4 Most Sexually Uncomfortable Characters From Your Childhood
Back in the day, TV was a lot more subtle than it is in the current fast-paced, My 600-Pound Life-laden world. Today you have sitcom characters like Barney Stinson, who in every episode of How I Met Your Mother seemed to have an hilarious joke about chunnel fisting or beaver bashing or whatever. Or Allison Williams on Girls, who got her ass eaten on camera, though we hear that her father misremembers the incident. We've come a long way from Lucy and Ricky having separate beds and barely ever celebrating an anniversary with more than a casual Dirty Sanchez.
And while nowadays sexuality is clearly in your face, almost to the point where we can expect CBS to just introduce a semi-erect dong as a character next season, when you were a kid, it was less so. Sure we had slutty characters, but their sluttiness was a lot less explicit, and sometimes the nature of it was so creepy that it probably caused undue trauma to your brain without you even realizing it.
All shows -- all media, in fact -- try to present those who are sexually adventurous and promiscuous as admirable and kind of awesome. (Except when they're women and we're forced to decide between having them portrayed as stupid, predatory, or insane. That's not my decision though, I swear. Down with slut shaming!) The problem is that sometimes writers, producers, and actors start resting on their laurels, and characters' sexualities get a little skewed, a little weird, and a little flat-out unsettling.
Blanche Devereaux
The literal grandma of all skanky TV characters, Blanche was the hussy of The Golden Girls, a show about four women of retirement age living together and humping their way across Miami one dry, denture-cream-lubed rendezvous at a time. Right away, this level of sexuality is off-putting to the majority of viewers, who don't want to think of grandma gagging on some schooner captain's kielbasa. But apparently that's what Blanche did each and every episode, when not planning fundraisers or volunteering to organize some charitable event which would introduce her to a grey-haired gentleman whose ass she'd inevitably try to finger blast.
There were 206 episodes of The Golden Girls, and while it's arguable that only one in four of them would be Blanche-centric, she likely had at least a secondary story in every episode, and that means nearly 206 separate stories about a lady in her late 50's having rampant sex with strange men.
Rumor has it that there was in fact an episode in which Blanche addresses her own promiscuity by acknowledging that she uses condoms, which is great and was a good message for the '80s. But how many children who watched this on the family-friendly Friday night lineup week in and week out started to wonder if the reason they only saw their own grandma every so often was because she was too busy ironing some old timer's pork whistle to come hang out?
Should old people be allowed to have and enjoy their sexuality? Of course, but for a kid, that shit is just mind-blowing. Sex is mind-blowing in general, but trying to wrap your head around the concept of Blanche Devereaux having three-ways with shuffleboard champs is the kind of stuff that leads to nightmares about being eaten by freeze-dried Southern clams.
Mrs. Roper / Larry Dallas
There was an interesting dynamic afoot on Three's Company as far as sexuality went. Characters were basically camped as either asexual or hypersexual, with very little in-between room. Jack spends most episodes either trying to convince people he can cook worth a damn or trying to bone anything with hair longer than Mr. Furley's, while his smoking hot roommates walk around in short shorts and completely useless bras and act like sex is Christmas -- an event that happens once a year and need not be discussed until the season approaches.
Jack is a baseline character whose sexuality seems more or less normal. He's not too weird, too ghastly, or too abhorrent in his behavior, so he's OK. He's a precursor to every character currently on TV. In contrast to Jack, there are the sexual mutants on the show who have evolved beyond him and are far out of control. Their desire for the beast with two backs trumps all reason and humanity. They are no longer human, they are smutmeisters. They are Larry and Mrs. Roper.
At first glance, Larry Dallas, used car salesman and Jack's wingman, for the most part seems no different than Jack -- he's a player, he somehow gets tail despite his terrible haircut and wardrobe, he seems admirable to those who aspire to be professional booty hunters. And then comes the fact that Larry is arguably one of the most unscrupulous pussy hounds in the history of television. No lie is too big, no deception too egregious to be used in the pursuit of ass. Is Larry actually a former Marine? He claims it in one episode. Is he a photographer for Playboy? A talent scout for MGM? No. And why did he enter jack's cookie recipe in a competition for old ladies, forcing his friend to dress in drag to win anyway? No one knows. Larry is just a compulsive liar.
"Wh-what?"
