Anger Management: Mel

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Wherever Charlie Sheen goes, the objectifying and demeaning of women and patronising of physical appearance follows.

The other night, after flicking through numerous television channels and stacks of infomercials, I decided to stoop so low as to watch a show starring Charlie Sheen: Anger Management. It just so happened that that particular episode, Charlie and the Slumpbuster, contained, with no surprise, the demeaning of a woman due to her stereotypical lacking of so-called 'appealing womanly features'. It was as though it was timed to play when I was yearning for something to watch, and it angers me so that such an episode still exists in this day and age.

As a woman who does not befit the stereotypical womanly look, I am appalled that apart from magazines and movies, television shows are still playing a part in making someone like me feel like utter rubbish, like a disregarded water bottle that never had a chance to be reused. It seems an insurmountable task to produce a television series that does not insult or criticise those who are already criticised and insulted enough by the rest of society. And I have television shows like this to blame.

The episode, titled Charlie and the slumpbuster, featured a woman named Mel who had recently poppd into Charlie's life after having been his 'slumpbuster' when he slept with her when they were much younger. I searched through Urban Dictionary and found that a 'slumpbuster' is defined as:

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Mel basically was 'an easy score to get [Charlie's] confidence back up'. He slept 'with someone [he] would never otherwise associate with'. The entire episode was then based on Charlie pretending to be interested in Mel so as to prove that he never was not interested in their youth, but only ended up being completely appalled by her entirety, including her figure as shown in the still below, which, mind you, is not at all a bad figure for someone of her depicted age.

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It is awful to depict a woman who does not dress, act or speak provocatively as someone who is unattractive, as someone who is worth sleeping with only if you wish to stoop as low as her depicted level, as someone who means nothing but an easy-score, or a one-night-stand, or even worse, as someone who is a 'slumpbuster'. The majority of women who Charlie sleeps with in this series are younger than Mel, wear revealing clothes and speak in a way that late phone-sex line operators do. When someone like Mel comes along, though, she is considered highly unsexy and is immediately considered reproachable. 

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How are we expected to treat one another in this society? We have television shows based on the rejection of older women being contradicted by advertisements based on the sexiness of older women, and we have the overall judging of every type of person in existence. Not to mention the advertisements that encourage people to file complaints about inappropriate shows... I think that if more people thought like me, the people working for that company would constantly have their hands full.