I was watching an episode of Who The Hell…? (a programme where people talk about how they ended up either marrying/being in a relationship with/knowing someone who turned out to be a criminal or who had a big skeleton in their cupboard) a while ago, & it featured (spoiler alert) a youngish businessman who’d met a Russian woman in the course of his work. Cue major fetishising of this woman on the grounds that she was Russian, & it was also mentioned that the businessman had trouble concentrating on what the Russian woman was saying because he was so captivated by this attractive woman that had come into his office. Unprofessional much? Dude, the woman was ostensibly there to get your business (there was more to her than met the eye- no pun intended), not to be drooled over, fetishised & objectified! Stop thinking with the head that doesn’t have a brain in it! This just adds credence to the myth that men can’t control their urges & turn into blithering idiots as soon as they come within spitting distance of an attractive woman, & it really annoyed me. This show has form when it comes to sexism & gender stereotypes (not to mention the idea that every woman should want to have a man in her life (or be ‘a wife’) & want to have children, should have to choose between a career & a successful love life (because *of course* they can’t have both), give up their jobs when they get married & support their husbands’ careers instead, change from quiet, polite, submissive little mice to domineering harridans as soon as they get married & make a habit of lying about rape), & there has also been transphobia & biphobia thrown in for good measure- the word ‘lifestyle’ was certainly mentioned in relation to bisexuality in one episode (I hate that word when it’s used in that context), & it was implied that being trans was a ‘sexual deviancy’ in another. Once again, thanks very much, American TV, for absolutely damn all. American TV does seem to have a nasty habit of portraying the LGBT community as predatory & ‘mad, bad, & dangerous to know’, which makes me very cross.
