The Dennis Gaze 

            It is my understanding from the world around us that women are looked at as more or less here to make the men happy and depend on him. This patriarchal ideology is not all that accurate in some cases. I also don’t agree with it, but this ideology is forced on us in almost all of the main stream media we see today for example Hodkinson quotes Dworkin, MacKinnon, on page 222:

“Other theorists have focused on more every day mainstream media depictions, which presented women as subordinate and to depend on men…”

This is again focusing on the male dominant norm that women fall under in today’s media.

Despite the prevalence of this I believe I have found one exception that somewhat challenges this norm. Episode 10 season 5 of Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia, In this episode one of the writers of the show Glenn Howerton aka Denis, develops the D.E.N.N.I.S system. What is this you ask? Well according to Denis it’s “a system for getting any chicks undying love and emotion, for life”.

            Lets start with the D of this system, and yes this is an acronym used to get women. In the words of Dennis the “systemic approach” or learnable step-by-step approach to getting any girl starts with Demonstrating your value to the women. In this case Kayle the pharmacist is Dennis’s target. He demonstrates his value to her by asking her to fill a prescription for his “very ill grandma” this, in Dennis’s mind is showing her he’s a caring good guy. Then comes the E in this system, which stands for Engaging physically. This is when Dennis knowingly takes the woman to a closed restaurant so he can het her back to his place and engage her physically.

            Then there’s the N, this is where things get pretty stereotypical on the man’s side of things. The N stands for Nurture her dependence this in Dennis’s head means scare the shit out of her on the phone so she comes running to you for protection because she cant protect her self. When Dennis introduces this strategy to the guys they all start acting like monkeys, flexing their muscles and literally making monkey noises. Now this might be an over exaggeration or even an under exaggeration, the point is it is assumed that in the male culture we act like a primitive species when it comes to women. We resort to things like need of ownership and or the expectation that the woman WILL depend on the man in barbaric ways. I believe us men are stereotyped like this because of the mainstream media and the way it is portraying femininity vs. masculinity as an uphill battle on the feminine part. Which is portrayed very creatively within this episode of its always sunny, when Dee tells ben (her online soldier boyfriend) that she’s independent and can handle her self while shortly after falling down a huge dirt hill, then crawling back up still chanting “I can do it by my self I don’t need help”. This, in my mind semiologically depicts the constant down hill up hill battle for respect for women in the mainstream media and over all culture.

            Getting back on track with the D.E.N.N.I.S acronym, I believe we left off on the N, which has quite an interesting meaning in the sociopathic mind of Dennis. Which is Neglect, by this he goes on in telling the guys that if you completely neglect her and make her fell threatened, for example with a phone call pretending to be a serial killing neighbor (which he did in the previous letter N) she will come running to him again for help but he won’t be there. This brings us on to our next letter which is I, inspire hope by after completely neglecting her you come back and bring her hopes up. Then quickly after engaging her physically again you, S, separate entirely.

This overly complicated, psychotic way to get a girl I feel is purposely put in place by the writers for a couple reasons. One it’s blatantly obvious that its really messed up to do this to a woman and chances are its not going to work. Two, instead of discretely pointing out the flaws in in modern media, the male gaze and the way women are wrongly portrayed in out society, I feel that the writers made the D.E.N.N.I.S acronym not out of tips to getting a woman, but out of obvious flaws in things such as the male gaze that are going unnoticed to the greater society. I believe they brought these flaws to fruition to make a mockery of what is happening to the societal relationship between men and women. I also believe they wanted us viewers to see how lost in the mainstream media we’ve all become. Which is why when everyone on the cast try’s Dennis’s system it fails miserably and they all end up looking like a bunch of primitive cavemen trying to get a women.