You know you're old if you laugh at Tom & Jerry...

No, this blog is not about whether I find Tom & Jerry humorous or not, but I had the opportunity to see this show after a very very very long time over spring break, and it kind of got me thinking. With all of this talk about gender and portrayal of males and females in television and the media, it was no surprise that I have been noticing a lot more messages in the media than there appears to be. On this one particular episode of Tom & Jerry, Tom had the upperhand on Jerry and they had made a mess in the refrigerator, and Tom put Jerry in and closed the door and ran away just before the owner of the house came down. She opened the refrigerator, and much to her surprise, she found a mouse and screamed, jumped on a stool, and pulled up like 10 different undergarments before her whole skirt was up. She called on Tom to come and get the mouse and while he was chasing Jerry he knocked over the stool with her on it and she got up and said "This is no place for a lady!" and walked out of the room. There are more obvious messages about how this show views females and how they should behave with the owner's comment, suggesting that women shouldn't take part in man's business. Also, going back to the article "Beauty and the Patriarchal Beast," before this particular scene in the episode, the owner is yelling at Tom that he better not be messing up anything or eating any food out of the refrigerator. Yet, when there is a mouse in the refrigerator (which Tom put there in the first place) all of this is forgiven and he is actually called on to help. In all of the Tom & Jerry episodes Tom is always threatened to get kicked out and a couple of times he actually does get kicked out...yet he always seems to be there in time for the next episode. Perhaps this "Beauty and the Beast" trend that the analysts found is not so new after all...