The Hidden Curriculum: How Sitcoms, Family Films, and Pornography Groom Us Into Objectification

^{Expression in Eyes by Yue Minjun}

The sound of television laughter shaped a generation. It was the laugh track of Friends, filling the silences after Joey Tribbiani leaned across the counter and said, “How you doin’?” It was the canned chuckles in Home Improvement when Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor grunted at his attractive assistant. It was the live audience roaring in Married… with Children as Al Bundy mocked his wife and ogled other women.

We didn’t think of it as teaching. It was background noise — something to relax to after school or share with family after dinner. But it was teaching.

The laughter told us more than when to find something funny. It told us what to accept. It told us that men’s wandering eyes were natural, that women’s role was to endure, and that objectification was not a problem but a punchline.

That is grooming. Not grooming in the narrow sense of one predator and one victim, but grooming on a cultural scale. Slowly, steadily, we were desensitized. Boundaries were tested. Harm was reframed as humor. And all of it was rewarded with laughter and belonging.

By the time pornography appeared, it didn’t feel like a rupture. It felt like the natural extension of everything we had already been taught. And the most insidious part of this grooming is how it convinced us that porn use wasn’t just common — it was inevitable.

Sitcoms: Our First Classroom in Desire

Sitcoms, those bright, 22-minute slices of life, were more than entertainment. They were classrooms in desire, constantly rehearsing scripts about men, women, and relationships.

In Friends, Joey was the charming predator — always chasing, never remembering names. Chandler was the man who mocked intimacy with sarcasm. Ross was the jealous boyfriend whose possessiveness was coded as love. For women, Rachel was valuable because she was beautiful, Monica because she was desperate to be chosen, and Phoebe because her quirks were made charming by her attractiveness.

The Simpsons offered Homer, the bumbling father who ogled other women while his wife Marge sighed with weary tolerance. Lisa, the intellectual daughter, was mocked for being “too serious,” teaching audiences that female intellect was acceptable only if it didn’t interfere with male fun.

Home Improvement carried the same script. Tim Taylor’s gaze lingered on his assistant, and his wife Jill’s role was to absorb his immaturity. Pamela Anderson’s early role as Lisa, the “Tool Time Girl,” existed for spectacle, not dialogue.

Married… with Children dispensed with subtlety altogether. Al Bundy’s misogyny was the show’s central joke. Peg was sexually needy but unattractive; Kelly was sexualized and ridiculed for stupidity. The laughter was constant, instructing us to find humor in degradation.

Later comedies recycled these dynamics in new clothes. The Office made Michael Scott’s inappropriate remarks tolerable because he was “clueless.” Modern Family turned Phil Dunphy’s awkward attraction to his daughter’s friends into running gags. The Big Bang Theory romanticized Leonard’s pursuit of Penny and reduced her to the neighbor-turned-prize.

Across decades, across genres, the lesson was the same. Men were appetites. Women were spectacles. Tolerance was mandatory. And laughter sealed the deal.

Family Films: Fairy Tales with a Hidden Script

Even the films we thought were innocent were teaching the same lessons.

In The Little Mermaid, Ariel gives up her voice — her agency — in exchange for legs. Ursula makes the bargain clear: beauty is enough, speech unnecessary. Children absorb the message that women’s worth lies in appearance, not in self-expression.

Shrek pretended to parody fairy tales, but Fiona was still valued as an image first. Lord Farquaad lusted after her photo before he met her. Even Shrek’s love for her hinged on whether he could accept her “true form.”

Transformers gave us the famous Megan Fox car scene — the camera’s slow worship of her body making her less a character than a spectacle. For boys, it was instruction in how to look. For girls, it was instruction in how to be looked at.

Even Frozen, hailed for progress, carried remnants of the old scripts. Anna’s instant attraction to Hans was mocked as naïve, but Elsa and Anna’s designs still reflected impossible standards. Even in rebellion, the mold persisted.

