8 ms·

I don't understand this. In most stories, arn't protagonists primarily male? Arn't they typically courageous, or intelligent, or unyielding, or strong, or deter

I don't understand this. In most stories, arn't protagonists primarily male? Arn't they typically courageous, or intelligent, or unyielding, or strong, or determined? I don't understand.

mixmastamyk 11y ago
He's speaking of commercials, which often portray dad as barely able to tie his own shoes.
Torgo 11y ago
If I watch an action movie, I am not intimidated by or identify with the cool guy in the movie because I'm not the guy they're portraying. When sitcoms and commercials emasculate and defame the everyman, I know they're talking about me.
- j2kun 11y ago
  Yet young boys grow up identifying with the hero.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - marrs 11y ago
    Really? Fantasising about being him, maybe. It's usually the side-kick that one identifies with.
- GhotiFish 11y ago
  daaaaaamn man. You're telling me you don't identify Jerry Seinfeld, you identify with George Costanza? Because when I've seen men get emascualated or mocked on TV, it's due to some jackassery on their part, and I don't feel the need to empathize. Isn't that true for you as well? If there's an over-riding theme in media regarding men that I would report, it's that the consequences they experience are a result of their actions. I'd call that just as far from the truth, but an otherwise pleasant lie.
  - Torgo 11y ago
    When I see the stereotypical sitcom dad, he keeps fucking up to telegraph to the audience that he's a fuckup, AKA Barney Fife, not to be a morality play "don't do this or this will happen." Barney can't not be a fuckup because that's his identity. Andy is a well-rounded character, he's not even perfect, sometimes he plays the fool and you learn the lesson, so it serves the morality play function. The dad on My Three Sons is near-perfect, he's the opposite of Barney Fife, his identity is that he's an inhuman archetypal father-figure. I Could see how this could be intimidating, but at least it's something to aspire to. From my perspective, the first two have mostly disappeared from television and most male characters that I would identify with are made to be Barney Fifes. There are also a lot of characters I don't identify with at all, I don't think anybody is supposed to identify with any character in Seinfeld, they are all supposed to be nigh-sociopathic. The audience is invited to laugh at all of them.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
sdrothrock 11y ago
> In most stories, arn't protagonists primarily male? In most stories, the protagonist (male or female) is chosen because they're extraordinary. While I might identify a bit with Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker, they're certainly not going to be people I think of when I try to think of who I am because they're so fantastically extraordinary. On the other hand, Bart Simpson or Fresh Prince Will Smith? Or, considering the age I'm approaching, Al Bundy? I can identify with them a lot more, even with the negative traits. The other issue is: > Arn't they typically courageous, or intelligent, or unyielding, or strong, or determined? Why do you have to be courageous, intelligent, unyielding, strong, or determined? Why are all of those the absolute "good" traits? If you're not a super strategist, are you a bad person? What if you avoid conflict? Afraid of dogs? etc. The "standard" of extraordinary manhood is incredibly high if you look at stories like that.
SoftwareMaven 11y ago
It's a valid question, but most people I know (including my boys) identify far more with the guys on Big Bang Theory than Bruce Willis in Die Hard, and those guys are every negative archetype of maleness (sexist, unable to care for oneself, etc) wrapped up in a pseudo-intellectualized package. The one exception was Penny's boy friend, who filled "stupid jock".[1] What Bruce Willis brings to the table is this idealized version of what "man" is supposed to mean. So, on the one hand, we have an image of men as socially retarded incompetents and on the other hand, we have an image of men as unkillable tough guys. Where is a 15 year old supposed to land in there? 1. I actually really enjoyed the first five or so seasons of BBT, before they started playing more and more to the cheap "socially retarded scientists" jokes. I also believe they aren't making lives better for intellectual young women, either, who need the role models more than anyone.
- sukilot 11y ago
  BBT has had nerdy women for a few seasons already. And most of the characters take care of themselves in their own apartment, and have highly respected careers. The nerdy women are actually a bit stronger than the nerdy men.
  - tdkl 11y ago
    > The nerdy women are actually a bit stronger than the nerdy men. Of course, they have to be, it's a modern sitcom. The most attractive one is also only a waitress/failed aspiring actress.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- marrs 11y ago
  This is why you shouldn't rely on TV to provide your role models :p
cmelbye 11y ago
In older stories, sure. But the "action hero" died a while ago. Have you not noticed the rise of the weak male lead in movies/TV/commercials? It's hugely prevalent in romantic comedies, but even TV shows like Modern Family (bumbling Phil and razor-sharp Claire) depict archetypes that are becoming quite common. The formula is a charming yet incompetent male lead who's mainly driven by sex, paired with a strong, capable female lead who's always two steps ahead of him. If I had children, I certainly wouldn't want them watching TV/movies that depict their gender as incapable or unintelligent. And that's equally true for girls and boys.
- antod 11y ago
  This isn't really a new thing. I presume it was already a cliche when The Flintstones came along.
  - bobbles 11y ago
    Exactly, the sitcom approach has also generally been fat dude + thin woman for just as long a time
- Zikes 11y ago
  http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BumblingDad http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BumblingDad http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentingTheHusband http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentingTheHusba...
- sukilot 11y ago
  Why do you prefer seeing men only as action hero? In fact, many boys will grow up to be goofy dads.
  - Crito 11y ago
    That's quite the false dichotomy. Why would the opposite of "bumbling moron father" be "action hero", rather than "competent father"? The John McClanes of this world, if in fact they exist at all, are exceptionally few and far between. Good competent fathers though? Those are hardly Hollywood inventions.
