{"id":199,"date":"2005-11-10T10:35:23","date_gmt":"2005-11-10T14:35:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/snarl\/2005\/11\/10\/i-love-a-good-stereotype\/"},"modified":"2005-11-10T10:35:23","modified_gmt":"2005-11-10T14:35:23","slug":"i-love-a-good-stereotype","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/2005\/11\/10\/i-love-a-good-stereotype\/","title":{"rendered":"I Love a Good Stereotype"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a3395'><\/a><\/p>\n<p><P>Did anybody catch &#8220;Trading Spouses&#8221; on Fox last night? I&#8217;ve never watched the show, but I recall seeing ads for this episode over the past few days. I forgot all about it until I was flipping stations around 9:30 PM and caught this particular episode right in the middle.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>It seems the&nbsp;premise is that the mothers in two families trade families for a period of time and you get to see how the families respond to this different maternal figure. In the end, the mother&nbsp;designates how an alottment of money for&nbsp;her new family gets to be spent. &nbsp;In last night&#8217;s episode, a large southern Christian woman (stereotype A) swapped families with a petite Massachusetts hippie type woman (stereotype B). <\/P><br \/>\n<P>Hilarity ensued.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>I missed the first half of the show when they documented them all living together. I only saw&nbsp;from the moment where Stereotype A was leaving the Massachusetts family and asked the family for hugs. Nobody, not even the father, wanted to get off his seat to hug the woman. From that point on, I knew it would get interesting.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>The two mothers met face-to-face to talk before returning to their own families.&nbsp;On one side of the ring you had this open-minded, big-haired&nbsp;hippie-chick talking about hypnosis and new age therapies. On the other side was this woman talking about saving the family and how they treated her so badly (from what I could gather, they treated her poorly because she was lecturing them non-stop about going to Hell). Anyway, things really got crazy once the mothers returned to their families.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>Well, things got crazy once the southern Christian returned to her family in Louisiana. She went on an all out rampage, threatening the camera crew, telling her family they&#8217;re going to Hell, denouncing the unholiness that now encompasses their home because of this woman. She was SCREAMING at her children for allowing the other mother to hypnotize them and for not praying enough for her while she was up in Massachusetts.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>Those poor kids. The daughter kept saying she prayed for her mom every night, but her mother wouldn&#8217;t listen. I truly feel sorry for those children.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>It was fascinating. And scary.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>I think I prefer my stereotypes when&nbsp;I know&nbsp;they&#8217;re&nbsp;made up&nbsp;versus when they are actual living people (Give me &#8220;In Living Color&#8217;s&#8221; movie gay movie critics or &#8220;Mad TV&#8217;s&#8221; on-going jokes about Bobby Lee (Asian-American), etc&#8230;). <\/P><br \/>\n<P>OH! And I accomplished something else last night! I managed to clean the apartment (finally). No more dust bunnies, no more ring around the tub, no more crumbs by the computer. Like a proper gay stereotype, my home is now immaculate. You may all visit me now.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>&nbsp;<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Did anybody catch &#8220;Trading Spouses&#8221; on Fox last night? I&#8217;ve never watched the show, but I recall seeing ads for this episode over the past few days. I forgot all about it until I was flipping stations around 9:30 PM and caught this particular episode right in the middle. It seems the&nbsp;premise is that the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}