Running Head: Harmful stereotypes discouraged by Colombian soup operas.

Colombian Soup Operas must discourage harmful stereotypes

Sebastián Lozada Char
Universidad del Norte.

Author Note
Sebastián Lozada, Psychology department, Universidad del Norte
Correspondence concerning this paper should be addressed to Sebastian Lozada
Undergraduate School of Psychology. Universidad del Norte, Km 5 Via Puerto Colombia.
Email: sebastianlozada@uninorte.edu.co.
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The importante of Soup Operas on the life of the average Colombian family has been

growing insanely over the pass of the decades. The ritual of, between the hours of the

dinner, sitting on the couch with all the family to see the Soup Opera of the night, it’s

something that it can’t be replaced easily. This is why the content of this soup operas

matter, until the point that the thing we see on these soup operas can be an influence for the

little kids that are seeing it with their families.

By this reason, on this essay we are going to talk about how the content of soup operas can

be influenced by the general problematics of the society, and even discourage harmful

stereotypes like machism, sexism, type of jobs women/men perform, etc.

As we usual see on average TV shows, many of them have a plot around themes like:

drugs, prostitution, a lot of sexism, etc. Normally these shows are scheduled to be seen on

familiar schedule, and like the Albert Bandura’s experiment of the Bobo doll researched, ‘’

It shows that people not only learn by being rewarded or punished (behaviorism), but they

can also learn from watching somebody else being rewarded or punished (observational

learning).’’ (1963).

But in the case of the soup operas, more specifically Colombian soup operas, the central

plot of the stories don’t go on about these controversial themes, quite the opposite, it

develops around themes that are normally stereotypes, and these soup operas want to

discourage them with the purpose of doing that the people can see this things as a normal

thing and not discriminating it like we usually do.

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This is the case of the soup opera ‘’Betty la fea’’, the most successful soup opera of the

world. ‘’La Fea (the Ugly One) broke every telenovela stereotype (there was none of the

usual handsome-richman-falls-in-love-with-beautiful- poor-girl-who-turns-out-to-be-the-

long-lost-daughter-of-a-powerful- tycoon, etc.), and in the process left a whole army of

voluptuous, bottle-blond tearjerker heroines biting the dust.’’ (Ruiz, A. 2006).

Betty La Fea could make what the usual TV show with a lot of aggressive and crude

content between each episode can't do, being the most successful soup opera with a content

against usual stereotypes.

On the other hand, we have soup operas that can’t be placed with these kind of non-

discriminating-content, quite the opposite they feed the mass need of see on a screen a lot

of blood, discrimination, crime and obviously, stereotypes. An example of this is the

Mexican ‘’narco-dramas’’, as it said by Hamburguer, E.: ‘’with plots that involve "corrupt

police and army, morally ambivalent drug dealers, and peasants or urban dwellers looking

to survive any way they can". (2009.)

But against Mexican soup operas, Colombian soup operas mostly have a non-aggressive

content that on a lot of situations can discourage a lot of stereotypes without involving

themes than can’t be adequate for the familiar schedule. In Colombia, like in all Latin

America, there are a lot of stereotypes that must be deleted, and that’s why the soup operas

may influence on these type of discrimination. And at least, we have been improving our

behavior around the world, breaking a lot of stereotypes even around of, j
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