vijayr 11y ago
Look at some of the stories from the media. Some airlines will not allow males sit next to unaccompanied children. A theme park bans single males from bird watching, "in case they are predators". Female sexual assaults are disgusting while male sexual assaults are funny, to most people. If a little girl has a problem, it is immediately attended to, whereas if a little boy has a problem, he is told to "be a man and suck it up". Feminism is cool whereas MRA is not. Oh, we also have some "interesting" people like this - http://www.vice.com/read/is-reducing-the-male-population-by-90-percent-the-solution-to-all-our-problems http://www.vice.com/read/is-reducing-the-male-population-by-... And so on. I wish we look at problems without the gender/race/nationality etc lens and only purely based on their merit. This is 2015 and we still have gender stereotypes, whole lot of double standards (for both genders), laws favoring one gender or the other etc. All this noise is just tiring.
- pikachu_is_cool 11y ago
  Going off of that Vice article, sometimes I think that a 40/60 ratio of men to women would be favorable... it'd probably reflect the proportions of our hunter gatherer ancestry, and a lot of psychological benefits would come with that I'd imagine. But everything else she said was extremely misandrist and sexist.
  - jaggederest 11y ago
    You can actually see the difference in gender relations in places with different gender ratios, and by age, as well. "Single men become a rare commodity later in life due to our unfortunate propensity for dying. If you can get to 50 the world seems to be nothing but women." http://jonathansoma.com/singles/ http://jonathansoma.com/singles/
  - roel_v 11y ago
    "sometimes I think that a 40/60 ratio of men to women would be favorable..." Without wanting to turn this into a race thing, there are sociological circumstances which sort of give us a glimpse (in subsets of the population) of what that could look like - and it's not pretty... See e.g. http://www.economist.com/node/21532296 http://www.economist.com/node/21532296, which is one of the lesser emotionally charged discussions of it, but I'm sure you can find the right Google terms to find dozens of other articles about it yourself.
danmaz74 11y ago
In old stories, yes. But just look at The Simpsons as a major and early example to the contrary.
s_baby 11y ago
>I don't understand this. In most stories, arn't protagonists primarily male? Arn't they typically courageous, or intelligent, or unyielding, or strong, or determined? That is a common motif. Is it easy being expected to be unyielding/strong/determined/etc? You have lower social value when you aren't adhering to this role. When you are adhering to this role you are making yourself disposable to a "higher cause". In other words making yourself cannon fodder or getting black lung in some coal mine.
facepalm 11y ago
In Germany there was a funny incident recently: the Green political party decided to change all the wording in their publications to be gender neutral. In German often jobs have two names, somewhat like "captain" and "captainness" for male and female captains. And so on. They decided to change everything to "captain/ness". The funny thing was that they properly gendered all positive personae appearing in their publications. But they forgot about the negative appearances. So it would be "the captain/ness is steering the ship into the harbour" but "the captain is leaving the sinking ship". So check your bias next time you read a story. It's telling that you don't even notice all the negative portrayals of men anymore.
- _pmf_ 11y ago
  > But they forgot about the negative appearances. "Forgot".
  - facepalm 11y ago
    What do you mean? Is it incorrect? I am not a native speaker of English.
    - jongraehl 11y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes
mattlutze 11y ago
Like a lot of people have said, modern shows are very much into the everyman male lead. Bryan Cranston's character in Malcolm in the Middle, Ed O'Neill's Al Bundy, Tim Taylor playing, once again, the affable rough-though-bumbling dad. The thing is these are all prime-time sitcoms and comedies. There's just as many popular shows where this isn't the case. Dramas rarely have this sort of soft, incorrigible-but-loveable archetype. I'm not super-current on my media, but Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, Walking Dead, Mad Men... most everything on HBO, Showtime, AMC, and FX run with strong, deep, emotionally complex male characters who grow and discover themselves, alongside the female characters. And the male characters in these dramas are, on the whole, much more identifiable and aspirational.
- humanrebar 11y ago
  > Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, Walking Dead, Mad Men Those characters are aspirational? They're almost all murderers, thieves, adulterers, or worse. I wouldn't want my son to be anything like any of those characters. Part of the problem with the antihero-as-role-model is that it also conveys that being interesting is important. And to be interesting, it's good (or at least OK) for a man to have significant character flaws. So many soon-to-be-men think having your crap together is boring and thus unattractive. And many women think falling for a flawed man and fixing him is a romantic notion.
  - mattlutze 11y ago
    Yeah, aspirational was probably the wrong statement there. Your son probably shouldn't be like any character on television, whether that's the antihero or bumbling means-well-but-worth-nothing comedy father. But Interesting doesn't require character flaws. Those exist in characters in stories to provide space for developmental arcs -- space for us to see them grow and change, something we all want to do. They exist to make a point out of a story. And these folks are so identifiable because we all sometimes feel like a not-put-together person. Heck, look how popular Breaking Bad, or House, M.D. were -- Laurie and Cranston were insanely popular in those roles because in their ridiculousness they reflected traits many people understand. Though I doubt their performances encouraged any meaningful percentage of the nation's fathers to start cooking meth, or medical professionals to treat people for lupus. The story for a lot of these characters is that you can look like you have your shit together and still have space to learn, grow, evolve. Sure, it's in the context of murders and whatever because there's more drama there than "guy that goes to the office and has an ongoing feud with his HOA". But that doesn't invalidate the story, or directly encourage the audience to adopt the superficial story components.
mason240 11y ago
In more stories villains are male.

