Dramas Keep Showing Us Hapless Men — and Hypercompetent Women (NYTimes)

Hot-Celebration-1524 · 2026-01-18T23:03:47+00:00

Rather than grappling with gender norms or gender ideology, the author waves it away as a response to authoritarianism and “the way the world feels” as if it just fell out of the sky. Most people don’t realize that cultural and lifestyle media exists largely to launder trends by making them seem normal and inevitable rather than deliberately shaped.

PassengerCultural421 · 2026-01-19T00:07:27+00:00

And then some feminists have the audacity to complain about men weaponzing incompetence and women being pressured to be super responsible in society. But still portray men as clueless and women as extremly competent their media though. So which is it?

In other words it's Schrodinger's Feminism.

Subpar-Amoeba · 2026-01-18T23:46:50+00:00

if you've never read the comments on a NYTimes article related to gender, they can be astonishingly caustic

They really are. There has to be a double standard in reviewing comments because many of the top-voted are often openly misandric. More frightening, I find a recent trend of female supremacy thinking driven by younger people: women are inherently smarter, have superior self-control, some real Nazi brain science shit that is apparently fine with the Grey Lady.

During the past year I have taken to copying the entire comments section of NYT gender rage bait articles, feeding them into ChatGPT, and asking it to summarize frequent comment patterns to try to convince myself I am not hallucinating this.

It's interesting that legacy media often blames 'the algorithm' in social media for our ragebait epidemic, but old-fashioned newspaper headline writing along with first mover recommendation advantage in the NYT comments produces more extreme results.

gigglephysix · 2026-01-19T01:11:19+00:00

i remember in my mind calling this type of character a '90s bumbling unthreatening idiot' during my student years and never liked it. i'm a woman btw, it wasn't because i personally felt offended - it's because i perceived it as obnoxious messaging not affording dignity to the portrayed.

so it's been 35 years of this now. still feeling the same..

Nobleone11 · 2026-01-18T23:43:24+00:00

Reading this article stirs all kind of rage inside me.

I hate this culture. I hate the current generation of people in it.

Such a vile, revolting time.

Get me out of here so I don't have to find myself enduring inner torture constantly with society throwing the "Women are wonderful" effect in my face and supporting the girls and women who hurt me in my past.

Endorsing them.

What do I do? What the hell do I do? How can I possibly stand existing if this keeps up?!

:(

AriochBloodbane · 2026-01-19T03:20:48+00:00

The problem is that it is not only TV. There is a large majority of women that actually believe the propaganda of smart women / dumb men and it has been there for decades. Dunning Kruger effect is a powerful drug lol

Specific_Detective41 · 2026-01-19T03:31:16+00:00

It's been like that for over a decade now in media. What's also typical of legacy media slop journalism is that they endorsed this for years now this journalist plays the game of plausible denialbility and acts as if it happened out of thin air.

eldred2 · 2026-01-19T01:05:29+00:00

A big problem with this is far to many people treat the fiction they see on TV as if it were reality.

TheJumboman · 2026-01-19T09:10:10+00:00

Ugh. Reminds me of the other stereotype I just keep seeing in movies. The gritty, bitter man who quietly suffers loss (a divorce, a death, a dream), drinks too much, is mean, doesn't talk about his feelings, is a total mess, but somehow plows through and gets the job done. Every time I start a new Netflix show it's this guy, and I've just stopped watching all of them, it's exhausting.

Former_Range_1730 · 2026-01-19T17:50:03+00:00

These dramas are actually damaging everyone. As, only a small demographic of women are hypercompetent. But now almost all women believe they are super human. And smart men, the men they want, sees this, and treat these women accordingly. And then these women wonder why men won't treat then more that a situationship/

DeterminedStupor · 2026-01-19T19:58:28+00:00

That’s why last year’s movie I’m Stilll Here (dir. Walter Salles) is a bit refreshing. Sure, the movie has “a strong woman” as the protagonist, but the father character is also portrayed as competent and loving. No reason we can’t have both really.

Mickenfox · 2026-01-19T20:08:58+00:00

Sitcoms are filled with men who are either dumb, assholes, or losers (think Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin, Moe Szyslak, Comic Book Guy, George Costanza) and practically no female equivalents. The only ones I can think if is Patty and Selma, and now Elle in Family Guy.

Well, losers are funny, and I'm guessing people just complained if you made them women, but didn't if you make them men, so that was the path of least resistance.

Lets_Remain_Logical · 2026-01-19T11:00:46+00:00

Hollywood since years now is getting : 0 dollars of my money. Including the streaming platforms and YouTube ads. Please do the same.

Phuxsea · 2026-01-20T05:19:22+00:00

Interesting article. It's notable that when men save women, it's "damsel in distress" but when women save men, it's "mommy figure".

Enzi42 · 2026-01-20T12:51:09+00:00

This isn't really related to the article itself (so please forgive me for going on a tangent) but more about a pheneomon I've observed for some time, and the comments section of that article is rife with it.

There is an incredibly irritating and I'd even say borderline immoral thing a sizeable number of women do in these gender politics discussions, something that I call "Stolen Terror" named after the practice of Stolen Valor.

When Stolen Terror is at play, the woman (or male sympathizer) employing it will cite examples of women being harmed as a matter of social policy...except those examples will be from decades or even centuries prior to the era we live in now.

Not only will they bring these ancient atrocities into modern discourse, they do so as a defense for misandric beliefs, rhetoric and even actions. They defend the idea of women who never experienced these things taking "revenge" on men and boys who never committed those wrongs because neither party was born then.

Now, there is validity in examining how old ills can affect modern people, especially if the harms done are passed from one hand to another over the generations. We do this with things like slavery/Jim Crow, effects of war, family histories of abuse, etc.

But in these Stolen Terror situations, people are literally saying "Because Great-Great-Granny didn't was considered near property, I have a right to hate my peers in this generation, and you need to accept that!"

Worse still, (although I did not see it in that particular comment section) people who espouse this doctrine will use terms like "generational trauma" to excuse what is in reality the ideology of blood fueds, utterly mutilating the meaning and causing ugly ripple effects down the road.

All that is to say that a lot of people in the comments of thus article seemed to be using that tactic to excuse or cheer the negative depictions of men in movies and I wanted to draw attention to it, since I've seen this "reasoning" for years.

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RuncibleVorpal · 2026-01-20T13:52:51+00:00

Has been so for quite some time, in truth, especially in sit-coms - thinking of the Simpsons. I'm not really sure where this idea of men being shown more positively than women (a cornerstone of patriarchal culture) actually comes from, in the main. Sure, we can find some examples, but it is hardly the norm. Adverts also contain many examples

Grand-Feeling-9301 · 2026-01-20T19:02:33+00:00

Culture war garbage that I'm always annoyed to see this sub fall for.

Not only does it misrepresent some of the very work it's critiquing in the article - it ignores the wide range of sheer content that is out there. There is no shortage of competent men on TV and in film. The culture war is just convincing you there is.

FightHateWithLove · 2026-01-19T12:45:15+00:00

This was also like, every sitcom ever except I Love Lucy.

Enzi42 · 2026-01-20T12:51:48+00:00