The Slice: Looking at reruns with a cultural critic

Watching 1960s TV Westerns with a 2017 woman can be instructive for a man.

This is especially true if the woman is a baby boomer with an encyclopedic recall of how females were portrayed on television during her formative years.

I suspect I am not the only man in Spokane to have made this discovery.

Does a feminine voice exclaiming “Oh, for the love of … give me a break” sound familiar?

How about “Boy, whoever wrote this really hated women”?

Now – no need to mention any names here – the woman in question might know full well that ’60s Westerns are not a reliable repository of progressive takes on gender roles.

It’s also true that no one is forcing the woman to watch those old horse operas. But if she is a companionable sort and her husband is on some kick of watching ancient reruns of “Have Gun/Will Travel” and “The Rifleman,” she might join him.

That doesn’t mean she will feel the need to keep her comments to herself.

Which, of course, is totally fine. What man would wish to be seen as endorsing some ’60s script-writer’s view that women are silly, ineffectual, schemers? You know, vacant hairdos incapable of running five strides without twisting an ankle and falling helplessly near the corral as the bad guy closes in?

So there’s something to be said for hearing the perspective of a woman who lived through, as one put it, the cultural brainwashing of seeing females depicted as airheaded ornaments.

“That’s what we were exposed to,” said a woman whose favorite TV Western character was the exception to the rule, the strong, elegant Victoria Barkley of “The Big Valley,” played by Barbara Stanwyck.

(By the way, the anonymous woman quoted in this column has views well known to me, as she lives at our house.)

Anyway, watching an old Western from the imagined vantage of an impressionable little girl can be eye-opening. What would that young viewer have said to her parents way back when?

“Why is that lady so utterly useless, Daddy?”

Even if one accepts that those programs were products of their period, quite a few of the female characters seemed to exhibit a limited zest for life.

Of course, some of the peripheral male characters in those shows were total troglodytes. So maybe the thing to do is turn off the TV and mosey outside for a walk.

Today’s Slice question: Take a guess. What percentage of those who cause car wrecks in Spokane lie about the circumstances?

Write The Slice at P. O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. One more week of summer.