I don't understand this. In most stories, arn't protagonists primarily male? Arn't they typically courageous, or intelligent, or unyielding, or strong, or determined? I don't understand.

mixmastamyk 11y ago

He's speaking of commercials, which often portray dad as barely able to tie his own shoes.

Torgo 11y ago

If I watch an action movie, I am not intimidated by or identify with the cool guy in the movie because I'm not the guy they're portraying. When sitcoms and commercials emasculate and defame the everyman, I know they're talking about me.

j2kun 11y ago
Yet young boys grow up identifying with the hero.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- marrs 11y ago
  Really? Fantasising about being him, maybe. It's usually the side-kick that one identifies with.
GhotiFish 11y ago
daaaaaamn man. You're telling me you don't identify Jerry Seinfeld, you identify with George Costanza? Because when I've seen men get emascualated or mocked on TV, it's due to some jackassery on their part, and I don't feel the need to empathize. Isn't that true for you as well? If there's an over-riding theme in media regarding men that I would report, it's that the consequences they experience are a result of their actions. I'd call that just as far from the truth, but an otherwise pleasant lie.
- Torgo 11y ago
  When I see the stereotypical sitcom dad, he keeps fucking up to telegraph to the audience that he's a fuckup, AKA Barney Fife, not to be a morality play "don't do this or this will happen." Barney can't not be a fuckup because that's his identity. Andy is a well-rounded character, he's not even perfect, sometimes he plays the fool and you learn the lesson, so it serves the morality play function. The dad on My Three Sons is near-perfect, he's the opposite of Barney Fife, his identity is that he's an inhuman archetypal father-figure. I Could see how this could be intimidating, but at least it's something to aspire to. From my perspective, the first two have mostly disappeared from television and most male characters that I would identify with are made to be Barney Fifes. There are also a lot of characters I don't identify with at all, I don't think anybody is supposed to identify with any character in Seinfeld, they are all supposed to be nigh-sociopathic. The audience is invited to laugh at all of them.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

