“Previously educating the audience, now only educating women.”
As expected, the sketch “Can That Be the Same?”, which relied on piling up “bad memes” created by netizens to squeeze onto the stage of the Spring Festival Gala’s language programs in the Year of the Dragon, has drawn a lot of criticism for its “stereotypes” and “gender discrimination” against women. Some netizens even believe that “the malice towards middle-aged married women is too great.”
Watching the sketch for more than ten minutes from beginning to end, one couldn’t find any points of laughter. It basically just reviewed those memes created by netizens. To be honest, aside from the controversy brought about by gender concepts, the few language works that appear on the Spring Festival Gala stage nowadays are left with only embarrassment after losing laughter. It’s just that the Spring Festival Gala, which uses the father-daughter duo’s fight against the mother’s double standards as a joke, makes people feel very uncomfortable.
It’s not that netizens are too harsh. From the plot design to the lines, the entire sketch reflects the discipline of women. The father takes care of everything for his daughter, and the mother even stops her married daughter from going back to her in-laws’ house for the New Year. It’s truly rare that this kind of plot, which is obviously different from real-life experiences, can be written by the screenwriter. It can be called a new work of magical realism, just like what netizens said, “It’s also difficult for the director to pick out such a unfunny one from so many programs.”
In fact, the Spring Festival Gala’s language programs are bound by gender confrontation, which is an old tradition. Especially in terms of “hostility” towards women, one can find the objectification, stereotyping, and stigmatization of women in almost every cross-talk and sketch. They are obsessed with women’s appearance, shaping women as always being right, the petty scheming between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law, the irritability of menopausal women, and female leaders seeming like “tomboy”. From the mother’s double standards nowadays, going around in circles, the Spring Festival Gala sketches still can’t escape the shackles of stereotypes.
A few years ago, “China Women’s News” wrote an article criticizing, “Year after year, why doesn’t the Spring Festival Gala’s gender concept improve!” In the article, it is believed that since the Spring Festival Gala programs have gender discrimination, the production team should face the problem, invite gender experts to review and diagnose, cut what should be cut, and delete and modify what should be deleted. After all, a “green” Spring Festival Gala without gender discrimination is the responsibility of CCTV as a media outlet.
Unfortunately, the current CCTV Spring Festival Gala still cannot change the stereotypical definition of male and female gender roles in media communication, and cannot break the rigid role norms of language programs. In my opinion, perhaps this is precisely the helplessness of artistic creation in a rigid real environment. There are too many taboos, the attribute of educating people is too strong, and it forcibly makes language art works, which were originally only responsible for happiness, bear too many functions outside of their attributes.
In traditional society, women are always defined as being subordinate to the family rather than society. “Can That Be the Same?” is stereotyping the image of the mother from beginning to end, portraying the mother as a double-standard “unreasonable middle-aged woman” who only sees other people’s problems and not her own, completely ignoring the fact that most women in reality bear the vast majority of family responsibilities, elevating individual cases to universality for public complaints, and educating women on the occasion of the Spring Festival, making the mothers who are making dumplings in front of the screen feel how they feel?
When there are too many social taboos and concerns, the satirical attribute of language is suppressed, and the space left for art, especially on a stage like the Spring Festival Gala, can be imagined. It’s just that when the object of artistic satire has always been limited to the disabled, women, and other powerless groups who should have received more care, how can it have vitality?
From this perspective, the reduction and even the future withdrawal of language programs from the Spring Festival Gala stage may not be a defect of art itself. In a rigid reality, it is destined that works that penetrate human nature cannot be created.
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