Sexism, "Two and a Half Men," and Hemingway

I recently came across this 2015 click-bait article offering a list of the "10 most sexist shows on TV." Number 5 on the list, and featured prominently through illustration in the article, is the show Two and a Half Men. Though it's hardly surprising to see this show on the list, I'd suggest that it has more to do with the authors' conflating of the show with the persona and lifestyle of its one-time hedonistic star Charlie Sheen.

(For the record, I've never seen the show without Charlie Sheen, but think it's a pretty funny show most the time. More on that -- what makes it funny -- in another post.) 

The article calls the show "sexist" (misogynistic is used elsewhere in the article) based primarily on the presence of Charlie's stalker-crazy neighbor Rose, the cold and "selfish" mother character, and the parade of short-lived female dates and one-night stands, who are supposedly portrayed as "usually unintelligent and superficial." A similar charge of misogyny is often levied at Hemingway, and I think in both cases it has more to do with our perceptions of Hemingway the private man (who often treated women terribly) and Charlie Sheen (whose life has been raising eyebrows at least since his entanglement with the Heidi Fleiss trial in the 1990s; this fascination with Charlie and the fictionalization of his lifestyle is basically the engine that drives Two and a Half Men and the more cynical but still successful sitcom Anger Management). 

The article misses the point that on "Two and a Half Men," as with just about any sitcom (which lean toward "low" comedy, and that's not an insult), the joke is usually on the main characters. Male characters on sitcoms in particular tend to come off even worse than the women, but in low comedy generally, we are laughing at the main characters as much as we are laughing with them. Contrary to the assertions of the article, many of the "fleeting" female characters on Two and a Half Men (dates with various backgrounds, but also the expected array of waitresses, strippers, stewardesses, etc.) are intelligent, strong-willed, and unwilling to cater to the immaturity of Charlie or to tolerate the annoying qualities of Alan. Charlie and Alan, as they often admit, are the ones with issues, and most of their issues can be traced to a fear of commitment or a tendency to see women in the simplest of terms. They sabotage relationships and spoil good things because they fear the motives and minds of female characters, who they inevitably see in adversarial terms. In other words, yes, the characters can be misogynistic, but that doesn't mean the show itself has that overarching message. 

With Hemingway -- though of course it's more complicated and the comparison is mostly a postmodern dart on the wall -- with the exception of some fantasy-tinged, oversexualized characters, the female characters are often stronger and more human than the sometimes self-hating and self-destructive male characters. Read "Hills Like White Elephants" and decide which of the two only real characters in the story -- the male or female -- come off as more human, more compassionate, more likeable. Hemingway is often showing men at their worst -- pathetic and manipulative, self-defensive in their vulnerability -- and though the male characters don't always get it, it wasn't an accident on Hemingway's part. 

The image from Two and a Half Men featured prominently in the article, of a supposed menage a trois involving Charlie, is actually a shot from a fantasy sequence. Yes, Charlie has an immature and hypersexualized mind, but the females in this case are illusions. The evidence that the mother is unlikeable and hateful is hard to refute, but she's mostly there as a foil, to provide a supposed motivation for the brothers' issues but also so she can repeatedly remind the "boys" that they're grown men who cannot blame their mother forever. This is a positive message for men overall: at some point, it's time to grow up and stop blaming others. But comedy isn't about sending messages as much as it is about laughing at the failures of others -- and also ourselves -- to see what's already in front of them.