Ricky's Effect On Women

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Since its origins, television has always provided stories for audiences to both enjoy and learn from. From news broadcasts to the Discovery Channel, television attempts to display the real world’s stories as much as fictional ones, sometimes narrating real experiences through imaginary characters and storylines. However, this commonly means that these stories are depicted through antagonizing or ignorant means, mainly for the specific stories certain demographics want to watch to increase revenue. Conversely, this meant placing female characters in conventional roles for women such as caretakers or dedicated housewives would not change until society allowed women to explore different hobbies and careers. Television may showcase societal issues, …show more content…

When an episode of the famed television series explored Lucy sharing her passions of getting a job in entertainment like her husband, it provided viewers with the inevitable conclusion of Ricky and his tough nature softening for Lucy’s charisma. However, audiences today view Ricky’s behaviour as not just dismissive, but abusive. When Lucy initially mentions her desires of performing with Ricky on stage, he immediately rejects the idea by reasoning that she is too overweight, and her only talents are being a wife and mother (Kaaronen, 2024, p.17). Comparably, Mad Men, a show set during I Love Lucy’s time, provided audiences with a decade worth of episodes. Contrarily, this decade saw society birth a fourth wave of feminism, which interfered with the stories Mad Men was producing weekly. The main praise for the show is its dedication and accurate representation of the title era’s cut-throat advertising business, as well as unfortunately, the extreme subordination of women. In fact, similarly to the real lives of women living in the Mad Men era, the series’ female characters had little to no storylines of their own, as they commonly served as the male character’s …show more content…

The franchise’s New York spinoff featured Betheny Frankel, a fan favourite who capitalized on her fame to release a line of cocktails she named Skinnygirl. This proved to be only the beginning of her career as an entrepreneur, as the third highest retailing whiskey company in the United States, Jim Beam bought her company. While this proves that women and housewives can achieve success outside of the private sphere, Frankel has since become the target of critiques that claim herself and her brand as underserving of such accomplishments because it was built off of the owner’s own reputation (Nayar, 2015, p.10). However, Nayar (2015, p.5) insists that such negative responses are rooted from the stereotype reality television has received since the peak of its popularity in the two-thousands, stating that it has accentuated issues normally associated with women and placed them into a commercial viewpoint. Ferrucci et al. (2014) affirm, dominant female voices and stories are not prominent in media because audiences prefer female characters to be passive, overemotional, and reliant on men to fulfill all their needs. Frankel’s popularity, originating from a popular reality program centered on traditional and archetypal traits and roles for a woman to possess, aids the argument that Skinnygirl should not be considered earnest, as factors of

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