Free How I Met Your Mother and Philosophy by Lorenzo von Matterhorn

had a free attitude towards sex and one-night stands. She’s not only able to separate the physical from the emotional, that’s actually her involuntary response. She views sex as a physical desire, a need that’s totally separate from romance or love and therefore does not require any sort of emotional connection. In other words, she approaches sex in the same no-strings-attached, Path B way that Barney does.
    As a man, Barney’s liaisons are overlooked and sometimes even applauded by his friends, but not so for Robin. Instead she’s judged for her open attitude towards sex divorced from love. She’s called ‘cold’ or sometimes far worse. In “The Naked Man,” Marshall announces he’s “calling slut,” labeling Robin in an extremely derogatory manner because the group discovered she had a one-night stand with a man she has no interest in seeing again. It’s clearly sexism at its height, but rather than take up the feminist torch Robin quickly succumbs to peer pressure. She feels so badly about herself that she attempts to seriously date the man and pretend to have feelings for him just to save face until Marshall takes back his claim that she’s a slut.
    â€œThe Naked Man” illustrates the double standard that exists for men and women, but more specifically it highlights how even Robin, a woman who presents herself as a forward-thinking feminist, still feels compelled to conform to the traditionally approved path for women.
    Daddy Issues
    Just so we won’t miss the ideological war happening within her, the writers compound Robin’s struggle with the history of her upbringing. With a domineering single father who wanted a son and raised her as a typical boy, Robin was automatically pushed into feminist thinking from a very young age. The abnormal, exaggerated experiences of her youth set up immediate turmoil for Robin as to gender roles and what a woman should want out of life.
    In “Happily Ever After” and “Who Wants to Be a Godparent?” Robin talks about the horrors of her young life and how all signs of traditional femininity were punished. In “Mystery vs. History” she even tells of how she was literally left alone in the wilderness and forced to become independent and self-reliant simply to survive the ordeal. Those are just a few of the episodes that in sometimes comical, sometimes heartbreaking, but always unmistakable ways demonstrate how Robin has been programmed since childhood to believe that all “girly” traditional things are bad, and has instead been shoved down a path of unrelenting self-sufficiency with a complete focus on career.
    Do we all have a maniacal father who forces us to burn our feminine clothes in an oil drum, pushes us out of a plane over a wolf-infested forest, and sends us off to military school if we’re caught kissing our crush? Do all of our friends “call slut” and instead promote saying “I love you” on the very first date? Of course not, but by placing Robin squarely in the middle, caught between the two opposing philosophies, the writers create the instantly recognizable struggle facing countless modern women over which version of themselves they can and should be.
    I Never Said Never
    At the same time that Robin is tugged in opposite directions by friends, family, and society both to remain a stanchly independent, career-focused feminist and to bow to the time-honored love and marriage lifestyle, her dilemma is further complicated by the fact that she feels a secret desire for some of those traditional things herself, leading to an increased sense of guilt and confusion.
    In the second half of “Nothing Good Happens After 2 A.M .,” when Robin goes home to her empty apartment, she realizes that those kindergarteners were right; she is lonely. It’s that loneliness that compels her to start a relationship with the very conventional Ted in the