Sometimes you read a troll dropping that makes you wonder if the person could really be that clueless. I was over at Tennessee Guerilla Women where Egalia had a post about the Super Bowl Snickers commercial starring Betty White you see above. One of Egalia’s regular trolls named “Lance Thruster” posted this comment:
Betty White rocks!
Is TGW OK with her Sue Anne Nivens/Happy Homemaker charicature from the MTM Show (cuz you know she pretended to be a bit of a “strumpet”)?
Lance’s Crayola computer obviously doesn’t have spell check but what he really needs is an intelligence upgrade. Betty White’s character “Sue Ann Nivens” pretended to be the sweet “Happy Homemaker” but in reality she was a very different person, rude, sarcastic and sex-obsessed.
The role was groundbreaking because Betty White portrayed one of the first women on television that was not only openly sexual but sexually aggressive. The humorous aspect of the Sue Ann role was shock factor in that she was a middle-aged woman (Betty was 51 in 1973) who behaved very differently from the stereotypical “grandmother” role and from her well-established public persona. I have no idea what the real Betty White is like in private life but I bet she’s not two-dimensional.
White satirically fulfilled both of the two traditional roles for women under the patriarchy. Satire is often used to bring attention to social and/or political issues that our culture finds difficult to face directly. Most of the socially-conscious commentary in movies in television during the sixties and seventies appeared in comedies rather than drama.
It is ironic that the single and sexually active Sue Ann appeared in the Mary Tyler Moore show because just a few years earlier Mary and her television spouse Dick Van Dyke had to sleep in separate beds.
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