After a night out last weekend with my roommates, we decided to ‘post-game’ by watching something on TV before the Domino’s we had ordered had gotten too stale to really eat anymore and we all went to bed. We looked through a couple of shows- then stumbled across a perfect mix of casual viewing, nostalgia, and low-stakes entertainment: SpongeBob SquarePants.
The show was my favorite as a kid, and it’s one of those rare exceptions where re-watching it at an older age doesn’t really change your understanding of it much- with a few exceptions. Ironically enough, these exceptions would hit me soon into watching a couple of random episodes: episodes that all maintained an interesting pattern of gender and gender roles.
More specifically, throughout the show, Spongebob, is constantly put in situations that not only diminish any sort of masculinity he has but work to feminize the character. He is rarely depicted as a masculine figure, and often when paired with other characters resembles a more feminine version. For example, in the episode, “Rock-A-Bye Bivalve”, Spongebob and Patrick play a married couple that raise a baby clam. Patrick plays a stereotypical working man, coming home from his ‘job’ in a shirt and a tie, barely helping raise the child and clean the house- jobs that have typically not been assigned to men under the patriarchy. Spongebob, on the other hand, plays a woman who takes on these roles of raising the child and working at the house. At the surface, this looks like a funny gaff put into a children’s show to put Spongebob in a dress and get a laugh, and to this, I encourage the classic question: “so what?”
To explore an answer to this question, I’d like to go back to our class discussion regarding phallocentrism in film and media. As a class, we came to the consensus that it is difficult to find examples of films/tv shows that are not phallocentric. This scenario provides a unique response to this consensus, given that as we know it, Spongebob is a male character depicting a woman, so for me this begs the question whether it reduces any sort of phallocentrism, or rather, exacerbates it.
To this, we must understand why Spongebob is put in these situations himself. Why is Spongebob the one character whose masculinity is constantly disregarded. There are plenty of other examples of Spongebob ‘playing’ a woman by wearing feminine clothes. In fact, it’s quite often. So, why does this happen so often compared to other characters?
These questions have complicated answers, but a key concept in understanding Spongebob’s gender agency resides in a major recurring motif of the show: youth. He is the youngest of the main characters, and his youth is preserved by several factors. One of which, and ultimately the most important, is that he does not have his boating or (drivers) license. For most of us in the real world, this is a freedom that comes with aging and adulthood. To own or drive a car is a symbol of freedom resembling our maturity/ respect gained from the law due to our age and knowledge. For Spongebob, he cannot enjoy these freedoms, and given that he never passes his driver’s test, he is forever a boy. Because of this, Spongebob’s masculinity is severly limited. After all, he is just a boy, and so his masculinity can only go so far.
This motif of youth ultimately serves as a way to justify Spongebob’s femininity throughout the show, and the recurring pattern we see of him dressing up as a woman or even playing a spouse.
This is such an interesting analysis into Spongebob. One thing that is really interesting is how the show plays off of the fact that they quite often has the butt of the joke being Spongebob in a dress. The one time I can think of that is when Girly Teengirl goes to Pearl’s slumber party and Pearl slams the door on her face because she thinks it was just Spongebob pretending to be a girl but in reality, it was a separate person all together.