Day 453
How did I miss this? There was a debate over whether or not Bert & Ernie should get married on Sesame Street?
THEY'RE PUPPETS! They go over your hand or hang off of strings? Often made out of a sock or other pieces of cotton? You know....puppets. They aren't gay. They aren't straight. They aren't bi, asexual or like screwing goats. They're inanimate objects with some guy or girl doing a weird voice outside of your field of view. They flop around on a screen or a stage of some kind and that's pretty much it. They're supposed to be funny.
Ok, I get it... Sesame street is a tool to teach kids about morality, diversity, community and all that other fun stuff that they might not learn while still sheltered at a young age. Cool. That works... But don't we think that pushing the the whole "accepting gay marriage" thing is a little too much for Sesame Street?
Cue the moral indignation in 3...2... 1... go
No... I'm not saying it's wrong to teach kids to accept non-hetero relationships at any age. That's cool. I think kids shouldn't be sheltered into thinking that the only "right" kind of relationship is what they're going to mostly see on TV between hetero couples & then end up confused when they see a non-hetero couple on the streets or be conditioned that it's unnatural or anything. I just didn't think Sesame Street is really doing much in the line of validating relationships of ANY kind to kids. Nor should it be.
Granted, I haven't watch it in like... forever... but I don't remember them really having romantic relationships of any kind between any of the characters. Maybe I'm forgetting something, but I don't remember any OTHER 2 characters having any sort of romantic connection. It just always seemed like most of them were just friends with each other (except Oscar... nobody liked him cause that guy was kind of a dick... and kinda awesome)... Is there a straight couple on the show that I'm not remembering? If so, forget anything I really said... showing the other types of romantic relationships is perfectly reasonable. I just don't remember Sesame Steet having ANY relationships.
I always got the impression that Bert & Ernie was trying to teach kids that you can get along and live with people that you might have almost nothing in common with. That people that live differently than you aren't bad people or anything. Just that they're different and we can still get along at the end of the day, even if we disagree on almost everything else. The whole "live and let live" message.
Granted, you can still get a lot of the same message across if they were gay, but I think it loses its effectiveness about the "getting along with people that are different" message at that point. I can't really put into words yet this morning WHY I think that though. I might have to come back to that. It's the same message in a different way. More from the perspective of the other characters getting along with "people that are different than themselves" than 2 characters that have very different personalities getting along with each other.
But if "legitimizing" non-hetero relationships to kids is the goal, why not just throw in a new non-hetero couple? I think you'd get the social perspective of "gettling along with others that are different from yourself" better than attaching it to existing characters.
I guess what I'm saying is that don't try to teach the whole lesson... on the inter-personal level and on the social level... with the same characters. It's like saying "we need a half-black, half-hispanic, muslim, trangendered lesbian character to teach suburban white kids about relating to someone of a different race, religion, sexual orientation and non-traditional gender types all at once!". Effectively teaching anyone about diversity by sticking all of the "diverse traits" in 1 or 2 characters means a lot of the effectiveness about some of those areas is going to be lost.
I just think that you'll end up diluting the message too much when it's all coming from 1 or 2 characters. And it's almost like teaching kids that everyone is the same execpt like 1 in 20 people that are nothing like the others. And we all know that's not true.
Or I'm probably over-thinking this. Yeah, probably.
And I couldn't really find any funny pictures for this one cause I'm trying to NOT make too much light of it. I think it is important in the grand scheme to get kids to understand the diversity of the world to help break down the walls of prejudice that exist. I just think there's better ways to go about it than to shoe-horn the one set of friends that doesn't get along really well into a non-traditional relationship just to teach kids that that kind of relationship is just as normal as mom & dad's.
Though the whole "sleeping in the same bed" thing really doesn't help my case.
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