berry Bitty City to open a cafe??? Strawberry Shortcake when I was a kid, was awesome, with boys AND girls AND villains, all with brilliant colours and names. It may have been created to sell toys but at least it had good stories and characters. Now it’s all watered down and every episode has a MESSAGE. But that’s another issue. Ok, but before I move on… Seriously, check out the difference between the 80s Strawberry Shortcake and the current one:

Original

New (and improved???)

The original one looks like a chubby, fun-spirited girl with a cat. The new one is a teenager who lost the pantaloons and baby fat and got some salon-styled hair. And check out her dainty, manicured hands. You do the math. But now back to what this post was REALLY supposed to be about.)

My son is most fond of the Imagination Movers at the  moment. I thought this was great. They solve problems with imagination and music. They have a song about brainstorming. Surely this is good stuff. But last week it struck me: the Imagination Movers are all (white) men. There is only one regular woman on the show. Nina is their neighbour and she’s apparently a photographer for the local paper. Although I think she helps them brainstorm ideas and solve problems, she doesn’t get to wear coveralls like the men. No, she wears only pink or red skirts. I really want to like them, especially after reading this background, but why can’t they have a woman wearing coveralls? My son tells me it’s because she’s not part of their company. But why not? It’s a glaring oversight.

Yesterday, one of my twitter friends linked to this video. (Let’s hope it plays here.)

This is a great video. Except for one thing: it points out how only skinny girls (and women for that matter – except for Molly, on Mike and Molly, both of whom are currently on diets I think) are allowed on tv, but the video itself shows only slim girls. So we still don’t see any chubby girls. (And while I’m on the topic, I really hate the term overweight, because it’s relative. I prefer to try to reappropriate the word ‘fat’ as a value-neutral, descriptive adjective rather than a moralizing, often seen as self-hating word. But I’ll live with chubby, big or ‘of size’ over overweight any day. But I guess that’s another post too.)

My son and I often sometimes watch the Food Network together. It’s always been the only thing I like watching that seems innocuous enough to have my child in the room at the same time and then he started getting into it. We tend to watch more of the cooking competitions now (Chopped, Top Chef, Next Iron Chef) although we also adore Pitchin’ In with Lynn Crawford and enjoy Glutton for Punishment with Bob Blumer. Because there are so many commercials, we started talking about why they’re made and how they try to make us want to buy things. We’ve started to ask what we’re being sold.

But I’m realizing the programming isn’t just vapid, lazy-me time. What’s interesting to me, now, is that women may not always be represented in the same numbers as men on the shows, but the people on the shows always talk about that subject. When Chef Lynn is on a shrimp-fishing boat for a few days with a group of men, she likens the experience to proving herself in the man’s world of professional kitchens. (Also, what is UP with that? A woman’s stereotypical place is in the kitchen — as long as it’s unpaid work for her family. But as soon as it becomes paid work, it’s a man’s world?) The female contestants on Top Chef talk about how there are only three women in the show, or they’re the last woman left. When one of the contestants on Top Chef Just Desserts insulted another contestant by calling him a girl (which they didn’t bleep out, strangely), I talked to my son about it , and we wondered why it might be an insult to be called a girl when there’s nothing wrong with being a girl.

There are also fat people on the Food Network, and it’s rarely a topic for discussion. They’re just there, doing what they’re passionate about. That’s kind of revolutionary, isn’t it? I’m starting to wonder if the Food Network is the most feminist, most fat-positive tv I can expose my son to.

So what about you? What (if any) tv shows do you let your ids watch? What (of any) conversations do you have about the shows? Do you care or notice or talk about how narrow the apparent options are for boys and girls?