http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/04/opinion/bennett-men-in-trouble/index.html?hpt=hp_c1 My favorite part is the picture on the top of the guy playing video games. CNN has the best reporters.
Women Rule and Men Drool..... Says CNN.
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makare
I can't believe this is an actual news story. I am amused.
Oh I have plans, but it won't be the stupid things you do that will entertain me. Throwing a sandwich into an arena to watch two starving men fight to the death, while throngs of loin cloth and bare chested women lay at my throne? That'll be entertaining. The best part, is the sandwich is laced with a slow killing poison invented by some gorgeous female scientist in my labs. The sandwich? Was made by another male slave. Just to add to the symphony of irony.
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makare
I thought it was posted with irony? Now i am confused.
Are you kidding? That part made it 10x more funny.
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makare
I thought men have been dumb on tv since its inception?
GasBandit
Staff member
The glorification of the immature male, the underachiever, is relatively new. A whole lot more of our movie and TV "heroes" these days are unemployable slacker dudes with little assertiveness and no ambition in life other than to suffer through the minimum amount of grown-up stuff they have to put up with to fund their gaming/pot habit. I know - there but for the grace of god go even I.
Sure, Robert Petrie was a goofball, but he was a hard working, sole-breadwinning TV executive with a wife and child. Somewhere along the line, Maynard Krebs stopped being comic relief and Dobie Gillis started being the jerk/villain.
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makare
So they've always been dumb but now they are dumb AND losers?
GasBandit
Staff member
Succinctly put. And portrayed in such a way as to be shown to be "living the dream" because of it.
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makare
Seriously though I wish that assessing college attendance by gender wasn't so important. Why can't we look at it as a total percentage of potential workforce instead of by gender. That just frustrates me.
GasBandit
Staff member
And it doesn't just have to be "gamers." Think about the 3 male leads on "Friends." The only one approaching classical "manliness" is a perpetually unemployed/underemployed actor who sponges an existence off his best friend. The other two are a geek wuss and a "childhood issues" wuss.
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makare
Well but really how common was actual classical manliness anyway? Maybe tv is just showing more of what average guys have always been like. Not the gamer thing but the just average joe guys not mahnly mahns.
I've seen a few of the older TV shows where women were pretty much the opposite of what they're portrayed like on TV today. Lucielle Ball comes to mind. Only time you see a women acting that stupid/slapstick is on SNL.
Added at: 21:04
Also the man was "classier" too (Ricky Ricardo).
Added at: 21:05
Ugh I meant to quote Makare's post about classical manliness back then.
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makare
I am not saying all guys were dumb but it was a common theme since the beginning. I mean the Honeymooners comes to mind.
I'm not sure if Jackie Gleason's character was supposed to be an idiot, and he definitely wasn't a slacker.
Over the last few years there have been a lot of romantic comedies and sitcoms based around lead male characters that were essentially happy losers, or at least immature man-children.
That's actually exactly what I was thinking of. The only thing that comes close to that today is Jenna on 30 Rock, and she's still outdone by Tracy Morgan every time.
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makare
Ralph Kramden was a doofus. My husband the lovable dolt that was the theme.
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makare
are they roasting captain picard?
Close enough
Obviously in a future full of almost entirely women, they are going to be Kirk fans.
Actually, looking at the image again, I think that is Kirk's head located to the right. Either Sisko is the luckiest man alive, or all these women love Captain Janeway and worship her like a god.
GasBandit
Staff member
Low intelligence and class, sure, but he was also a career bus driver with deeply ingrained notions of what it meant to be a man - to be in charge, to be assertive, to be a breadwinner. Whenever any of those things were threatened, he became severely unhappy.
Look at the old examples of leading men in media. They basically range from Fred Flintstone to Ward Cleaver. The slackers or less masculine men were relegated to comic relief or other such sidelines. Hell, even Gilligan, the complete antithesis for pre-generation X manliness, was the hardest working screwup you ever did see - and he was gainfully employed (until the storm, of course). He and the Skipper were just working class schlubs, but they were *working,* not slacking.
The closest these guys ever came to today's slacker heroes was when Fred and Barney would occasionally sneak out of the house, perhaps under false pretenses, to go bowling. But even that was a temporary diversion. Fred's justification for his self, his identity, was his work. It's why George Jetson and Dagwood Bumstead were forever absolutely terrified of losing their jobs even though they worked for horrible tyrants - if they weren't providing for their wives and children, they suffered soul-crushing bouts of depression and anxiety.
A far cry away from the typical male media hero of today, like Seth Rogen's character in "Knocked up" - a perpetually unemployed illegal canadian living in a house with 5 other guys whose only income is an old injury settlement who spends his days either drunk or playing video games with absolutely no plan or care for the future. And we're supposed to identify with his struggles.
We're a generation of men raised to admire - even envy - Bart Simpson, Dave Chappelle, Randall Graves and Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski.
I'll worry about men when the fundamental systems of society prevent them from making any worthwhile achievements, or society itself treats them as inferior cattle to be used and abused. In the meantime, I'm not going to shed a tear if more guys are acting like immature dumbasses. I have no sympathy for self-inflicted wounds.
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makare
I've concluded that as usual you are completely missing my point, so this is the last post I'll be making.
I dunno, he's pretty fucking wealthy.
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