How I Met Your Mother

How I Met Your Mother (from spring break)

So this is my second post in three days, however it's spring break and as I’ve taken residence at my girlfriends house with a comfy couch and a large television I’ve had my fair share of pop culture to enjoy (most of that being sitcoms and television in general). I’ve just watched another episode of ‘How I Met Your Mother’. In the episode we see the traumatic after math of the break up between Robyn and Barney.

However what struck me about this episode is that we see Barney moving on with his life, whilst Robyn struggles through the break up unable to date others. At first my reaction was well this makes sense, after all it is Barney the ‘Joey’ of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ a man who dates everyone and who doesn’t care for women’s feelings and only usually cares for sex. Although with closer inspection you realize that Robyn was the exception to this he really did care about her, it was real relationship. Also Robyn is renowned in the show for being a woman with ‘masculine’ style characteristics. She doesn’t really believe in marriage or children and isn’t your stereotypical woman.

However when it comes to the scenario of a break up the show seems to still revert to classic gender stereotypes, the woman is the one who can’t get over it and who cannot move on. Whilst Barney the male can continue seeing women guilt free. For me it was interesting to see even a show that goes against so many gender types, can still find it so easy to fall back into them.