I didn’t really get to watch the show Scrubs when it aired on television. It began while I was in college, and my schedules were always so all over the place that I couldn’t really watch shows with any kind regularity. Plus, I had access to Cartoon Network and I’m a big cartoon nerd. In any case, following college I moved out to California, and we never paid for cable or bothered to purchase rabbit ears (when you could still do that). It was the beginning of our TV being used solely for DVDs and video games (and now Netflix).
But I digress. Scrubs. I had always heard that it was funny, but I didn’t have a chance to dive into it until several years ago when I started watching it on Netflix. And I really enjoyed it, so much so that I just finished my third run-through of it. It has that wonderful mix of zany and heart-tugging that I like.
It has its problems, of course, like many shows do. But there was one that I definitely picked up on this time around, one that had bothered me subtly before this and made itself known in my third run-through. In at least three episodes there is a moment where a female character is called out for an odd or unexpected reaction, and her response is more or less this: “I’m a woman.” (There is one episode where this bothered me so much that I refused to watch it this time around.) And these are the blatant moments; I’m sure there may have been other similar but subtler ones and I just didn’t notice (I tend to watch sitcoms while I’m doing dishes or other work).
Now, I get that there are differences between men and women, and whether those differences are genetic or developed based on the way society presses women to act, I’m not smart enough to say. I just know that they are there. Regardless, to boil down a character’s reaction as “I’m a woman” is rather insulting to women. Not only that, but it’s also lazy writing.
Don’t make your characters do something because they’re a guy or a girl. Put some reasoning behind the action. Give the character some dimension. Have it make sense to the viewer (or reader). But don’t cop out with a simple “I’m a woman”.
But then again, I could be wrong. I am, after all, a man.
Peter Tarkulich 