I am obsessed with Bewitched. It was my favorite show as a kid because of the magic but it’s my favorite show now because of the nostalgia – not nostalgia for my childhood memories, but for an era I have no memory of…the Sixties that existed in the pregnant pause before the cultural revolution–that long tail of the post-war Baby Boom that would fuel the counter-culture that changed it all.
But the show is also amusing on its face and even my modern kids enjoy it. I don’t let them watch TV or use electronics on school nights mostly because they fight too much over who gets what for how long. A month or so ago, however, I made an exception and bought the first season of Bewitched. Now we watch one episode per night as a family. We all love it. But when we first started watching it, I grieved for American innocence lost–a culture of etiquette and gentility that perhaps skewed corny but was fundamentally good. Then the outdated terms of the husband-wife relationship broke through to my consciousness and it occurred to me that really this might just be a white-washed version of the ugly culture depicted in Mad Men. Darrin Stevens and Larry Tate were the original mad men and the cigarettes and martinis and gender roles ring true in both versions. I was a little disturbed by this possibility, but also a little relieved because I didn’t have to have Good Ol’ Days syndrome – maybe those days weren’t so good after all.
To check my instincts on this, I took advantage of an opportunity to get an unbiased impression of that era as I was driving in the car with my 8-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter. My 9-year-old had announced at dinner the night before that she “accidentally” stumbled across the word “sexist” in the dictionary while looking up some “other word.” It didn’t take me long to come up with a list of “other words” she might have been looking for on that page, but I let that pass. I did, however, use that information later in the car to ask, “Hey, since you know what the word ‘sexist’ means, let me ask your opinion on something. Do you think the show Bewitched is sexist?” I was so amazed by their answers, I decided to share them….
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