Tell me I'm being irrational...

Demonspawn · 2011-11-15T22:29:13+00:00

You'll likely enjoy this article. The directly relevant portion is:

The Masculinity Vacuum in Entertainment : Take a look at the collage of entertainers below (click to enlarge), which will be relevant if you are older than 30. All of them were prominent in the 1980s, some spilling over on either side of that decade. They are all certainly very different from one another. But they have one thing in common - that there are far fewer comparable personas produced by Hollywood today.

Misandry As diverse and imperfect as these characters were, they were all examples of masculinity. They represented different archetypes, from the father to the leader to the ladies man to the rugged outdoorsman to the protector. They were all more similar than dissimilar, as they all were role-models for young boys of the time, often the same young boys. Celebrities as disparate as Bill Cosby and Mr. T had majority overlap in their fan bases, as did characters as contrasting as Jean-Luc Picard and The Macho Man Randy Savage.

At this point, you might be feeling a deep inner emptiness lamenting a bygone age, as the paucity of proudly, inspiringly masculine characters in modern entertainment becomes clear. Before the 1980s, there were different masculine characters, but today, they are conspicuously absent. Men are shown either as thuggish degenerates, or as effete androgynes. Sure, there were remakes of Star Trek and The A-Team, and series finales of Rocky and Indiana Jones. But where are the new characters? Why is the vacuum being filled solely with nostalgia? A single example like Jack Bauer is not sufficient to dispute the much larger trend of masculinity purging.

Modern entertainment typically shows businessmen as villains, and husbands as bumbling dimwits that are always under the command of the all-powerful wife, who is never wrong. Oprah Winfrey's platform always grants a sympathetic portrayal to a wronged woman, but never to men who have suffered great injustices. Absurdly false feminist myths such as a belief that women are underpaid relative to men for the same output of work, or that adultery and domestic violence are actions committed exclusively by men, are embedded even within the dialog of sitcoms and legal dramas.

This trains women to disrespect men, wives to think poorly of their husbands, and girls to devalue the importance of their fathers, which leads to the normalization of single motherhood (obviously with taxpayer subsidies), despite the reality that most single mothers are not victims, but merely women who rode a carousel of men with reckless abandon. This, in turn, leads to fatherless young men growing up being told that natural male behavior is wrong, and feminization is normal. It also leads to women being deceived outright about the realities of the sexual market, where media attempts to normalize single motherhood and attempted 'cougarhood' are glorified, rather than portrayed as the undesirable conditions that they are.

memymineown · 2011-11-15T21:54:32+00:00

I think you missed two types of people. Women are sometimes geniuses, pretty, and desirable. Men are also autistic geniuses who are idiots when talking to girls.

Nearly every tv show portrays men as less than women. You are not being irrational at all.

BinaryShadow · 2011-11-16T05:55:38+00:00

I've noticed this pattern ever since I was a kid. Ultimately, it is what lead me to the mensrights movement to begin with (obviously, my interest isn't solely this anymore, but it was the catalyst).

First observations as a kid:

With the exception of Mary Sue shows like Reba, the women in the sitcoms were usually the least funniest characters (the eye-rolling wife, for example).
Should it be a gender-wars episode (boys vs girls), the girls always won. If the boys won, it was because they cheated.
It's perfectly acceptable for a girl to break her brother's "boy's only" sign for their treehouse (audience wildly cheers), but girl's only things are perfectly fine.
In the rare example of a man confronting a man-hating woman about her bigotry, there is no wild applause for him. Usually just laughter at his witty joke about the whole situation.
If a woman hits a man, it's funny. If a man hits a woman, it's horrific.

As I got older and wiser, the patterns weren't just what was funny or not. If a woman is in a "male" position, she must always remind us that she's a woman in a man's world. She can't just do her fucking job, she has to do her job as a woman. She's always hypereducated and amazingly great at everything she attempts. Despite her wonderful abilities, everything has to be about her fighting the man, even when there's no evidence of any resistence to her.

Hell, even today that still goes on. I'm watching Dexter. How many times has the female lieutenent played the gender/race card whenever she gets shit from her boss? He has never once shown any hints of sexism or racism, but she still accuses him of it whenever she gets in trouble by her own means. She's dating one of her coworkers and it's against the rules. When the big evil white male boss finds out about it? "What is it about me? Is it that I'm a woman?" In his defense, he answered "No, it's your arrogance." At least once an episode, she has to remind us all that she's a woman in "a man's world" despite the fact that not one fucking man has ever treated her with any disrespect.

Young women in shows, holy shit. Every female, ranging from age 9 to 18, is equipped with the intelligence and bitchiness of a 40 year old feminist woman. Lisa Simpson is one of the younger examples. Perfect, genius, dry feminist humor, normally not funny. It's like, yeah the family needs a female, but god forbid we make her entertaining. Girls need role models!

