Portlandia: “Doug Becomes a Feminist”
While we’re not always fond of Portlandia’s opening sketches, this week’s was a winner as Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein tackled a topic du jour—National Coming Out Day—and added witty wordplay to elicit more than a few laughs. In a quasi-PSA, the characters Fred and Carrie help people select the best possible gender identity by introducing a few new labels. Our favorites include Tom (Armisen), who self-identifies as a “hetero-plausible”; Mary (Brownstein), a “homo-nextual,” who can’t wait to break up with the guy she’s dating to start seeing women; and the “hobo-sexual” who’s only turned on by…hobos.
It was a perfect setup for the episode, “Doug Becomes a Feminist,” with its two main storylines addressing themes of sex, power and identity (in a Portlandia way, naturally). In the titular sketch, Doug, an unemployed man-child-slacker, stays home and reads Game of Thrones books while his wife Claire heads to the office. When he shows their housekeeper how to fold one of Claire’s sweaters, she tells him in broken English, “You are very feminist.” Although she meant “feminine,” Doug proudly takes up the mantle of “male feminist,” but let’s just say his ideology doesn’t exactly align with Emma Watson’s #HeForShe campaign.
When Claire gets home, he confesses that he was starting to feel terrible that he wasn’t working or doing more at home, but because of this newfound feminism, “I’m enabling you to be the breadwinner…I’m subverting the patriarchy.” Claire doesn’t exactly agree, but that doesn’t stop Doug from joining a male feminist group, burning her bras or wearing T-shirts that reads, “Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make History.” When she asks him if he wants to have sex, he first asks, “Do you feel safe?” It’s totally acceptable, until he changes the mood quickly by trying to get a “soft on.” With the exception of the male feminist group scenes, the Doug and Claire sketches were highly relevant, which make them all the more humorous.