How I Met Your Mother- Analysis

How I met your mother is an American sitcom that uses comedy to recount to his children in the year 2030, the events that lead the main character, Ted Mosby, to meeting his wife. However, this television series is a lot more than what it appears to be. We perceive throughout each episode a degrading trend that projects negative images of women. They are repeatedly marginalized as objects and are mostly spoken about in a harmful and debasing manner by one character, Barney Stinson. With the use of irony, the hegemonic view point of the white rich Christian male is excluded from the norm, equalitarian to sexes. Nonetheless, Barney’s ideologies cause the most laughs and achieve dominance over the others.
First of all, in this television series woman are shown to be “something of use”. This is to say that females are portrayed to be objects of male satisfaction. They are shown in revealing clothing that is not seen as sexual expression but as low class and slutty. This perspective is made clear to us by Barney’s actions and the way he regards women. These images are chosen by the media to encode anti-feminist messages, consciously or subconsciously, that will allow men to remain at the apex of social hierarchy and continue this ideological cycle due to the viewer’s socialization. The media is a business and by allowing these messages to remain in society, it becomes profitable to those who control this industry, the hegemonic male.   Stuart Hall clearly supports this idea by his definition of the mass media. According to Hall, mass media is
“A complex structure in dominance’ sustained through the articulation of connected practices, each of which retains its distinctiveness and its own specific modality, its own forms and conditions of existence.”

In other words, figures in power will attempt without fail to broadcast a certain way of thinking that will be beneficiary to them and will allow them to keep their seat as socially dominant. For example, in one...