Follow-up thoughts on rant
Remember last week's rant about women as the Death of Fun?. There's another side to that coin, an entirely different but intimately connected rant, about how men are just as unfairly painted with unflattering colors in media and advertising. For every shrewish wife who's the death of fun there's an idiot man-child husband who does his level best to weasel away from his grown-up life. Like those dumb Sears commercials about men escaping home to "spend all day hunting for the best deal" and the eleventy bojillion dumb-dad representations. For every woman portrayed rolling her eyes at Star Wars quotes there's a man portrayed as resenting the most basic adult/marital responsibilities. If, the media shouts, women are no creatures men would ever want to be married to, then they're equally guilty of showing men as slobbering morons that no woman would ever want to saddle herself to, either. It's no more fair to men than is to women.
The basic idea seems to be that women want to grow up too much, and men not enough. I wonder why that is? And it seems to be a latter twentieth-century phenom. Someone in the comments pointed out that the roles were reversed in the first half of the twentieth century. In movies it was the free-spirited woman who helped the buttoned-down, responsible man loosen up and enjoy life. Women were seen as blithe spirits. Oh, we still see this, most commonly in the oh-so-frequent cinema trop of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but it's less common.
Is it an outgrowth of social changes with women's liberation? As women have shouldered more of the responsibility of providing for the family financially, have men rebelled against the erosion of their traditional breadwinnner/head-of-household roles by chafing against what they see as the unfair intrusion of women into their domain? Is this bubbling about in the male subconscious? I hesitate to blame it all on men, but it's hard to escape that most of the ads/media that have driven this phenom were created by men.
I had a bit of a knock-on-the-head moment listening to Savage Love the other day. A caller was accusing Dan of being down on monogamy, because he's not necessarily of the opinion that it's the end-all be-all or that's it's reasonable to expect it 100% of the time. The caller said "But isn't our entire civilization kinda based on it?"
Dan said, "Oh no, honey. Civilization is based on monogamy FOR WOMEN. Monogamy for men has only been expected for the last sixty years or so. Before that, nobody expected men to be monogamous."
So is it true, then, that changing social values have been largely about men becoming more like women? Expecting the things of men (monogamy)that have always been expected of women, while at the same time society expects the things of women (working, money earning) that were historically the sole province of men while STILL placing the lion's share of the homemaking/childrearing expectation on women as well?
I don't know where I'm going with this. I don't know if I have a point, unless it's that men get just as much of the shaft in terms of media portrayals as women do. According to Madison Avenue, we're ALL assholes. So buy our cars and beer and chips and you'll be fine.
The basic idea seems to be that women want to grow up too much, and men not enough. I wonder why that is? And it seems to be a latter twentieth-century phenom. Someone in the comments pointed out that the roles were reversed in the first half of the twentieth century. In movies it was the free-spirited woman who helped the buttoned-down, responsible man loosen up and enjoy life. Women were seen as blithe spirits. Oh, we still see this, most commonly in the oh-so-frequent cinema trop of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but it's less common.
Is it an outgrowth of social changes with women's liberation? As women have shouldered more of the responsibility of providing for the family financially, have men rebelled against the erosion of their traditional breadwinnner/head-of-household roles by chafing against what they see as the unfair intrusion of women into their domain? Is this bubbling about in the male subconscious? I hesitate to blame it all on men, but it's hard to escape that most of the ads/media that have driven this phenom were created by men.
I had a bit of a knock-on-the-head moment listening to Savage Love the other day. A caller was accusing Dan of being down on monogamy, because he's not necessarily of the opinion that it's the end-all be-all or that's it's reasonable to expect it 100% of the time. The caller said "But isn't our entire civilization kinda based on it?"
Dan said, "Oh no, honey. Civilization is based on monogamy FOR WOMEN. Monogamy for men has only been expected for the last sixty years or so. Before that, nobody expected men to be monogamous."
So is it true, then, that changing social values have been largely about men becoming more like women? Expecting the things of men (monogamy)that have always been expected of women, while at the same time society expects the things of women (working, money earning) that were historically the sole province of men while STILL placing the lion's share of the homemaking/childrearing expectation on women as well?
I don't know where I'm going with this. I don't know if I have a point, unless it's that men get just as much of the shaft in terms of media portrayals as women do. According to Madison Avenue, we're ALL assholes. So buy our cars and beer and chips and you'll be fine.