Gender In The Golden Girls

Focusing on the episodes at hand, an emphasis will be placed on the dialogue for the given characters. What key words or lines stand out or allude to a particular character’s sex life? Examination of the character’s body language will be conducted to see if this reveals anything about their sexual arousal. Do they present actions that allude to them feeling sexual? Following up on that, examining the insight will be gained from analyzing the tone of scenes where sex is being discussed or alluded to. What are the characters connotatively trying to convey? What is being emphasized and what is not being emphasized? Are the four main characters perceived as having the power pertaining to sex? Lastly, the paper will analyze how the characters react

All three episodes examined displayed 4 women, over the age of 50, living vibrant lives after marriage and experiencing sexual encounters. These three episodes all confronted the dominant ideology, presented by the media, that women over the age of 50 are not sexual beings. They talked about sex. They joked about sex. They chased sex. And most importantly, they had sex. Surprisingly, through the analysis, the episodes depicted they women as feminists even if it were not explicitly said. These women were not the object of any man. Well, men wanted them, but it was they who became the active person and it was the men who were shown as passive. Mulvey (270) writes that the “male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure” and the dominant ideology depicts that to be true. The series flipped that notion on its head and it was these 4 female characters were the ones who placed a gaze onto men and projected their fantasies. The women were in control. Expanding on this study, attention and analyzation could be focused on episodes that do not feature a plot central to a sexual theme or one of the characters dealing with a relationship with a male. In these episodes, is the topic of sex still heavily present? Also, to expand the study, episodes where the series tackles serious issues could be looked at. In these episodes, are the women presented as objects as less sexual or do they conform more to the dominant ideology? Those are at least two areas to analyze and see if the study would present any new changes. In accordance with this study, the series did not conform to ageist dominant ideology but instead challenged it in order to showcase feminist women in the face of