These films weren’t side notes. They were blockbusters. They were replayed endlessly, embedding lessons in the very fabric of childhood.

The Male Gaze: Seeing Through Someone Else’s Eyes

Film theorist Laura Mulvey put words to this dynamic in her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975). Mulvey argued that cinema trains us to adopt the male gaze — to see women as objects of vision and desire rather than as subjects of their own stories.

Think of how Transformers introduces Megan Fox, not through dialogue but through a camera crawling across her body. Think of how Ariel’s seashell bra or Jasmine’s bare midriff are exaggerated for audience pleasure, not narrative necessity. Think of Joey in Friends, scanning women with his eyes while the camera lingers just long enough for us to see as he sees.

Mulvey also noted how women’s stories in film resolve only in relation to male desire: the good woman is rewarded with love, the “bad” woman is punished. Sitcoms and rom-coms alike replicate this pattern. Even when women are central, their arcs hinge on male approval.

The power of Mulvey’s insight is this: the gaze is not neutral. It doesn’t just show us women. It trains us to see them through men’s eyes — and for women to internalize that gaze upon themselves. That is grooming at the level of perception itself.

Cultivation: When Repetition Becomes Reality

Media scholar George Gerbner called this cultivation. See something enough times, and it stops being story — it becomes reality.

Watch enough sitcoms, and you stop thinking Homer’s lust is unusual. You assume that’s just how men are. Watch enough films where women are loved for beauty and forgiven endlessly, and you begin to expect women to behave that way.

So when a teenager encounters porn, it doesn’t feel like a leap. It feels like the next stage in a story he has already been told a thousand times.

And that expectation — that of course every boy will watch porn, of course every man will desire constantly — is itself the outcome of grooming. It was never natural. It was cultivated.

Grooming in Culture: How It Works

Grooming follows a familiar pattern, whether between predator and child or culture and audience.

First comes desensitization. What feels wrong at first — a husband ogling another woman — becomes tolerable when laughter reframes it as funny.

Then comes boundary testing. Michael Scott in The Office crosses lines, but the show excuses him as ignorant. Each push extends the boundaries of tolerance.

Next comes reframing. Harassment becomes humor. Disrespect becomes charm. Objectification becomes “boys being boys.”

Finally comes reward. Each laugh, each moment of arousal, each porn climax delivers dopamine. The brain learns that objectification equals pleasure.

This is why grooming is so effective: it hides its harm behind entertainment, and it rewards compliance until it feels natural.

The Brain as Student

Neuroscience explains why grooming sticks.

At first, the amygdala may fire an alarm when boundaries are crossed — discomfort, unease. But repetition dampens the signal. The laugh track smooths over resistance.

Meanwhile, the reward system — the striatum and nucleus accumbens — fires with each joke and each cue of attraction. The brain wires objectification to pleasure.

In adolescence, the prefrontal cortex is still developing, leaving self-regulation fragile. Cultural grooming exploits this window, wiring in appetites before reflection can catch up.

The result: many men say they never “chose” porn, it just happened. And they’re right — it “just happened” because they were trained to expect it.

The Cult of “Boys Will Be Boys”

At the heart of grooming lies a creed: boys will be boys.

It functions like a cult doctrine. It excuses harmful behavior by calling it natural. It silences women by labeling resistance as uptight. It convinces men they lack agency, that desire is destiny.

Inside the cult, it feels normal. Everyone laughs, everyone agrees. Outside, it looks absurd — like waking from the Matrix and suddenly seeing the wires. The inevitability of porn, the normalization of objectification, the mantra of “boys will be boys” — all revealed as programming.

This is what awakening feels like: the realization that inevitability was always the lie that kept grooming alive.

The Double Bind: Everyone Trapped

Cultural grooming harms both men and women, locking them into impossible double binds.

Women are trained to be beautiful but not too sexual, desirable but not desiring, endlessly forgiving but never resistant. Their script is endurance.

