86 | 29, pp. 75-95 | doxa.comunicación

July-December of 2019

Survival in the TV series “La que se avecina” of the stereotypes against women denounced by Simone de Beauvoir

ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978

college girl and it will be all benefit to you. But if a guy comes, he’s going to “prick” your wife. Another of the men says that in “life is either being the follower or the leader” and it is a choice. They believe that carrying out domestic work is a lack of authority for the male.

Women, on their side, criticize another protagonist whom they call “whore” because she had had her fourth child out of marriage and also describe the child’s appearance as “ugly as hell”. The female character who plays the “saint” woman tells that “she has been punished by God for what she has done”.

The following scene reproduces the third stereotype by which they “consider triumphs as a men’s thing”. The wife of four and whose husband has taken parental leave returns from work in a clothing store and the husband who takes care of the children tells her that he wants to leave the house and go back to the office because he “needs to be a person again” and that his job is more important than that her wife’s job and for that reason he has to go back to work away from home. Besides, he accuses her of sleeping with her boss and getting clothes as a present from him.

The chapter of the fourth season starts with a statement of the first stereotype about the inability to be self-sufficient and the need of a man in their lives. They relate to the dependences we keep in order to maintain a certain type of life. Another new neighbour insults one who plays a model calling her a “slut and whore”. The “failed actress” also insults three neighbours by calling them: the old granny, Doña Croqueta (a grotesque American tourist) and Sister Quisquilla (a very catholic housewife). She calls them “residential housewives” and their answer to her is that she is a bit snobbish.

In chapter five, the male character characterized by his despise for women and immigrants, refers to the neighbour who is a psychologist, lives alone and has an appearance matching the current criteria of beauty, with the qualifiers of “redhead bitch” and slut. “This one sleeps around easily”. The male protagonists make prostitution as the final prize to satisfy their bad vibes. This is reflected in phrases when the character who just ended his relationship with a girl, they call a “red-haired slut” says “now I can make my life as a single man” and the other one says “let’s go to the prostitutes”. This character is obsessed with finding if his neighbour has slept with the president and he says sentences like, have you slept with the president? How’s her pussy? The president has brought up the evil side.

This character takes every opportunity to call women “whores”. And he gives a child some advice: “You, never get married! You, whores, eventually will become cheaper with time”. Lesbians are called pervert. They are an indirect example of stereotype 2. It is not the woman who considers herself inferior, but the man who considers himself superior. All these slogans and ways of seeing women as inferior human beings are confirmed at the bar they go to and where the friend-waiter reinforces his belonging to the clan in which men consider themselves superior, by asking his friends: “Are you a lion or are we kicking you out of the herd?” with all the meanings it can carry.

In this meeting, the father of the “four children” says that “my mother is not a slut like the Cuqui” (his ex-wife), that he doesn’t want to go back to the Cuqui, his ex, and he wants to be “a lively fucker”.

The three young girls and the mother of the four children speak in the next scene of the psychologist’s possible relationship with the married man doing household chores. The psychologist and another of the girls insult each other and enter a “neighbourhood” fight for this married neighbour. Stereotype 8 is obvious (erotic transcendence consists in becoming preyed upon), while the protagonist who is the Saint labels her as “nymphomaniac”, used as an insult while