Explain this to me like I’m a child:
Henson doesn’t want Bert and Ernie to get married partly because they’re just puppets, right? And puppets shouldn’t have a sexuality or get married or anything. They aren’t people. They’re puppets.
Well, first of all, I think Jim Henson is rolling in his grave to hear his own company dismiss the Muppets are just puppets. I mean really, guys, you have to do better than that.
But it makes me wonder something…
Kermit and Miss Piggy. They had this whole romance and eventually got married, right? Where is the difference? Aren’t they just puppets and so they shouldn’t be married or have a relationship or anything?
I need someone to explain the difference to me, in very simple terms, that shows me how this is vastly difference, outside of the gender preference involved.
Eisner and Harvey award winning editor, writer and tired person. Novelist, comic writer, cat owner, NY'er.
Remember when I say that I think it’s a stupid, selfish idea for Change.org to petition Sesame Street to marry off Bert and Ernie that this is coming from a gay man. And I truly do feel it’s a selfish move, based on a long running ADULT joke seen with ADULT eyes, on a program for children.
Comparing Bert and Ernie with Kermit and Mrs. Piggy might seem like a good move, until you remember that Kermit and Piggy aren’t on Sesame Street (anymore) and have almost COMPLETELY split from the Sesame Street canon. What happens with those characters doesn’t affect Sesame Street, and vice versa.
Honestly, earnestly, for realsies suggesting that Sesame Street marry the two characters is completely out of context for that world, which is based on simplicity for CHILDREN. I’m not saying children can’t be exposed to healthy gay relationships. You know, like how Sesame Street already does? By including same-sex parents of children on their program? Yeah, it’s a newish thing, but they TOTALLY ALREADY DO THAT.
Their point with showcasing Bert and Ernie is primarily about accepting people for their differences, and that you can totally be friends with people who aren’t like you. Even if they drive you nuts, you can still be friends. From an ADULT’S point of view, this has similarities with a lot of romantic relationships people see– which is just an extension of friendships, when you think about it. But don’t most people have at least one friend they don’t ‘get’, but love regardless? Are they off hopping in their beds? No.
I have a straight friend, my best friend, who people swear we’d make an adorable couple. We lived together for a year and people joked that we were really ‘together’ but everyone knew otherwise. Now imagine if, in a real world context, people started petitioning for us to ACTUALLY get together. How ridiculous would that be? The joke would have gone too far.
Yes, the show is just a show, clearly fictional, but the sentiment still stands. It’s just out of character not just for the characters, but for the show as well. And, frankly, Bearnie (as I’m calling them for ironies sake) does a perfect job doing what Change.org is asking Sesame Street to do– LEARNING TO ACCEPT, AND APPRECIATE OTHERS FOR THEIR DIFFERENCES.
Also, everyone forgets the part of that petition asking for a transgendered character on that show, to which I readily point to Elmo.
I have to side with Mr. Alva; by making Bert and Ernie an actual gay couple, you’re saying that two guys can’t get together and share space WITHOUT being gay. I think if Sesame Street is going to make any moves towards teaching homosexual acceptance is to introduce new characters that are gay.
And I am not saying they should do this or have to do this but…
Saying that these two are X doesn’t mean that it is all or nothing. I totally reject that showing two people living together teaches that they can ONLY do so if they are in a relationship. That feels utterly false. That’s like saying “If we make the shopkeeper black and he’s the only shopkeeper we’re saying ALL SHOPKEEPERS ARE BLACK” – that is simply silly.
That said I totally think they should do it with new characters, at the least. But it is the sort of thing that should be happening.
“Now imagine if, in a real world context, people started petitioning for us to ACTUALLY get together. How ridiculous would that be? The joke would have gone too far.”
Are you kidding? That would be the funniest thing ever. Imagine a world where your life is dictated by random internet petitions. “The internet has decided that the President’s name has been changed to Poopy McPeepants, and everyone must pledge allegiance to Peepants every lunch hour, and for lunch you must eat a single French fry and two gallons of Gatorade.” And so forth.
Anyway, the reason that Kermit and Piggy can get married but Bert and Ernie can’t is that we invest more agency and humanity in Kermit and Piggy than we do in Bert and Ernie. A huge part of that investment is the romantic tension between the two. Bert and Ernie don’t have that romantic tension because they’re ‘just puppets.’ And they’re ‘just puppets’ because otherwise we’d have to put their relationship on the same level as Kermit and Piggy – not to say that we make them romantic partners, but that we grant them the same spectrum of emotion as Kermit and Piggy.
We don’t do that because they’re ‘confirmed bachelors,’ as the saying goes. To elevate them from caricature to character would be to admit the possibility of homosexuality and take it from a lame joke to a dramatic possibility. And we don’t do that because homosexuality between two human figures is totally icky. And straight love between a pig and a frog is not. Welcome to the wild world of heteronormativity.
“I have to side with Mr. Alva; by making Bert and Ernie an actual gay couple, you’re saying that two guys can’t get together and share space WITHOUT being gay.”
What? That needs… some explanation.
I don’t know… I always saw Bert and Ernie as anything but gay.
Yes, seriously.
They have more of a brotherly relationship, where Bert is the crotchety older brother and Ernie is the shit disturbing younger brother.
And for the record, I watch Sesame Street with my 3 year old on a very regular basis. I’m well versed in the personalities of those muppets to this day :P
So, I have a couple of points to make.
The first is, grownups, stop fucking politicizing things that are for kids. Sesame Street’s audience is primarily made up of pre-schoolers, very few of whom have much of a concept of what ‘married’ is, let alone gay/straight. They know kids have parents, they don’t really extrapolate that to those parents are sometimes married, though as often not, these days, and for most what they do know about marriage is that they want to marry their mom, regardless of their gender.
Second, Ernie and Bert are Sesame Street character, with said preschool audience. While Kermt started on Sesame Street, Piggy was never on SS, she was only on the Muppet show, which had a decidedly older audience.
Third, the romantic aspect of Kermit/Piggy was central to their character development so their marriage was internally consistent with the Muppet world. This is decidedly not true for B&E.
I suppose the fourth is that as I’m typing this I realize that none of this answers your question. I think all the above are good reasons for Henson Co. not to marry B&E, but that they are ‘just puppets’ is decidedly not. The real reason is likely quite simple – everyone in publicly funded area are running in fear of the nut jobs we’ve placed in charge of the federal budget, and would not do anything that would cause them to appear on the faithful’s radar.
I’ll tell you what chafes my ass with this whole “make Bert and Ernie get married” thing: THEY’RE NOT GAY. The content owners have already come out on the record more than once and said, “They’re not a couple. They’re two friends who live together.”
If they WERE gay? I wouldn’t complain if they got married (though I also wouldn’t really care if they got married either–I’m not generally a Muppet-shipper). But they’re not gay, and they’re not in a romantic relationship, so leave them alone, Change.org. How does Change.org NOT see that forcing a sexual preference upon two previously nonsexual characters actually hurts their cause rather than helps it?