She spends most of her time cooking and caring for her children, and acts as the family's heart and conscience. Marge, for her part, always wears a dress and a pearl necklace, a blue-beehived lampoon of the traditional housewife. If there's one thing that can be certain in the world of The Simpsons, it's that Homer will never know best. In fact, The Simpsons began clearly as a satire of the idealised family of such beloved American postwar sitcoms as Leave it to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, and Father Knows Best. It is Marge, the stay-at-home mother, who has always animated, as it were, the questions we ask about women's roles. While overall The Simpsons has often targeted sexism in its sweeping satire, most of the Simpson family members don't show any tension about their own gender roles: Homer sees himself as a hunter-gatherer who has no place in the kitchen except being fed Bart is the anarchic small boy wreaking havoc and Lisa is consistently feminist in her resistance to traditional notions of femininity. Marge has always represented the mother and woman trying to come to terms not just with conflicting definitions of contemporary women, but with her own conflicting desires. When the smoke clears, Marge is sent away on holiday alone for a much-needed treat, which entails eating a hot-fudge sundae and drinking tequila in a bubble bath – while watching Thelma and Louise. But maybe Marge's decision is simply a cry for attention? After all, she is chronically under-appreciated by the male members of her family – so much so that in one episode her frustration erupts in road rage, captured by the local news station with the bulletin: "An overworked and under-appreciated housewife has snapped." The police arrive and cordon off the area with police tape reading: "Distressed Mother – Please Stay Back". Lisa delivers an outraged peroration in response: "Millions of girls will grow up thinking that this is the right way to act, that they can never be more than vacuous ninnies whose only goal is to look pretty, land a rich husband, and spend all day on the phone with their equally vacuous friends talking about how damn terrific it is to look pretty and have a rich husband."Īnd now Lisa's own mother has sold out to none other than Hugh Hefner, who has founded his fortune on the exploitation of vacuous ninnies whose only goal is to look pretty. I'm just a girl" – followed by tittering. When she gets the doll home, Lisa sets up a little UN chamber in the living room with her other dolls, and announces: "A hush falls over the general assembly as Stacy approaches the podium to deliver what will no doubt be a stirring and memorable address." She then pulls the string on the back of the doll, who says things like, "I wish they taught shopping in school", "Let's bake some cookies for the boys", and "Don't ask me. In the classic episode Lisa vs Malibu Stacy, Lisa is desperate to get the newest Barbie doll, which talks. Lisa has also never had anything but righteous contempt for women who collude in their own objectification. One can only imagine the outrage of Lisa, the family's outspokenly feminist daughter, at such a patriarchal throwback: only the men in the family get a voice? Being so gratuitously excluded could only add insult to injury, for it is Lisa, much more consistently than her mother, who has deplored her society's sexist treatment of women over the programme's 20 years. One newspaper opened its report of the news by asking only what Homer and Bart would make of Marge's decision. So what are we to make of Marge's sudden decision, in commemoration of her family's 20th anniversary, to join the ranks of sex objects and bare all for the readers of US Playboy? Is The Simpsons escalating its satire – or selling out?Ĭertainly if the cartoon's producers are taking an ironic position towards sexism, the irony has been lost on some commentators. In another episode, when Bart covertly took pictures of Homer dancing with a stripper at a stag party, Marge forced her husband to take Bart to meet the stripper, with the injunction that he teach their son not to treat women as sex objects. After all, when Bart got a job at the local burlesque house (Maison Derrière ), Marge "shared her moral outrage" and took a bulldozer to it (the good men of Springfield stopped protesting when they realised she didn't know about the town's bordello).
Many fans of The Simpsons have expressed surprise, even dismay, at Marge's choice.
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