by Tieran Harvey
My third grade birthday party was How I Met Your Mother themed. The show aired when I was two and ended when I was ten. My family watched every single episode and even rewatched favorites religiously. During this adolescent transition I accidentally let How I Met Your Mother teach me about life. I only discovered this when I rewatched the show this year. I know that our consciousness is built from all of our experiences combined but I swear I can see the specific lesions that I still hold with me in the episodes. The show tackles dating, friendships, and career in your 20s. The show taught me lessons like “nothing good happens after 2am” and exes can never truly just be friends; ideals like these have been ingrained for years. However, when I rewatched the show I realized I had somehow forgotten the insane early 2000s beauty standards that are harped on time and again. Barney and Ted are obsessed with women but only when they fit the standard of young, gorgeous, and very skinny. Barney, as an exaggeration of the horny bachelor of the era, was constantly outlining what was okay for women to look like and act like. However, these ideals were rooted in the truths understood in the culture and were absorbed by my impressionable mind. In an innocent effort to understand why we were laughing, I began to understand what adults and the show thought about women. Watching back I specifically remembered trying to wrap my head around the scene where Barney’s perfect woman had a pair of boobs on her back. I sat at my desk in 3rd grade pondering and pieced together everything I knew about sex and attraction and still could not figure out this mysterious metaphor. At the end of the day, I think that there is merit in rewatching the shows
that built your worldview. I stand by the lessons that How I Met Your Mother taught me about love and life at an impressionable age but I still feel like maybe Disney Channel would have been better for an eight year old.
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