Last night, Family Feud held a mirror up to nature and revealed that, sadly, it’s somehow still a chill notion to suggest on national television that “a woman’s job” should entail a fabulous cocktail of “cooking, cleaning, nursing, hairdressing, domestic duties, dishes, receptionist [work] and washing clothes”, served perfectly garnished to her husband on his arrival home of an early evening, just in time for Family Feud.
Those were the answers elicited in popular order and in response to one of the typically inane surveys that comprised the liberally-applied make-up of last night’s Family Feud episode – one that unsurprisingly invoked a considerable amount of ire and accusations of misogyny after woodland sprite Grant Denyer asked contestants to “name something people think is a woman’s job.”
Honestly, how ‘Blow Jobs’ didn’t make the survey responses – all other answers considered – is beyond me.
Family Feud, which Denyer describes in his introduction as a show in which “two families answer some simple questions to help us work out which of them has a better grasp on how their fellow Australia thinks,” also asked its audience to “name something people think is a man’s job.”
‘Correct’ answers to that quandary included building, mowing the lawns, taking out the bins, being a mechanic, tradie, fixer of things, carpenter and plumber.
If this is how our “fellow Australians think”, it’s a very underwhelming assessment of our tendency for the kinds of thought that would now even appear to be out of date if they appeared on an episode of Mad Men; not even a new episode at that, just one being replayed for the fourth time on SBS2 at 11:30pm.
Granted, 100 people is a very small sample size, and you’d really have to hope that the spread is not indicative of anything more than a very niche sub-subset of Australians who would consider Family Feud a viable light entertainment option. It is, after all, Family Feud, and not Question Time. The questions themselves are also drawn from an international Family Feud database.
If anything, what this whole exercise in mediocrity does is call into question the chain of command at Family Feud HQ and Channel 10, or whoever thought that a) writing those survey questions and b) allowing those answers (and the show) to go to air was a great idea in the first place.
This relatively minor mishap is less an indictment of the people who derive some kind of satisfaction from participating in Family Feud surveys, and more one of the producers, whose ineptitude apparently knows no bounds. We can all do better than this.
Meanwhile, on Family Feud in the States overnight, be thankful that you aren’t on the receiving end of this:
UPDATE: Network Ten have released a statement that reads as follows:
“Network Ten apologises for including two questions relating to what people think is a man’s job and a woman’s job in the episode of Family Feud which aired last night on Network Ten. The questions were ill advised and should not have been included in the show. The survey results are determined by 100 people and we understand they are not reflective of all Australians.”
