I hate to sound like a senior reminiscing on their youth, but when I was a kid, the humor was dumb and generally consisted of bathroom jokes. I still see those nowadays, but now I'm seeing more and more encouragement to sexualize women in a way that is meant to be received as funny.
For example, I was watching an episode of "Henry Danger" on Nickelodeon with my little siblings and I was upset with what I saw.
Basically, "Henry Danger" is about a boy, Henry, who becomes a sidekick to the superhero, Captain Man, as a middle schooler. In this episode, Henry waited to ask a girl, Bianca, out to an event and by the time he asked her, she had already been asked by someone else. I was fine with that because Bianca had no reason not to say no to the other boy. My issue with the episode came when Henry decided he needed to make Bianca jealous. More so, the way he wanted to make her jealous.
He wanted to make her jealous by taking a pretty girl to the event with him, creating a female character to serve as a plot device. Because he's in league with a superhero, he's able to make a robot into exactly what he wants. To make Bianca more jealous, he changes the robot into a pretty high schooler who can dance. Like most attempts to make someone jealous, it fails horribly, but Henry still manages to get Bianca back.
The part I find most troublesome is that the writers of "Henry Danger," through Henry, show that it's absolutely okay to let young boys fantasize and sexualize older women, that one should be proud if they're able to take someone on a date like arm candy.
It has always been a trope that young boys flirt with older women, but I have never felt comfortable with it because there is a difference between admiring someone and harassing them.
Of course, the dancing robot was the perfect submissive, as women are expected to be, and did as she was told, but this isn't the first time this has happened on kids’ shows. I've seen it on "Hannah Montana" with the young Rico and older Miley. I've seen it in middle school where boys would brag about how many girls they've kissed and girls would gossip about how many boys another girl has kissed.*
Not only do these ideas affect young boys, but it also harms young girls. Girls grow up thinking they are expected to look older than they are until a certain point, because after a certain age, women are perceived as less attractive.
I'm just tired of how often boys are admired for having interacted with more girls while girls are generally shamed for interacting with more boys.
(Sorry to be heteronormative, but no one was really out during middle school.)
