Last Friday, I attended Rose’s screening of North by Northwest, a critically acclaimed, Hitchcock-directed film with a score of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. I of course had high expectations going in.

I was more amused than I was moved by the thriller. I was particularly shocked by the level of sexual innuendo in a movie made in the ’50s. The writers dedicated long scenes to sexually suggestive dialogue between Cary Grant’s and Eva Marie Saint’s characters. The final scene of the movie, in which a train enters into a tunnel, was quite obviously a phallic symbol. Hitchcock has admitted that this was no accident. He purposefully inserted that scene into the film to be sexually suggestive.

When I think of the ’50s, I imagine it as the era of I Love Lucy, a show in which the married main characters were shown to be, unrealistically, sleeping in separate beds. CBS, the channel on which I Love Lucy was shown, even banned the word “pregnant” from being said on the show, despite the fact that the main character was obviously expecting. However, in contrast to this rigidity and reserve of media, North by Northwest and Marilyn Monroe represented the more sexually liberal side of pop culture at the time.

In these two contrasting pop culture-spheres, we see that the role of women in film and television remained limited. Either the woman played an the obedient housewife or she played the sexual object. In sexually reserved media like I Love Lucy, female characters were portrayed mostly in domestic settings, working to please and dote upon the men in their lives, whilst being dependent and obedient upon them. More sexually liberal media like North by Northwest, instead, made women into one-dimensional characters purely present to serve as the object of the main man’s fantasies. Although the atmosphere has changed in the modern era, with more independent, complicated, three dimensional female characters taking over film and television, we must still be sensitive to presence of franchises remaining steadfast to painting women in sexist, unrealistic ways. For example, the James Bond movies continue putting a woman in every film to simply serve as an objectified sex object for Bond. These portrayals are unacceptable and we can no longer have such a primitive view of women in the media and in society. Media needs to recognize its influence on society and make its representations of women more realistic.