The Walking Dead Season of Sexism

       

By: Yonalis Fabian

I remember when “The Walking Dead” (2010-) premiered on AMC, my brother, my father and I all gathered together and became glued to the TV. But it was only until a few years ago when I rewatched the beginning seasons again that I started to pick up on the sexism that filled the first season. According to Fandom, the first season makes it clear how much our society relies on gender roles for it to function. But I think many of us fans forgot the misogyny that was present during this season because there appears to be a huge shift in gender roles taking place on the show now.

One of the most well-known jobs women were depicted doing on “The Walking Dead” was laundry. Anytime we are shown the women they are either doing laundry or talking about laundry. It’s like it is the only skill that they have to contribute to the group. And what makes it more irritating is that for the majority of the time, women on screen do not seem to have a problem with this or do not seem to think that they could do more than this. Rosenfield from TV Guide, mentions how the women were always being sidelined from the action or being reduced to one-dimensional stereotypes like what they only brought to the group, doing chores. Meanwhile, men are depicted keeping watch at night, cleaning guns, canvassing the area, going out looking for resources and of course making all the decisions for the group.

When the women on this show do, in fact, think outside of doing chores and want to actually participate in more than just these chores, they are shut down and told that is not their job or that it was not necessary. We see this in season one episode three “Tell it to the frogs”, when the women, of course, are washing everyone’s clothing by the quarry and some of them finally are complaining about the division labor around the camp. While the women are doing this we see another character Shane playing in the water with young Carl and Ed one of the women’s husband smoking while sitting on a car. Ed comes near to see what the women are laughing about and tells them to get their work done and stop messing around. When one of the women Andrea, tells Ed if he does not like how they do his laundry that he should do it himself and he just says “Ain’t my job, Missy”. Often we also see that whenever something occurs and there is a search party or shifts are being assigned for keeping watch, rarely are the women even considered for these roles instead the leaders of the group, which was either Rick or Shane assigned these types of roles to the other men in the group.

But to me, as viewer personally what to this day confuses me is how not only did the show have so many sexist themes woven in it but how the majority of the show’s audience constantly bring down the character of Lori. There seem to be many reasons for this but one of the biggest reasons that she received a lot of hate was that she could not keep a leash on her 8-year-old son, Carl. Viewers constantly bring up the fact that Carl always seemed to be in trouble as he strayed away from the camp and was up to something mischievous that has gotten some other characters in hot water and even lead to some of the characters deaths. But all the blame to why Carl was in some type of danger always seems to be placed on his mother Lori, and only on his mother. Which is interesting because he also has a father Rick who for the majority of the time did not know what his son was up to. Throughout season one and many others, Rick keeps leaving his family to either help out strangers or to run some errand that always causes his family to be in danger as he keeps abandoning them for other people. It is commendable for Rick’s character to want to help others but with the world ending, literally, and people constantly dying one would think that his family would be his first priority but that just simply is not the case. Yet people seemed to not think of this as an issue and only place the blame on Lori’s character whenever Carl got hurt or went missing. As if she was the only one who was supposed to be taking care of her family as the household is the job of the woman and not of the man.

The first season of “The Walking Dead” was amongst one of the lowest rated ones, which makes sense since maybe not a lot of people had heard of it. But after this season the ratings jumped enormously. I wonder if this says something about how many people actually enjoyed the first season so much to extend that they continued to watch and even others began to also watch it. How can a show that is filled with so much sexism and misogyny become so popular after the season was exploding with these themes? I think this says something about how many people did not necessarily see these themes in season one as much of problem and just with the way things are in our society. One would think that after having a show filled with such negative views towards women that the ratings would actually decrease because who watches something that seems to be written by men, and only men, but this was not the case at all for “The Walking Dead.”