Let it out

Being a woman puts more requirements on you. They are expected to do things that men aren’t. In the pilot episode of Manifest, women are shown as being more emotional than men, and to the detriment of everyone leads to a reinforcement of that cultural norm. That leads to the belief that only women should be allowed to show emotions in public and if you are a man who does it, you are weak.

In the first ten minutes of the show, Michaela is shown to be crying because her mother’s dead. Her brother(Ben) who’s standing right next to her and is getting the same news shows some emotion, but nowhere near the scale that she’s at. Male viewers who see this will think that if they are a man and they cry in public, they won’t be liked by others because other men don’t cry. Michaela also reveals how she’s doing to Ben while he keeps his feeling bottled up. When she starts hearing things, she tells Ben about it, and Ben says that she’s going crazy and not to tell others about it, and although he’s having the same feelings, he doesn’t reveal it to her until much later. This give men the impression that they need to keep everything hidden and shouldn’t let others know about what’s going on in their life.

Saanvi is another female character who’s emotions drive her actions rather than other factors. When the board decides to not accept Cal for cancer treatment, because it could make their treatment look flawed if it doesn’t work, she wants to save his life and argues to accept him. The main decision maker in the board was a man. By choosing to have a man play that role, the show effectively tells that men aren’t drived by how they feel. But right after that, Saanvi shows her feelings and so the show further strengthens its statement that women have their actions driven by their emotions.

Manifest reinforcing the cultural norms about emotional women is a huge detriment for all viewers. Men get the feeling that if they show their emotions publicly that they will be hated or called weak by other men, and even women, while women who don’t show emotions will be perceived as heartless and seen as different from the rest of the people. That simply isn’t true and TV needs to let people realize that they can

Related posts:

TL;DR Being an Admissions Ambassador is a lot like product management. Rather than delivering a product and tracking it with a bunch of metrics, you are engaging in the process of product discovery…

The website is fully set-up, social media business pages created, a few posts here and there, and now all that’s remaining is for you to ‘get discovered‘ by your customers who’ll be screaming, “Take…

The user will be redirected to the below route where swagger documentation JSON will be visible. Just copy the URL address. Thank you for reading. Keep visiting and share this in your network. Please…