Are Women's Shows Ever Going to Be Less Genderedized?

There is a new show that came out this season called Devious Maids. If no one has heard of it nor seen it, it is a show with four women who are maids in very wealthy households who usuallly have something up their sleeve every episode. In the episodes I began to notice a pattern. The men in this show were always the more wealthy or the couple, had the better job, and was always the dominant person within the relationship of the man and woman. The men in this show call the shots, they boss their wives around like they are just an object made to be there for show. In one episode one of the upper class, wealthy women is divorced by her husband and left with nothing. She didn't get any money from him and since she did not have a job, she couldn't provide for herself. Her solution was to find another husband who could help support her. The woman talks about how she has had about 6 husbands and the thing is they have all been just for her to depend on. I don't agree with how this show portrays some of the women. The women, especially the wealthy ones living with their husbands unhappily, are portrayed to be helpless, dependent, weak, and hopeless. This show portrays that without a man, a woman can't provide for herself or anyone else and is unhappy. As the woman finds a new husband she becomes much happier and feels as though she can breathe again since she will now have the money to keep everything she owns. Women don't need a man to be dependent on nor do they need a man to be happy. Women should be portrayed differently in today's society to send a different message to people. Don't get me wrong, I love watching this show but I recently realized how everything is depicted within it from gender to race. Below is a picture of the maids in this TV show. They all possess some gender roles of that of a woman. They are all using sexy poses, they show the attractiveness and sexyness a women is supposed to have. They are maids so they do the work that women are "supposed" to do according to tradition gender roles. They cook for the families, they clean, and they take care of them in almost every single way neede. One of the girls is not exactly your typical type of maid. The one on the left works for a single gay man which is more of a business job than a maid.

The maids of the show Devious Maids.

Going on a race based argument, there are distinctions in this show that can be made about race. All of the maids are latinas and all of the wealthy people are white. Although an exception to this is a black man who is also wealthy but he is not very often shown during the show. There is also some irony with one of the men in the show. He is a latin gay man who decides not to come out of the closet because he would lose his job. This show explains the difficulty in society even today where gays cannot be "themselves" necessarily because they know they will be treated differently. Even when someone had found out that he was gay, he had to make a huge decision, whether to marry the girl who works for him or to lose his job. Of course he chooses to marry the girl who works for him in order to keep his career. This depicts the impact society has on someone that they can't even be who they really are. Then again this show is good in a way that it shows he still has every feature of an "ideal man". Even though his sexuality is different he is still the attractive man that everyone would expect a man to be.
All of the men in this show have at least one characteristic of the "ideal man". The older men who are the wealthiest characters in the show are all dominant and rich. None of them are particularly strong. Although, when we look at the young wealthy men, we see more characteristics of an ideal man. We see muscular, strong, aggressive, not really emotional, and dominant men.
I could go on forever about how much this show depicts all of the stereotypes and gender roles we have in today's society. The media needs to change how we view the gender roles so that people can stop expecting the unrealisticity of each gender.