Men are trained to desire constantly or risk their masculinity, to pursue without reflection, to mock tenderness and embrace appetite. Their script is immaturity.

Neither script leads to freedom. Both diminish humanity. Pornography doesn’t break these binds; it deepens them, reducing women further to objects and men further to compulsions.

Philosophy as Compass Out

Philosophy offers a way to name illusions and reclaim freedom.

Simone de Beauvoir showed that women are made “the Other,” defined only in relation to men. Naming this pattern allows us to see sitcom wives and girlfriends not as natural archetypes, but as cultural inventions that can be resisted.

Søren Kierkegaard warned of the despair in living only for aesthetic pleasure — chasing novelty, stimulation, and conquest. Joey’s endless pursuit of women is Kierkegaard’s aesthetic life in sitcom form, and porn is its hypercharged version. Kierkegaard knew that despair is the end of such a path, and that true life requires a leap into responsibility and purpose.

Michel Foucault revealed that power works through norms, not just laws. The laugh track is power; the inevitability of porn is power. To resist is to unmask norms, to refuse inevitability, to reject the cult’s doctrine.

Viktor Frankl insisted that between stimulus and response lies freedom. Grooming collapses this space, turning stimulus into reflex: see body → desire → consume. Recovery is reclaiming the space, choosing intimacy over objectification, meaning over reflex.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is another map. Sitcoms, films, and porn are shadows on the wall, mistaken for reality. Awakening is painful, but it reveals that the shadows were never truth.

Nietzsche warned of the herd — of following the crowd’s laughter, the cult’s slogans. Grooming is herd training. Freedom is the courage to stand apart, to revalue what the herd has taught.

Together, these thinkers form a compass: naming “the Other,” exposing despair, unmasking power, reclaiming freedom, leaving the cave, resisting the herd. Philosophy does not free us by itself — but it helps us see the illusions clearly enough to choose a different path.

Beyond the Matrix

Leaving grooming feels disorienting. Old shows lose their innocence. Jokes sting. Porn, once “normal,” reveals itself as a chain. But this discomfort is a sign of freedom — the bright light after years in the cave.

Like Neo waking in The Matrix, the moment of recognition is shocking: what you thought was reality was programming. Boys will be boys was not truth, it was the cult’s mantra. Porn was not inevitable, it was the outcome of cultural grooming.

Awakening means writing new scripts. Men as more than appetites. Women as subjects, not spectacles. Desire as intimacy, not compulsion. Pleasure as rooted in meaning, not reflex.

Conclusion: Naming Grooming as Resistance

The grooming worked because we didn’t name it. Sitcoms felt harmless. Family films felt innocent. Porn felt inevitable.

But naming is the beginning of resistance. When we name grooming, we see it for what it is: training, conditioning, manipulation. And once seen, it cannot be unseen.

The laugh track loses its power. The gaze is unmasked. The cult doctrine collapses.

And in that clarity, humanity returns — for men and women alike. Because inevitability was never real. It was only the story we were taught to believe.

And stories, once recognized, can be rewritten.

References

Beauvoir, S. de. (1949/2011). The second sex (C. Borde & S. Malovany-Chevallier, Trans.). Vintage.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Vintage.

Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s search for meaning. Beacon Press.

Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Morgan, M., & Signorielli, N. (1986). Living with television: The dynamics of the cultivation process. In J. Bryant & D. Zillmann (Eds.), Perspectives on media effects (pp. 17–40). Lawrence Erlbaum.

Kierkegaard, S. (1843/1987). Either/Or (H. V. Hong & E. H. Hong, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen, 16(3), 6–18.

Nietzsche, F. (1887/1998). On the genealogy of morals (M. Clark & A. J. Swensen, Trans.). Hackett.

Plato. (ca. 380 BCE/2007). The Republic (R. Waterfield, Trans.). Oxford University Press.