Now here's where it gets disturbing: A study found that men developed more sexist attitudes towards women after viewing scenes of sexual violence, but only if the women were passive. That's right: Watching a rape made the guys feel worse about the victims if they felt like they didn't put up enough of a fight. What the hell?

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As with most items in this article, there isn't some dark agenda at play here. Hollywood isn't secretly trying to overpopulate the world. But if a character has a uterus, TV writers have a hard time thinking of anything else to do with them. One favorite plot crisis, for instance, is the surprise pregnancy. In Sex And The City, Miranda gets pregnant and decides to roll with it after briefly contemplating an abortion (and in an episode in which Carrie talks about not wanting kids, she's portrayed as an unhinged woman with a shoe obsession). In Homeland, Carrie (Mathison) ends up having her dead terrorist lover's baby, only to dump the kid on her sister for months and then try to drown the poor girl in the bathtub after being forced to spend a single day with her. Maybe she should have pulled the trigger on an abortion instead of trying for one many trimesters too late. But deep down, even she desperately wants to be a mom, right?

Yes, showing women struggling with motherhood is a realistic reflection of a society in which it's hard to have both a career and a kid. But most of these struggles end the same way: Whenever a female character doesn't want children, a man comes along and changes her mind. In How I Met Your Mother, we spend nine seasons watching Robin come to terms with the fact that she can't have kids and doesn't especially want them anyway. Then she hooks up with Ted and gets stuck with two stepchildren. Which is ironic, considering how we learned that Ted's mom was pressured into having kids by his dad.

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Meanwhile, Lily seriously struggles with being a mother, and is sometimes tempted to bail on the whole endeavor. That's fine (and realistic), but her husband Marshall never has the same problem. All of the fathers on the show are amazing, despite the fact that they also work hard and party hard. Either they secretly have more hours in the day than the rest of us, or fatherhood is just something easy that you knock out in between trips to the bar. That may explain the trend of men who are desperate to have kids and women who are opposed to the idea (in The Big Bang Theory, Bernadette is averse to kids, but Howard desires them). Why not? On TV, being a dad is easy.

This one seems to stem purely from shows falling back on an easy, tired joke that happens to play into the worst female stereotype: that they can't function as rational humans due to their weird lady parts.

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Despite being a normal and usually tolerable monthly occurrence, you'd be hard-pressed to find a show that treats menstruation as anything other than all-out biological and emotional warfare against men. Maybe it's a side effect of mostly-male writers rooms kind of learning about menstruation in school while getting distracted by the fact that vaginas were being discussed, then never having to think about the subject again outside of bad stand-ups complaining that their girlfriends are on the rag.

So on The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon remarks that it must be Penny's time of the month whenever she snaps at him. Family Guy has continually portrayed PMS as a source of rage. In New Girl, the main character can't even function properly in an interview thanks to PMS. On Modern Family, Luke describes three female characters as "monsterating." The IT Crowd's Jen has a period so brutal and emotional that her male friends start experiencing the symptoms. And it's not only that it's a bad joke -- it's also an old joke. Married With Children had an episode where Al Bundy would rather brave a rampaging bear than a cabin occupied by three menstruating women, and Everybody Loves Raymond dedicated an entire episode to how unreasonably crazy Debra acts when on her period.

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Again, there's not some evil plan to undermine women. They're going for easy bodily function jokes, and folks acting all crazy makes for instant comedy. But there probably isn't a woman alive who hasn't gotten legitimately angry about something, only to have some smirking guy asking if it's "that time of the month." Thanks to pop culture, terrible dudes have a blank check to dismiss any woman who is ever upset about anything, ever.

We all have characters we love to imagine suffering a horrible death, like Joffrey Baratheon or Sheldon Cooper. But female characters get held to a weird double standard. The set of behaviors we'll accept from a woman on TV is weirdly narrow. The actress who played Skyler White on Breaking Bad received so much vitriol from fans that she wrote an article in The New York Times defending her character. What were Skyler's crimes? Being a wet blanket who always criticized her drug lord husband, as if she was trying to stop him from going to the bar with his bros instead of asking him to stop emotionally abusing his family while he ran a violent meth empire.

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And so many otherwise-rational men had such a burning hatred of Carrie Bradshaw that they achieved a dangerously ironic level of cattiness. She's routinely named one of the worst female characters ever conceived, for having the audacity to sleep around and be self-centered -- a trait that earns an equivalent male instant Awesome status. Oh, and for some reason, it's still considered hilarious for South Park, Family Guy and your comedy-challenged friends to compare actress Sarah Jessica Parker to a horse, because apparently it's perpetually 2002 and horses are a mythical animal no one's actually seen.

It's not just viewers who have female characters under constant scrutiny. Whether it's the questionable journalistic ethics of House Of Cards' Zoe Barnes, Homeland's Carrie Mathison sleeping around, the victimhood of Mad Men's Betty Draper, or the unspeakable ugliness of Girls' Hannah Horvath, TV critics love to pick female characters apart for ... not being perfect, we guess? Meanwhile, Walter White straight-up tries to kill a child and he's still simply a "badass."

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It's not that "badass" female characters don't exist. Look at two currently popular fictional universes full of the walking dead: Game Of Thrones and whatever that popular zombie show is called. Arya, Ygritte, Daenerys, Brienne, Michonne, Carol, Maggie, Sasha, other women with now-obscure names which will be dominating playgrounds 10 years from now ... they're all "strong" female characters who figuratively and literally kick ass.

Now, we fully support any woman who wants to professionally murder zombies. But any character who doesn't become an emotionless killer ends up loathed by the fans. Lori Grimes had the audacity to make bad decisions and demonstrate extreme emotion in the middle of the zombie apocalypse, and everyone hated Sansa Stark for being a teenage girl who somehow didn't grasp political complexities or have the desire to stab dudes in the throat. Sure, she survived a series of incredibly tenuous situations by being adaptable and emotionally manipulative, but that's stereotypical "girl" stuff, and we hate that shit. If women are to be heroic, they need to be chopping off heads. You know, man stuff.

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Studies back this up -- we want female characters who fit a "superwoman ideal." They should have the "manly" traits of assertiveness and aggression, but we're turned off if they don't hit feminine beauty norms and show at least some vulnerability. That's the difference: It's fine for male characters to have a single manly trait (he's the badass, he's the smart guy) but if women can't do everything, then they're not good enough.

So how did things get like this?