On the other side of the apartment building is Mrs Roper, who I think wore a muumuu in every single episode of the show, thus shattering any sex appeal a woman in her 60's could have hoped to muster with the efficiency of a tactical nuke. You could stuff a muumuu with Scarlett Johansson and free hot wings, and it'd somehow turn out disgusting and sleep-inducing. It's nobody's fault except that of the wicked djinn who created the garment in the first place, long long ago.
Mrs. Roper's MO is that she has a never-ending lady boner for her useless lump of a husband Mr. Roper, who had the sexual prowess of rancid custard in a Ben-Gay-scented sweater and loafers. But she was DTF all the time. Was Stanley packing some kind of donkey dick in his trousers? We can only speculate. Cringe and speculate.
Both Larry and Helen reek of not quiet but loud and ungainly desperation. Angry, almost rapey desperation. All presented under the cowl of hilarious '70s comedy. Neither seemed above dropping a Cosby in someone's drink, which was probably the plot of at least one episode, though I can't be sure.
Captain Kirk
Is there anything Captain Kirk wouldn't fuck? We all suspected there was more to Tribble reproduction than Dr. McCoy let on. To say Kirk banged anything with a vagina would be too conservative, since we honestly don't know if half of those green and blue ladies were physically put together the same as the ladies from Iowa. A more apt description was that Kirk would put the hump on anything with boobs, which very well could have included Harry Mudd and Khan. And when you think about it, if Kirk humped then dumped Khan on Ceti Alpha V, that whole storyline makes a lot more sense.
We can look back now and maybe snicker at the way William Shatner stilted all of his lines and somehow knocked aliens unconscious by punching them in the shoulder, but when you're a kid watching Star Trek, Kirk is a Star Pimp. He runs the coolest ship in the galaxy, he's never met a threat he couldn't take down or outsmart, and he's so amazing at his job that women from whole other worlds want him. Humanity is not enough, he was out there Pon-Farring Vulcans, forehead-ridging Klingons, lobe-plooking Ferengi, and deely-bopping Andorians. That's both hot and gross all at once, which is the only way I'll have sex.
On the one hand, this all sounds progressive and liberating. Let's be honest, Star Trek was a thinly-veiled metaphor for social issues pretty much every episode, so Kirk banging aliens is a lot like a racial harmony kind of message, which is nice. But then he almost log-jammed this atrocity:
Yeah, it was disguised as a hot chick for a while, but that salt vampire came pretty close to turning Kirk into a snack food treat, and it looks like half a loaf of dog shit fucked an octopus and got caught in a fishnet. What's this to teach a young, would-be space explorers in search of booty? That Kirk's sense of dignity got lost in a Jefferies Tube somewhere around Tau Ceti Prime, and a willingness to hump anything in space can come back to bite you, or at least drain all your salt.
Smurfette
Smurfette was never, in my experience, presented as sexual. Please don't think I'm a horrible person. I mean, I am, but please don't think I'm horrible for this reason. I don't sit around and ponder cartoon sexuality all that often. But, and you can't fault me for this, I did realize as a child the curious dynamic presented in the Smurf village by the existence of a single female Smurf.
we're blue as our balls
Now, if I were the kind of person who looked up cartoon history, I'd maybe look into how the show accounted for the existence of Smurfs. I imagine it was magic or a centaur jizzing on mushrooms that gave birth to the whole lot of them. But as a child, you see a town, you see one lady only, and you start answering the unasked questions presented to you. And to me, Smurfette must have been taken for more rides than a New York subway. There was even a baby added to the show at one point to hammer this home -- Smurfette was a pork machine.
Again, never was this relevant to the program. Never do I remember Azrael and Gargamel stumbling upon Smurf village intent on capturing them all, only to lift up a toadstool cap and see Brainy, Hefty, and Vanity running a train on her platinum blonde clam shell, but it was implied. At least to me it was, anyway. Everyone must have been throwing shots into her, and desperately. She was the only woman alive -- their entire race depended on the efficacy of her womb.
How does a child's psyche deal with the idea of a gang bang queen before the knowledge of such things existing is ever presented to them? Your basic understanding is "mommy loves daddy," more or less, and a then few children are born and they coolly ignore each other for the remainder of their marriage. It's not that mommy loves literally the entire town. Usually. Probably. Is it? Give me your mom's number.
For more from Felix, check out 4 Sex Lies Everyone Needs to Stop Telling and 4 Things Kids Never Learn (Because Parents Teach Them Badly).
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