sdrothrock 11y ago

> In most stories, arn't protagonists primarily male? In most stories, the protagonist (male or female) is chosen because they're extraordinary. While I might identify a bit with Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker, they're certainly not going to be people I think of when I try to think of who I am because they're so fantastically extraordinary. On the other hand, Bart Simpson or Fresh Prince Will Smith? Or, considering the age I'm approaching, Al Bundy? I can identify with them a lot more, even with the negative traits. The other issue is: > Arn't they typically courageous, or intelligent, or unyielding, or strong, or determined? Why do you have to be courageous, intelligent, unyielding, strong, or determined? Why are all of those the absolute "good" traits? If you're not a super strategist, are you a bad person? What if you avoid conflict? Afraid of dogs? etc. The "standard" of extraordinary manhood is incredibly high if you look at stories like that.

SoftwareMaven 11y ago

It's a valid question, but most people I know (including my boys) identify far more with the guys on Big Bang Theory than Bruce Willis in Die Hard, and those guys are every negative archetype of maleness (sexist, unable to care for oneself, etc) wrapped up in a pseudo-intellectualized package. The one exception was Penny's boy friend, who filled "stupid jock".[1] What Bruce Willis brings to the table is this idealized version of what "man" is supposed to mean. So, on the one hand, we have an image of men as socially retarded incompetents and on the other hand, we have an image of men as unkillable tough guys. Where is a 15 year old supposed to land in there? 1. I actually really enjoyed the first five or so seasons of BBT, before they started playing more and more to the cheap "socially retarded scientists" jokes. I also believe they aren't making lives better for intellectual young women, either, who need the role models more than anyone.

sukilot 11y ago
BBT has had nerdy women for a few seasons already. And most of the characters take care of themselves in their own apartment, and have highly respected careers. The nerdy women are actually a bit stronger than the nerdy men.
- tdkl 11y ago
  > The nerdy women are actually a bit stronger than the nerdy men. Of course, they have to be, it's a modern sitcom. The most attractive one is also only a waitress/failed aspiring actress.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
marrs 11y ago
This is why you shouldn't rely on TV to provide your role models :p

cmelbye 11y ago

In older stories, sure. But the "action hero" died a while ago. Have you not noticed the rise of the weak male lead in movies/TV/commercials? It's hugely prevalent in romantic comedies, but even TV shows like Modern Family (bumbling Phil and razor-sharp Claire) depict archetypes that are becoming quite common. The formula is a charming yet incompetent male lead who's mainly driven by sex, paired with a strong, capable female lead who's always two steps ahead of him. If I had children, I certainly wouldn't want them watching TV/movies that depict their gender as incapable or unintelligent. And that's equally true for girls and boys.

antod 11y ago
This isn't really a new thing. I presume it was already a cliche when The Flintstones came along.
- bobbles 11y ago
  Exactly, the sitcom approach has also generally been fat dude + thin woman for just as long a time
Zikes 11y ago
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BumblingDad http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BumblingDad http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentingTheHusband http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ParentingTheHusba...
sukilot 11y ago
Why do you prefer seeing men only as action hero? In fact, many boys will grow up to be goofy dads.
- Crito 11y ago
  That's quite the false dichotomy. Why would the opposite of "bumbling moron father" be "action hero", rather than "competent father"? The John McClanes of this world, if in fact they exist at all, are exceptionally few and far between. Good competent fathers though? Those are hardly Hollywood inventions.

vijayr 11y ago

Look at some of the stories from the media. Some airlines will not allow males sit next to unaccompanied children. A theme park bans single males from bird watching, "in case they are predators". Female sexual assaults are disgusting while male sexual assaults are funny, to most people. If a little girl has a problem, it is immediately attended to, whereas if a little boy has a problem, he is told to "be a man and suck it up". Feminism is cool whereas MRA is not. Oh, we also have some "interesting" people like this - http://www.vice.com/read/is-reducing-the-male-population-by-90-percent-the-solution-to-all-our-problems http://www.vice.com/read/is-reducing-the-male-population-by-... And so on. I wish we look at problems without the gender/race/nationality etc lens and only purely based on their merit. This is 2015 and we still have gender stereotypes, whole lot of double standards (for both genders), laws favoring one gender or the other etc. All this noise is just tiring.

