Two posts that ended up being about men

[trinityvixen]

I don't truck with that "five things make a post" idea, not least of all because on the way to collecting five things, I have probably already tweeted four of them and see no need to repeat myself. So this is a "two things make this not a tweet" sort of post.

I was trying to find a way to post about this round-up of The 7 Deadliest Deadliest

Comments

[edgehopper]

I've gotta give the feminist snark the edge over the strawman.

The Don Draper fanboys have about as much social influence as the Barney Stinson fanboys and the Hiro fanboys, which is to say, none worth speaking of. The fact that a few idiot professors and reporters with writers' block write something about it does not make it a "thing".

The TWoP forums are speculating that Deadliest Warrior will soon do a female warrior matchup, incidentally. The fact is that military combat was almost exclusively male until the last few decades, a few exceptions like Amazons and Joan of Arc notwithstanding; I don't see how you make a version of Deadliest Warrior that isn't pretty much entirely masculine.

Real men prove their manliness by winning large scale fake military battles with hundreds of miniature troops, incidentally ;-)

[trinityvixen]

The Don Draper et al. phenomena is part and parcel of the overwhelmingly naive mindset that the 1950s were an ideal time to which we would all be better off returning, when men were men, etc., etc.

It also happens to be one manifestation of masculine anxiety issues, which flare up in different ways. One of which is in displays of hypermasculinity, of which The Deadliest Warrior has to be one of the best examples. This is a show whose primary attraction is in seeing the destruction that men can cause, a premise that does not require the penis-measuring that goes on between displays but does rather invite it.

I never said that the show couldn't help but be masculine--historically, of course men would the prime warriors--I just said that its testosterone-fueled celebration of chest-thumping (in any form) is as over the top as it is unnecessary to entertain its viewers. Why go for the T-hose-down when you can just amp up the (gender neutral!) gore?

[edgehopper]

Well, yes, the whole Spike network portrays ridiculously macho men and caters to the demographic of macho penis-measuring idiot boys (The History Channel and Discovery provide some measure of similar programming without the trash talk). Oxygen and Lifetime do something comparable for the demographic of whiny fashion and victimization-obsessed girls. I just don't see where this says anything more than "there exist people who are idiots who a few of the hundred channels on cable TV cater to," and on the Mad Men side, "there are fanboys." The Don Draper fanboys are much less nauseating than the Avatar fanboys, at least...they dress better.

[trinityvixen]

I fail to see where you divide the line between the two. I mean, "there exist people who are idiots who a few of the hundred channels on cable TV cater to" could just as easily describe the SyFy network--noted for having its share of fanboys (and girls) of its products. The fanboy mentality is very much one of escapism, just as the "I want everything to be Leave it to Beaver!" is.

Your level of nausea does not determine a difference between the two, though I sympathize with wishing to divide up the world into things that don't make you sick and things that do.

[ivy03]

Ooooh. You're tweeting. That's why you're posting less.

[trinityvixen]

I don't even tweet that much! I think I'm just posting less in general.

[ivy03]

I've finally seen an episode of Deadliest Warrior. It was Shaolin monk vs. Maori warrior. And a -- I don't see why you would devote your life to honoring a tradition that is basically just beating people with a rock until they're dead, and b -- I love that at the end they say "the computer says Shaolin monk wins." I was like--what is the methodology of this computer program? I mean, what the hell parameters are they using? And then they have actors "reenact" the ultimate battle.

...But the weapons demonstrations were kinda awesome.

[trinityvixen]

It's hard to argue against people preserving their culture, even if it is a martial or violent one, provided they don't actually hurt anyone doing it. Especially those cultures that have otherwise been overthrown or forcibly sublimated by western cultures. Doesn't mean I don't think it's stupid when anyone spends their lives learning to use obsolete weapons (my Viking and Scots brothers included). But if they want to preserve a culture along side that expertise, I guess I can't complain.

I do love the computer system and how the handwaving about what it's doing when it ranks the matches indicates how badly Spike is reading its audience. It assumes that only meathead males are interested in what is actually an extremely nerdy exercise. Yes, manly men are the ones doing all the destroying, and it's all a show of warrior prowess, which provides a lot of the entertainment, don't get me wrong. But the presumed premise is the match, the competition. We need to see how the rankings work in order to buy that, say, a pirate can take on a

[hslayer]

Where do you find this crap?

(Yeah, I just deleted a loooong, rambling comment and decided to go with that, instead.)

[trinityvixen]

I find it on the internet. Where else?

[hslayer]

I guess. Her post just seems like an awful lot of misplaced punctuation over what amounts to "some dumb guys". But that more general phenomenon is so pervasive, it hardly seems worth chronicling

[trinityvixen]

I don't think the author reads it as a threat to women's progress. She writes a feminist blog, so she writes about issues of sexism. The point is not that we might de-evolve from a more enlightened society into a less enlightened one but that the same sexism that used to suppress women is still fomenting in the form of resentment that women can no longer be (openly) repressed (in this country). That sort of resentment is still a problem, and it is worth mocking the shit out of it where it pops up.

[trinityvixen]

Still haven't watched it, so I couldn't say. I hear that the series addresses the pitfalls of that sexism, but I haven't seen it to know.