If you want to do an ideological analysis
of How I Met Your Mother, you have to
main characters that are perfect to analyze: Barney Stinson and Robin
Scherbatsky. Today I will be focused on Robin.
She is the perfect representation of the
active New Yorker woman. She is a
beautiful woman and tries to succeed in both her career and her love life. She is
the presenter of the morning news (which is a job where the power of the image
is huge) on Metro news one which is a small TV station. But nobody watch her
show even her friends. On another hand she tries to have a serious relationship
but she never find “the one” (even she doesn’t call him that way), and she
lives alone with her dogs most of the time.
When you look at this presentation, it reinforces
the ideology of the active women. She is nice but she can’t succeed just
because of her body. In an episode, she wants to find a job because if she
doesn’t have one, she will have to go back to Canada. And she tried to get
hired for the national lottery. But she wasn’t “dumb” enough to say the numbers
properly. Then Barney did a video resume for her. And he told her that she has
to do a lot to impress companies because men don’t think that women can do
anything. It shows that the ideology of the women who is too weak and not
intelligent enough is still here.
And when you look at her love life, it
shows that women can’t handle pressure, and even if they think they can be
strong they are always weak compared to men. For example once because “she had
too much pressure” from work and her life in New York, she quit and left to
Japan. She also has a problem with men because when she is in a relationship,
she “regains her natural instinct”. By this, I mean that it’s like she can’t
think anymore because she is with a man, because she acts like a doll who can
just say yes even if she’s strong and intelligent.
All this is the representation that the American
culture has toward women. And it presents the hegemony of a culture which is
still male chauvinist and where women are lower than the men even if they are
more active. And by providing this ideology to the younger generation it will
maintain this hegemony.