DVR has allowed me to reconnect with my childhood interest in the Cosby Show and Home Improvement. I think I liked the Cosby Show best because of the laugh track and Home Improvement due to its recognizable running gags. Now I'm hitting them from an older perspective, being a married man with an interest and education in feminism, attributed mainly to my wife's education in Marriage, Family, and Human Development.

Four years ago, I couldn't have told you what feminism is. I could have mentioned something about the women's lib movement of the 70s, my views on Hillary Clinton, or Hollywood's woman's empowerment: all bad examples of feminism. The core ideas of feminism as I perceive them are mutual respect among all human beings as to the abilities of all others. I understand the origins of the ideology's name, but if the term didn't have long pre-existing definition, I'd prefer the term "humanism."

Feminism in me has taken the forms of anti-benevolent sexism, allowing myself to express anger when I feel it, and acknowledging my own shortcomings due to cultural projections onto my personality. Benevolent sexism is by far the enemy with which I am most enraged. Some actions you may claim under chivalry I may call idiotic proclamations in the weaknesses, academically, professionally, and physically, of women. Benevolent sexism takes its form in many ways: holding a door open for a person solely because she is a woman, considering oneself a godsend to dating women (an unusually high percentage of BYU men believe this), "going easy" on female participants in coed sports, basically, considering any favor or consideration to a woman to be considerate because she is a women. Benevolent sexism works the other way, but for my purposes, it need not be discussed now.

I realize some of these examples have roots in reality. Doors, for instance, used to be very large and heavy, such that a female frame had difficulty opening them. The object of feminism is not to claim that men and women are the same, but to recognize the differences and see that they aren't more diverse than differences that exist among populations of a single sex already. Men and women are fundamentally different in some ways and those differences do not affect personality in general.

The Cosby Show and Home Improvement, as it turns out, are both founded from the principles of feminism. The latter is most interesting because it addresses implementing feminism in an over-masculinized culture without really changing the personality of someone immersed in that culture. More on that later, but here are some examples of feminism's disparity with benevolent sexism from those programs.

In the Cosby Show, we see the attack on benevolent sexism when Clair rebukes Sondra's future spouse Elvin for remarking delightedly that he didn't know she "did that sort of thing" when she got up to get drinks for the group. He saw her as a modern women, which meant to him that man benevolently allowed her not to do housework and to play a career. She scolded him, saying that in the Huxtable household, she would sometimes retrieve drinks for her husband and he would sometimes bring the drinks for her.

A few different times on Home Improvement, Tim expresses that he feels the home, car, and other possessions are solely his because he makes the money, and he allows Jill to use them. This is always followed by a cold shoulder, a talk with Wilson, and making up. In the end, Tim always overcomes benevolent sexism by realizing that his desire to feel that he possesses as much as possible is a result of cultural beliefs.

For now, I'll let that conclude my talk on insolence in relation to benevolent sexism. I'll followup with at least two more posts relating to my other two personal implementations of feminism: anger and cultural conditional.