Negative portrayals of men in media/culture is a title covered in r/MensRights Wiki, but I think the severity of this issue needs to be more reinforced.

It's not just negative portrayals that are an issue, but also glorification of missandry in media and culture.

People seem to forget that media and culture play a big part in our psyche and leave a major imprint on our viewpoints of the world. Not only is the problem severe in its effects, but it's also extremely common.

Here's an example: When you think about it, there are so many TV shows and films which portray men badly. They're not hard to count.

And they all utilise the same easy tropes to negatively portray men as being:

  • Incompetent at everything other than their careers
  • Stupid and clumsy
  • Simple
  • Lacking self-awareness
  • Immature, and portraying men with "Peter Pan syndrome"
  • Emotionally immature/unaware
  • Unstrategic
  • Loserly
  • Hypersexual, unrealistically sexually pestilent, and sexually frustrated
  • Perverse/ sexually predatorial in at least some mild way, especially for teenage boys (For example, how many times in TV have you seen ~15 y/o boys behave perverse with girls, stealing and sniffing their underwear? Yet do you know anyone who actually does this?)
  • Pedophilic, as an extension of peversion
  • Very sexually competitive, and generally way too competitive
  • Abusive
  • Sexually abusive/harassing
  • Stalker-like
  • Malicious
  • Animalistic/ bestial
  • Rapey
  • Creepy in the most exaggerated way possible
  • Obstructive to protagonists - especially if female - e.g. sexually pestilent/harassing
  • Murderous or abductors
  • Overly violent and angrily hostile
  • Deadbeat (dads usually)

99% of the time, the men who have these characteristics don't progress anywhere positively and are often the "losers" in the situation. Meanwhile, the women are often misandrists, and glorified for being so by the fact that the women succeed and fair better off than men.

While women can also be portrayed negatively, they don't get it anywhere nearly as badly or often, and the effect isn't as severe. Of course, men are not always portrayed with any of these characteristics, but it is far too common for contemporary male characters to be seen with a number of these traits.

For men, all these tropes are used to passive-aggressively degrade men. We all buy into it from an early age - both boys and girls - until we become so desensitised to it that we treat it as the norm and that this representation is acceptable/ realistic.

It needs to stop. All this tells society is that non-fictional men are inherently bad and never good or useful. The image of men and masculinity has been tainted. The effect is that men are assumed to be pedophiles when they are seen with kids! Women even call the police on men for suspecting this! Women are becoming more terrified of being raped by strangers on the streets!

Unfortunately, I have barely scratched the surface in this post. There is much more detail that needs to be covered to show how wider society, media and culture constantly defame, degrade, and demonize men.