Sunday night, while recovering from a tough Blackhawks loss, I was channel surfing when I stumbled across the movie Anchorman starring Will Ferrell. I immediately flipped to it because it had been years since I had seen it. Over the years, I had forgotten about how funny the movie was. Also, I had forgotten how sexist the characters were. Anchorman is set in the 1970s when women were starting to really make progress in entering previously male dominated industries (like broadcasting and journalism). Some of the sexist quotes from the movie include:
Brian Fantana: Don't get me wrong, I love the ladies. I mean they rev my engines, but they don't belong in the newsroom!
Champ Kind: It is anchorMAN, not anchorLADY! And that is a scientific fact.
Bartender: You know, times are changing. Ladies can do stuff now and you're going to learn how to deal with it.
Ron Burgundy: What? Were you saying something? Look, I don't speak Spanish.
Veronica Corningstone: I told you that I wanted to be an anchor. I told you that.
Ron Burgundy: I thought you were kidding! I even wrote it down in my diary, "Veronica had a very funny joke today!" I laughed at it later that night!
Ron Burgundy: I'm not a baby, I am a man. I am an anchorman.
Veronica Corningstone: You are not a man. You are a big fat joke.
Ron Burgundy: I'm a man who discovered the wheel and built the Eiffel Tower out of metal and brawn. That's what kind of man I am. You're just a woman with a small brain. With a brain a third the size of us. It's science.
Even though this movie's characters are supposed to be a bit of an exaggeration for comedic purposes, however, the characters still represent the feeling that men held of the time. It used to be that, even though women were allowed to hold jobs, they were not really allowed to advance in their careers. This was referred to as the "Glass Ceiling". For example, in the movie, the qualified Veronica Corningstone was hired by the news station because the all-male cast did not look good for the station's image. Veronica was not able to advance to co-anchor until Ron missed the broadcast and she was the only one who could read the news.
Anchorman reminded me of the play A Doll's House when it comes to the character's views in the advancement in a woman's place in society. Anchorman shows how women were not able to advance in their careers, but A Doll's House shows that women did not even have certain legal rights. In the play, Nora had to get a loan behind her husband's (Tovald) back because women were not allowed to borrow money without permission from their husbands or fathers. The reason Nora needed to borrow money was so she could pay for a trip down south for her and her family so Torvald could recover from his illness (which was not stated in the play). Nora is then forced to lie to Torvald and and gets blackmailed by a man at the bank so he would not expose her.
Nora's friend, Christina, also shows how males dominated the workplace back then. In Christina's past, she was forced to marry a man she did not love just to take care of her family. Her family was in desperate need of money, and Christina was the only one who was old enough to try to take care of everyone. Now, because women were deemed unqualified to work high paying jobs, she would not have made enough money to support her family on her own. So, Christina had to marry a man in order to get by.
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