dmxrated: (Default)
dmxrated ([personal profile] dmxrated) wrote2006-06-17 07:03 am

For God's sake, stop men bashing already!!!!!

Damn, I just missed an opportunity to pick look up men bashing at the library. But anyway, every day, I get more and more annoyed by the lack of balance between men and women in entertainment, not because I'm male, but because it is way out of balance. Or at least in comedic entertainment and in advertising; serious fandoms are balanced enough. Aside from only women doing the scolding between a man and a woman, there are lots more examples of men being made fun of in the media.

In a commercial about the v-chip, some middle aged man tries unsuccessfully to turn on the porn channel, and asks his daughter why it won't work. After explaining, the little girl tells him that he'll have to ask the mother, who in turn, says no. In an episode of Dexter's Laboratory, the mother has the kids guard some freshly baked muffins from the father; both of these examples are examples of how the roles of father and child(ren) are reversed. A poster I saw on an escalator in Great Britain, which reads "Please do not block the escalator," depicts a middle-aged man dressed as a plunger and doing just that.

Why are only male butts actively shown in The Simpsons, but no female butts? Why do only Bart and Homer die in the Treehouse of Horror episodes of that show, and never Lisa or Marge? Why is Spike TV: First Network For Men much lower brow than WE: Women's Entertainment? Because it's politically correct. We can't let constant male idiocy slide as mere character development. Anyone who thinks that men make better jokes than women only thinks this way because their view of men is warped by these depictions of men, and should watch Nanako's very first scene in Amazing Nurse Nanako.

As for the myth that men are generally more disgusting than women, my own sister was also a slob most of her life, but I'm not going to describe it. However, she still has to be told to clean her room up before she does it. Also, from what I understand, Misato from Neon Genesis Evangelion (a serious anime) lives on TV dinners and leaves the trays lying around her house.

It's a good thing we have The Lockhorns, where Leroy and Loretta criticize each other for a million flaws each. That's proof that women can be just as low-brow as men in the comedy world, and men can be just as high-brow as women. But this and a few girl-bashing anime series simply aren't enough.

I tried looking on Google for ways to end male bashing, but all I found, aside from essays, was a petition to sign and ways to reject the warped view of men. Ladies, some of us gentlemen supported you in your crusade for equal rights, and still do, so why don't you help us the same way?

On a closing note, the latter website I found states that when we bash men, we insult God as well, for He is a man and has created us to be diverse. Hence the title of this entry.

[identity profile] whinetasting.livejournal.com 2006-06-28 02:46 am (UTC)(link)
I completely feel that people need to be bashed in humor as well as held in high esteem equally, regardless of gender. Sure, there are things that one gender or the other is more likely to do, and it's certainly funny to make light of those things. However, the push in the media (sitcoms, cartoons, commercials, etc.) in the last, oh, decade or so to color women as smart witty problem solvers and their men as bumbling idiots, has gotten so very, very stale. It really is completely one sided (I saw that v-chip commercial once, made me want to gag). It's one of the few recurring themes across genres lately, at least on American television. Only thing you can really do to avoid it is to either cut TV out of your diet altogether, or limit yourself to things like History channel, Discovery channel, Animal Planet, maybe some Comedy Central when they're not showing Blue Collar TV, and shows like Mythbusters and whatnot; basically eliminating the sitcoms and muting the commercials.

This comes from a woman who does not want to eat her cake and have it too; I hold the door for people regardless of gender and am gracious when anyone holds it for me. So... yeah. I find humor in both sides of the coin, and in other coins altogether, so long as any one type of humor isn't all there is. Then it gets old, tiresome, and annoying.