Jeopardy has been on the air since the 1960s. Over the years, the show has used successful categories that have been worth repeating, as well as other categories that haven’t done quite so well. This week, the long-running game show aired an episode that included the category “What Women Want”. It's a category that needs to be banished to the nethersphere from here on out.
The category was supposed to include things women like. The questions included inquiries about jeans, sleepytime tea, crosswords, and my two personal favorites, vacuum cleaners and pilates. Here’s a look at a couple of the questions leading up to the highly sexist answers. Here's the one about exercise women enjoy.
And here's that other gem related to cleaning.
I’m not usually one to get up in arms about a Jeopardy category. The show is usually trying to innocuously tie in with culture, history, science, literature, math and art, not trying to make social or political statements. But honestly, that’s what makes the “What Women Want” category even worse. Someone literally sat down and created those clues thinking the average female living in the United States is only interested in her jeans, her pilates and her vaccumm. Don’t worry, they threw a crossword question in there to make sure that people know women can think, too.
I don’t even think we need to talk about all of the stereotypes that were present in the questions. They should be obvious to everyone, including the writers and workers on Jeopardy. Given how viral this story has already gone, however, it seems likely they’ll get the message and probably even offer up some sort of apology for what happened, which is fine. This whole mess is dumb and offensive, and hopefully Jeopardy has learned its lesson from here on out. Let's just hope they haven't already shot a "What Men Want" episode featuring questions related to beard trimmers, muscle cars and porn. Because that's all that men are into, right?
If you didn't get to catch Monday night's episode of Jeopardy, you can watch the "What Women Want" category in full on the next page.
