(no subject)
By now, I'm sure most of the community is at least vaguely familiar with a bizarre trope about gender that I've noticed emerging in the past ten or fifteen years - that of the high-powered, successful, driven, but emotionally underdeveloped woman and the horndog/slacker/stoner/goof-off man who's nevertheless a manipulative, successful liar, and cleverer than his successful lover/girlfriend/wife. I've seen this everywhere from Hollywood movies to Twix commercials, and of course it's on various sitcoms, which always seem to represent the stupidest of our cultural norms.
My mother and I were talking about this the other day, and what we couldn't figure out was this: it's almost always men who are writing and directing these various pieces of media, and we were both wondering what on earth men can get out of portrayals of themselves as perpetual child-men, as slobs, as shallow horn-dogs who don't really care about women as people and so on. If they're going to cede the battle on moral grounds, what are they gaining? It's such a loss of dignity. Plenty of men I know don't much care for the trope either - it's insulting and it's honestly not got all that much to do with reality. While Knocked Up was a funny movie, it was also really silly, and I have to admit, shallow though it makes me seem, I couldn't fathom why Vanity Fair (yes, I read Vanity Fair. My mother has a subscription. So shoot me!) would have Seth Rogan, who is not physically attractive, posing surrounded by drop-dead gorgeous starlets from various hot new television shows and up-coming films.
Is the aesthetic one of wish-fulfillment? That you can be not only unattractive physically, but also emotionally, and still get a beautiful, if "frigid" or "castrating", girlfriend? It still seems really, really limited to portray the hero as someone whose aspirations can't go beyond being the shitty boyfriend of someone who's too good for him - get a job! Go back to school! Start your own business! Advance yourself! Do something!
Maybe this particular trope has been discussed ad nauseum here (some topics are classics, others are just ooooold, I'm a terrible judge), so let's also have this post be about bizarre gender tropes in general - stereotypes whose origin, purpose, or beneficiary you can't figure out, and so on.
My mother and I were talking about this the other day, and what we couldn't figure out was this: it's almost always men who are writing and directing these various pieces of media, and we were both wondering what on earth men can get out of portrayals of themselves as perpetual child-men, as slobs, as shallow horn-dogs who don't really care about women as people and so on. If they're going to cede the battle on moral grounds, what are they gaining? It's such a loss of dignity. Plenty of men I know don't much care for the trope either - it's insulting and it's honestly not got all that much to do with reality. While Knocked Up was a funny movie, it was also really silly, and I have to admit, shallow though it makes me seem, I couldn't fathom why Vanity Fair (yes, I read Vanity Fair. My mother has a subscription. So shoot me!) would have Seth Rogan, who is not physically attractive, posing surrounded by drop-dead gorgeous starlets from various hot new television shows and up-coming films.
Is the aesthetic one of wish-fulfillment? That you can be not only unattractive physically, but also emotionally, and still get a beautiful, if "frigid" or "castrating", girlfriend? It still seems really, really limited to portray the hero as someone whose aspirations can't go beyond being the shitty boyfriend of someone who's too good for him - get a job! Go back to school! Start your own business! Advance yourself! Do something!
Maybe this particular trope has been discussed ad nauseum here (some topics are classics, others are just ooooold, I'm a terrible judge), so let's also have this post be about bizarre gender tropes in general - stereotypes whose origin, purpose, or beneficiary you can't figure out, and so on.