Acceptable Feminine Goals/Playing With

• Basic Trope: Life goals expected from a fictional woman for her to be considered a "true" woman.
• Played Straight:
  • Alice is a doctor, but is only shown treating children.
  • Bernice wants to be a babysitter.
• Exaggerated:
  • Alice is a doctor and refuses to offer help to anyone over 12 years old.
  • Bernice quit university and vowed never to have children in order to have more time for babysitting.
• Justified:
  • Alice is a doctor, but is only shown treating children because she works in a children's hospital.
  • Bernice wants to be a babysitter because she's underage and can't be legally employed in her country.
  • Alice comes from a culture that considers gender roles to be Serious Business.
• Inverted:
  • Alice is a pediatrician, but wants to become a merchant marine.
  • Bernice is a babysitter, but wants to mow lawns.
• Subverted:
  • Alice wants to be a pediatrician, but on her way to get her licensing for pediatrics, she witnesses a car accident and decides to be an EMT instead...
  • Bernice becomes a babysitter, only to realize that the money is poor and the clientele is awful, so she decides to mow lawns instead...
• Double Subverted:
  • ...but is only shown rescuing children.
  • ...and only mows the grass in elementary school playgrounds, so kids have a safe place to play.
• Deconstructed:
  • Alice wants to be a doctor, but is pressured into pediatrics because she's a woman and is therefore best suited to treating children, and Alice explores the reasoning behind it.
  • Bernice wants to mow lawns, but is pressured by her parents to babysit because pushing a lawnmower is too much hard work for a girl, and Bernice must find a way to deal with it.
• Reconstructed: Alice decides that she should choose the way she wants her career to go, and not her parents. She returns to medical school, and trains to become a doctor.
• Zig Zagged: The story follows Alice in a number of careers in her lifetime. She goes to medical school to becomes an EMT, but later has kids, quits her job, and is a Housewife. She decides to go back to work, but during an economic downturn, so the best job she can get is a school nurse. She becomes frustrated in the job after a few years, goes back to school, and becomes a brain surgeon. She has a fulfilling career as a brain surgeon for 15 years, but after that, she finds it too stressful for her old age, so she retires and becomes a school nurse again.
• Lampshaded: "Alice, you don't need to hone your surgery skills. Being a successful homemaker is all that a woman should aim for in life."
• Averted:
  • Alice is a doctor, and is shown treating people of all ages.
  • Bernice wants to be a scheduling consultant for busy parents.
• Enforced:
  • Alice wants to be a doctor, but is only shown treating children because the company that produces the show didn't allow the writers to show a sick or injured adult.
  • Bernice wants to be a babysitter because her show is Merchandise-Driven and the children she babysits are an easy way to introduce new characters for future toy lines.
• Invoked:
  • Alice is a doctor, but only treats children in order to appear more feminine for her friends.
  • Bernice is forced into babysitting because she lives in a society that prevents women from attaining a better career.
• Defied: "I don't have to conform to your idea of femininity. Just because I want to be a surgeon doesn't make me any less of a woman!"
• Discussed: "And exactly why should I quit being a successful surgeon?" "Because you're a woman and your role in society is to make babies, Alice."
• Conversed:
  • "It's scary how an individual woman is still looked at weird whenever she veers away from homemaking."
• Played For Laughs:
  • Alice is a doctor and only treats children, but she's hilariously bad with kids.
  • Bernice wants to be a babysitter because she wants to dig through strangers' stuff while they're not home.
• Played For Drama: Alice is a doctor who only treats children, but they are from poor families and she would gain money and recognition if she would treat wealthy adults.

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