"Dad's a chick!"

As the creator of the ever popular show Family Guy, Seth McFarlane has a knack for exaggerating situations to poke fun at the standards in today's society. One particular episode entitled "I am Peter, Hear Me Roar," places emphasis on the typical ideas that people have about women. In this episode, Peter is forced to attend a women's retreat after making a joke about women to a female coworker who decides to press sexual harassment charges on him. After attending the retreat, Peter returns home with all the characteristics that are found to be typical in women, according to traditional ideas. From his exclamation that "Oh fudge! I broke a nail!" to arguing that The View be on for 3 hours per day, Peter is a walking stereotype. This episode is interesting in that Seth McFarlane highlights the stereotypes about women through Peter's extreme exaggeration of such characteristics. This is meant to be a comical presentation of these stereotypes in that they really do not exist in that form anymore. While it is typical for a woman to admire her newborn baby or to fight for equality between the genders, McFarlane takes it a step further when Peter attempts to actually breast feed his baby. Nowadays, women are not as emphatic about broken nails or daytime television nor do they walk around spouting about equality, at least typically. I feel that this episode makes an attempt to highlight these characters in a man for the purpose of emphasizing the difference between the genders. I do not feel that McFarlane is attempting to highlight the importance of equality in this episode, but that he is rather trying to emphasize the difference in typical gender characteristics. By going overboard with Peter' feminine traits when he returns home from the retreat, McFarlane makes it seem ridiciulous that a man or even a woman should be so emotional and oversensitive. The other female characters in the show are not as extremely feminine, especially Lois who is a housewife yet holds none of the bizarre feminine characteristics that Peter does after the retreat. McFarlane does make a statement about masculinity, however, when the episode ends with Lois getting into a fight with another woman and Peter is aroused at the sight and brings Lois home to bed. This makes a bold statement about men as being perverted and simple while simultaneously making women seem more sophisticated than what the stereoptypical ideas about women might suggest.