Teenager girls are basically the same as teh adult females in the show. Eye rolling at every male, any jokes they make is at a male's expense, and they are perfect at everything. Girls need role models!

The silly humor that we all tune in to laugh at is reserved for the males in the show. They are the reasons we watch the show. We watch Simpsons for Homer and Bart, not Lisa and Marge (who are there to remind us of reality and that what the men are doing are silly). Homer and Bart are the ones with lines we've all been injecting in conversations ever since grade school. Don't have a cow, man! Doh! Does anybody remember any of Lisa's academic ramblings no 9 year old could possibly know?

Don't get me wrong. Watching your favorite characters make asses of themselves is great humor. I laugh at it all the time. But why not let the women join in the fun? What if Marge wasn't the eye-rolling wife to just pick up the pieces? What if she was out having her own silly adventure that magically gets resolved in 23 minutes plus commercials? God forbid a woman look bad in a show, right?

As for commercials, everyone sees women as the perfect ones propping up the magical product to fix the men's issues. Even the subtle ones like clorax wipe commericals only showing boys and men pass germs around while women are the ones to get infected and need this product to stay clean.

tl;dr: No, you aren't being irrational.

ForMensRights · 2011-11-15T21:41:48+00:00

It's not just you. The days of shows like Full House, Perfect Strangers, Step by Step and Family Matters has come to an end a long time ago.

francomaistre · 2011-11-16T03:12:25+00:00

You are completely rational; and television critics actually had a lot to say about this very subject at the start of the fall season. Relevant article from a couple of months back:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/sep/21/mean-women-milquetoast-men/

2011-11-16T08:03:40+00:00

I agree, but too many stereotypes in entertainment is a big issue beyond gender too.

ss_camaro · 2011-11-16T08:47:55+00:00

Granolas are hypersensitive about the 'environment', but are completely blind to our 'propagandistic environment'. They really think everything on TV is there strictly for reasons of entertainment, chance, or (best parrot phrase ever) because it's what the majority wants to watch.. LOL!

To point out that the programming is deliberate, makes you a conspiracy theorist in their book.

ThePigman · 2011-11-16T10:31:30+00:00

Only now you realize this?

InfinitelyThirsting · 2011-11-16T17:48:56+00:00

It's part of why I'm picky about what I watch. Psych and Community are the only two sitcoms I watch (well, and sometimes Big Bang Theory, but not for a while). Other currently airing shows I like are House, and In Plain Sight. But most sitcoms make me want to tear my face off, because both genders are portrayed terribly.

indpndnt · 2011-11-16T03:32:27+00:00

There are times I can't watch TV because the dudes in the shows are so completely omega. Frustration abounds!

ElenaxFirebird · 2011-11-16T10:24:09+00:00

You're being irrational.

ValiantPie · 2011-11-16T04:04:41+00:00

Stereotypes are a very very wonderful way to make people buy shit. TV is a medium bolstered by both advertisment, and a lowest common denominator which primarily relies on consumerism. TV assumes that you don't have a brain, and you need a brain to process a decent, nuanced self concept. Thus, all we are left with are idiotic, helpless stereotypes in the place of actual people.

Most popular media has no interest in convincing you that you are a fully fleshed out person; you are, after all, more profitable as a consumer.

mikesteane · 2011-11-16T10:11:42+00:00

Anyone interested in the way TV functions should read "Four Arguments for the Elimination of TV" by Gerry Mander. He says that TV is controlled by advertisers (he was an advertising exec before being a writer) and that the programmes themselves are dumber down to be worse than the adverts. The main instrument for this is the technical events rate.

A technical event is something that is impossible in normal life, such as an instantaneous change of viewing angle, a zoom or a cut. The technical events rate for adverts may be less than two seconds several times faster than the programmes themselves. A programme that is better than the adverts will not sell since no one will buy advertising space.

Mander points out that when there is really big news such as JFK getting shot advertisers rush to cancel their slots ostensibly out of respect but really because they cannot sell anything while the viewer's mind is dominated by the main issue.

TV is, and always has been, a garbage medium. Watching it, is the mental equivalent of eating junk food. The stereotypes that proliferate are designed to be non-chaleenging to create a docile, compliant receptivity in the viewer. For the benefit of advertisers.

Theophagist · 2011-11-15T22:28:18+00:00

[permanently deleted]

Title	Tell me I'm being irrational...
Author	Theophagist
Upvotes	14
Comments	35
Date	November 15, 2011 9:31 PM UTC (14 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/mdjjh/tell_me_im_being_irrational/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/tell-me-im-being-irrational.1031669 https://theredarchive.com/post/1031669

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