where are the girls???

yesterday morning when i woke up, the tv just happened to be on the disney channel. i don’t know what i was watching last night, but in the sea of infomercials and such, the sounds of disney is good to sleep by (lol, i’m not trying to say that channel puts me to sleep). well, some winnie the pooH type thing was on, except they were puppets or people in suits (i have no idea). but there was a character that i don’t remember from winnie the pooH growing up. for one, it was a female bird. that made me think… how many of those type of cartoons you watched growing up had many female characters in it? so i got to thinking… winnie the pooH only had 1 that i remember. roo’s mother. that just fits right into the gender role where female’s are suposed to be the motherly figures. another cartoon where it was blantenly obvious was the smurfs. who didn’t watch them as a child? out of that entire town of smurfs, there were only 2 females… 1 of which didn’t show up till about halfway through the running of the show. and the main female smurf, was an over exagerated blonde. what about the infamous sesame street. hehe. EVERYONE knows about that. to be honest, they did have a large number of characters on there. yet they had strategies for dealing with gender roles. i can only remember seeing 2 characters that were true females. bert and ernie were obvious males… but then… the debate arises as to what sex do big bird, elmo, and tellie belong to? not such an easy choice is it? fraggle rock was another one. i used to love that show. i think that was the only show that actually had the ratio of female to male characters about even. the doozers were seen as male type characters, seeing as they were construction workers, even though they had 1 female worker. maybe this non-equality between gender roles was taught to us by the producers of these shows… who knows who is to blame.