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Masculinity In Ted Mosby's How I Met Your Mother

442 Words2 Pages

The central concept of How I Met Your Mother sitcoms is Ted Mosby’s attempts to achieve maturity or adult masculinity through marriage and children, he is not forced into monogamy, but actively and desperately desires it. The audience is patiently awaits to see when ‘destiny’ will united Ted with ‘the one’ to assure his happy fairytale ending. Ted continuously imagines his future wedding and life as a husband and father in fear of being ‘weird uncle Ted’ or living alone being ‘eaten by cats.’ Considering the postfeminist perspective, Ted’s persona is presented by the sitcom as a reconstructive new single man, in other words, he represents an emerging social formation of masculinity, one that stereotypically has the desires and aspirations that might traditionally have been regarded to be ideals of a women. Throughout the series, Ted is explicitly and implicitly associated with the ‘single girl,’ but with a gender reversal. Additionally to Ted’s desperation for love and companionship presuming qualities of a female, the other characters frequently mock Ted’s anxieties in a way that references many anxieties aligned with female fertility. For example, the group overtly teases Ted that his ‘ovaries are shrinking’ or his ‘Tedological clock’ is ticking (‘The Duel’, 1: 8; ‘Milk’, 1: 21). These ironic and derogatory terms equates Ted’s panic with female …show more content…

How I Met Your Mother is set in a transitionally state between Ted talking to his children in 2030 and the retelling of the many stories of his single adult life mainly set in 2005-2013. The children are the reassurance to the audience that Ted obtained his happy ending and the only unknown throughout the sitcom is who the mother of Ted’s children is. Thus, the audience knows from the beginning that Ted’s singlehood is only temporary and the children are textual proof that Ted has found his ‘one,’ and fulfilled his marital

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