Life with the Queens Jeremiah 29:11

Feminism's Television Intrusion By Rebecca Lynne Adams (excerpts)

Today’s Christian women are bombarded by the effects of feminism, whether they realize it or not. Humorous sitcoms such as King of Queens, Everybody Loves Raymond, and Sex and the City are invading our marriages and thoughts. We become sucked into shows like Desperate Housewives, sitting on our couches intrigued by their lives, then horrified and stunned when a friend calls us to share her recent decision to leave her husband. If we can open our eyes to what the media is pulling us into, then we can prepare a counter-attack with God’s Word and principles so we aren’t left wondering how the humor of Hollywood’s divas became our marriage’s destruction.

Let’s begin by continuing the theme of the conniving serpent in the garden and look at one of television’s most popular sitcoms: Desperate Housewives. The opening clip even shows the stars of the show in a garden, with their hands holding bright red apples as a snake falls from the tree behind them. Their mischievous grins portray a feeling of satisfaction with their sinful behavior, and a powerful, sexy demeanor follows them into every scene, ready to satisfy their desires. It is true that victory does not always follow them and that they end up paying for their bad choices, but the underlying theme indicates a self-revolving world in which these women will do whatever it takes to satisfy their own desires.If you go to the www.imdb.com website, the plot keywords for Desperate Housewives include some of the following: “failing marriage, single parent, bisexual, divorce, cults, gay son, blackmail, irreverent, murder investigation, battle of the sexes, extramarital affair.” Sounds like a perfect show to sit down with a bowl of popcorn and pizza, doesn’t it? Yet, it won three Golden Globes! Why? It feeds on our sinful desires and says that it’s okay to do whatever you want because you deserve to be happy.

Can you think of any popular sitcoms that portray the wife as superior and the husband as stupid and incompetent? How about King of Queens, where the husband sits on the couch and eats, while the wife has a successful career in which she indulges in shopping and has little desire to have children? She says “do it,” and her husband obeys her. In Everybody loves Raymond, the mother-in-law rules the roost, Deborah constantly berates her husband, and Raymond is viewed as a failure when he is in charge of taking care of the children. How about the Simpsons? Marge is the ever-loving wife whose husband, Homer, is a complete idiot and never does anything right. You can even go back to our childhood days of reading the Berenstain Bears books , which portray the mama bear laying down the rules and the papa bear as the child who breaks them. Sitcoms that portray fatherhood and manhood as positive attributes like the Andy Griffith Show and the Cosby Show have been replaced with Married with Children and Two and Half Men. Is it any wonder why the family unit is becoming dysfunctional?

While it will be difficult to change the direction of Hollywood, encouraging them to return to a healthier mode of entertainment, there are things that you can do now to protect your family from absorbing the culture’s ideologies. First, recognize a lie when you see or hear it. To identify the difference between a lie and truth, you must know the truth, right? This will only be found within the pages of the Bible. God’s standards do not change with culture. When we understand what God’s standards are, we can move towards them.

Every day we must fight against the 3,000 advertisements that tell us to become independent, express the diva goddess within, explore our sexual freedom, redefine our sexual identity, become beautiful and perfect so that we will be loved, and discover that there are no differences between men and women. We must also replace those images with godly principles that remind us to become dependent upon the Lord; die to ourselves and seek to serve others; enjoy sexuality within marriage; decorate ourselves with the beautiful qualities of humility, love, and gentleness; and embrace the fact that God created us male and female, equal in the image of God, different in roles.