Feminism, Marriage, and What I Learned From Watching Bewitched
We are products of our culture.
I have issues.
In particular, I have issues regarding the male power thing.
Why do men 'run' the world when everyone knows that women are the true creative forces in the universe? It's just like when I was growing up, the typical, garden variety American girl of the sixties.
My entire vision of the male-female relationship was based on the tv show, Bewitched and Samantha's marriage to Darren.
Here, the guy has got a beautiful wife who could have given him absolutely anything in the world; but all he wants is to control her, keep her at home and powerless, deny her a witch's genetic heritage so that he can maintain his status as the power broker in the household.
It's as though Samantha is this intense concentration of creative energy, the prototypical artist, and Darren, a metaphor for linear thought, has to disempower her and force her into manual labor.
Gentle reader, you may be thinking that in the Stevens' household, it was Darren who was the creative force.
After all, he was an advertising executive who created slogans and images for public consumption.
But consumption is the operative word in that statement.
Darren was a prostitute for McMann and Tate, for Larry, for big business in general.
His artistic energy wasn't creative necessarily, but instead was manipulative and, one might go so far as to say, conspiratorial.
The two main questions in any socio-cultural analysis of Bewitched are: why would Darren choose a wife who was such an undeniable source of personal creative and predominantly female power? and why would Samantha kowtow to an uninspired man who had no concept of her need for autonomy and self-expression? Not that this is the place to answer questions as deep as those.
But consider the fact that Endora often referred to Darren as Darwin.
Were the writers of the show implying that, indeed, evolution had propelled women into socio-cultural submission to male power and men into the irrepressible desire to control and repress women even at the expense of never fulfilling their own desires? Or were Larry Tate's constant calls and sleazy attempts 'pimp out' Darren the writers' vision of the Capitalist world, of which Darren was a willing participant, and that world's moral stagnancy which represses all forms of compassion or empathy? Or, finally, were the writers just saying, as I assumed as a child, that husbands can be dicks: Dick York and Dick Sargent?
I have issues.
In particular, I have issues regarding the male power thing.
Why do men 'run' the world when everyone knows that women are the true creative forces in the universe? It's just like when I was growing up, the typical, garden variety American girl of the sixties.
My entire vision of the male-female relationship was based on the tv show, Bewitched and Samantha's marriage to Darren.
Here, the guy has got a beautiful wife who could have given him absolutely anything in the world; but all he wants is to control her, keep her at home and powerless, deny her a witch's genetic heritage so that he can maintain his status as the power broker in the household.
It's as though Samantha is this intense concentration of creative energy, the prototypical artist, and Darren, a metaphor for linear thought, has to disempower her and force her into manual labor.
Gentle reader, you may be thinking that in the Stevens' household, it was Darren who was the creative force.
After all, he was an advertising executive who created slogans and images for public consumption.
But consumption is the operative word in that statement.
Darren was a prostitute for McMann and Tate, for Larry, for big business in general.
His artistic energy wasn't creative necessarily, but instead was manipulative and, one might go so far as to say, conspiratorial.
The two main questions in any socio-cultural analysis of Bewitched are: why would Darren choose a wife who was such an undeniable source of personal creative and predominantly female power? and why would Samantha kowtow to an uninspired man who had no concept of her need for autonomy and self-expression? Not that this is the place to answer questions as deep as those.
But consider the fact that Endora often referred to Darren as Darwin.
Were the writers of the show implying that, indeed, evolution had propelled women into socio-cultural submission to male power and men into the irrepressible desire to control and repress women even at the expense of never fulfilling their own desires? Or were Larry Tate's constant calls and sleazy attempts 'pimp out' Darren the writers' vision of the Capitalist world, of which Darren was a willing participant, and that world's moral stagnancy which represses all forms of compassion or empathy? Or, finally, were the writers just saying, as I assumed as a child, that husbands can be dicks: Dick York and Dick Sargent?