The safe target
Men are jerks (cue laughtrack).
Welcome to the new comic image of men on tv: incompetence at its worst. Where television used to feature wise and wonderful fathers and husbands, today's comedies and ads often feature bumbling husbands and inept, uninvolved fathers.
[...] While most television dramas tend to avoid gender stereotypes, as these undermine "realism," comic portrayals of men have become increasingly negative. The trend is so noticeable that it has been criticized by men's rights groups and some television critics.
It has also been studied by academicians Dr. Katherine Young and Paul Nathanson in their book, "Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture". Young and Nathanson argue that in addition to being portrayed as generally unintelligent, men are ridiculed, rejected, and physically abused in the media. Such behavior, they suggest, "would never be acceptable if directed at women."
My dad has been saying this for years, and I think he's right. He claims that 75% of the people on TV ads are total morons: half the women and all the men.
I saw a couple of coupon ads lately that made me happy, though: they were of men taking care of babies, without any rueful "Oh, I really screwed this up" looks at the camera. In one of them, the guy was in the foreground taking care of the kid while the chick was in the background watching a football game, and neither of them looked like this was meant to be a comic situation.
Almost made me want to buy their potato chips, but then I remembered I don't eat potato chips.
Posted by Mris on January 28 2003 07:37
There's nothing really new about this, though. One of the eternal sources of comedy is making the powerful look foolish, frequently by showing them tripped up by the cleverness of their inferiors. And in our society, men by and large still have the upper hand. This tends to make them a more attractive target for mockery than women are.
The woman outwitting up the man, the barber outwitting his lord, the slave outwitting his master, the over-sheltered daughter contriving to elope despite the precautions of her possessive father -- these are all standard themes of comedy going back as far as we can see.
Which is not to say that a great deal of what's on television isn't insultingly stoopid, or at least what little I see of it any more. But this aspect doesn't seem to me to be a recent thing.
Posted by Scott on January 28 2003 13:33
I disagree that men still have that much of the upper hand, Scott. Most of the themes of these commercials don't seem to be "Father Knows Best -- oh, wait, no he doesn't! Haha!" There's no inversion, nothing overturned in the course of them. And it's not always even "Women smart/men stupid." It's often just "men stupid."
Posted by Mris on January 29 2003 07:24
Well, since I watch next to no television any more, I'll have to take your word for it. Nothing being described here sounds to me like anything you can't find in Aristophanes and Plautus, but as I refuse to sit and watch the damn thing, I have no personal knowledge of it and you may well be right.
On the other hand, if you mean to say that men are no longer more powerful than women in our society today, we'll have to agree to disagree on that.
Posted by Scott on January 31 2003 00:15
Scott's got a good point that this probably is in most ways a continuation of a classical comedy trope.
To reappropriate Einstein's quote on peace, though, I'm concerned that we cannot simultaneously prepare for sexism and egalitarianism. And that it may not be a healthy lesson for boys to grow up immersed in a message of "men as idiots." Not least because it could encourage an attitude of resentment and entitlement... if they had to be the butt of all those jokes, then by God they deserve all that power that those jokes were supposedly aimed at them for having.
Note that this doesn't deny the continued existence of male privilege... but in looking at where we are and where I (and I might guess most of MMG's readership) would like us to be (a society in which no one is arbitrarily penalized on account of sex, phenotype, ethnic background, sexual orientation, religion, diet, etc.), the route from the one to the other doesn't feature systematic portrayal of men as idiots.
Then, like Scott, I don't watch TV, so don't have first-hand experience of how bad the problem is or isn't.
Posted by Zed on February 3 2003 13:19