pikachu_is_cool 11y ago
Going off of that Vice article, sometimes I think that a 40/60 ratio of men to women would be favorable... it'd probably reflect the proportions of our hunter gatherer ancestry, and a lot of psychological benefits would come with that I'd imagine. But everything else she said was extremely misandrist and sexist.
- jaggederest 11y ago
  You can actually see the difference in gender relations in places with different gender ratios, and by age, as well. "Single men become a rare commodity later in life due to our unfortunate propensity for dying. If you can get to 50 the world seems to be nothing but women." http://jonathansoma.com/singles/ http://jonathansoma.com/singles/
- roel_v 11y ago
  "sometimes I think that a 40/60 ratio of men to women would be favorable..." Without wanting to turn this into a race thing, there are sociological circumstances which sort of give us a glimpse (in subsets of the population) of what that could look like - and it's not pretty... See e.g. http://www.economist.com/node/21532296 http://www.economist.com/node/21532296, which is one of the lesser emotionally charged discussions of it, but I'm sure you can find the right Google terms to find dozens of other articles about it yourself.

danmaz74 11y ago

In old stories, yes. But just look at The Simpsons as a major and early example to the contrary.

s_baby 11y ago

>I don't understand this. In most stories, arn't protagonists primarily male? Arn't they typically courageous, or intelligent, or unyielding, or strong, or determined? That is a common motif. Is it easy being expected to be unyielding/strong/determined/etc? You have lower social value when you aren't adhering to this role. When you are adhering to this role you are making yourself disposable to a "higher cause". In other words making yourself cannon fodder or getting black lung in some coal mine.

facepalm 11y ago

In Germany there was a funny incident recently: the Green political party decided to change all the wording in their publications to be gender neutral. In German often jobs have two names, somewhat like "captain" and "captainness" for male and female captains. And so on. They decided to change everything to "captain/ness". The funny thing was that they properly gendered all positive personae appearing in their publications. But they forgot about the negative appearances. So it would be "the captain/ness is steering the ship into the harbour" but "the captain is leaving the sinking ship". So check your bias next time you read a story. It's telling that you don't even notice all the negative portrayals of men anymore.

_pmf_ 11y ago
> But they forgot about the negative appearances. "Forgot".
- facepalm 11y ago
  What do you mean? Is it incorrect? I am not a native speaker of English.
  - jongraehl 11y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes

mattlutze 11y ago

Like a lot of people have said, modern shows are very much into the everyman male lead. Bryan Cranston's character in Malcolm in the Middle, Ed O'Neill's Al Bundy, Tim Taylor playing, once again, the affable rough-though-bumbling dad. The thing is these are all prime-time sitcoms and comedies. There's just as many popular shows where this isn't the case. Dramas rarely have this sort of soft, incorrigible-but-loveable archetype. I'm not super-current on my media, but Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, Walking Dead, Mad Men... most everything on HBO, Showtime, AMC, and FX run with strong, deep, emotionally complex male characters who grow and discover themselves, alongside the female characters. And the male characters in these dramas are, on the whole, much more identifiable and aspirational.

humanrebar 11y ago
> Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, Walking Dead, Mad Men Those characters are aspirational? They're almost all murderers, thieves, adulterers, or worse. I wouldn't want my son to be anything like any of those characters. Part of the problem with the antihero-as-role-model is that it also conveys that being interesting is important. And to be interesting, it's good (or at least OK) for a man to have significant character flaws. So many soon-to-be-men think having your crap together is boring and thus unattractive. And many women think falling for a flawed man and fixing him is a romantic notion.
- mattlutze 11y ago
  Yeah, aspirational was probably the wrong statement there. Your son probably shouldn't be like any character on television, whether that's the antihero or bumbling means-well-but-worth-nothing comedy father. But Interesting doesn't require character flaws. Those exist in characters in stories to provide space for developmental arcs -- space for us to see them grow and change, something we all want to do. They exist to make a point out of a story. And these folks are so identifiable because we all sometimes feel like a not-put-together person. Heck, look how popular Breaking Bad, or House, M.D. were -- Laurie and Cranston were insanely popular in those roles because in their ridiculousness they reflected traits many people understand. Though I doubt their performances encouraged any meaningful percentage of the nation's fathers to start cooking meth, or medical professionals to treat people for lupus. The story for a lot of these characters is that you can look like you have your shit together and still have space to learn, grow, evolve. Sure, it's in the context of murders and whatever because there's more drama there than "guy that goes to the office and has an ongoing feud with his HOA". But that doesn't invalidate the story, or directly encourage the audience to adopt the superficial story components.

mason240 11y ago

In more stories villains are male.