A War on Men?

I've commented before on the characters on two cartoon TV programs, Homer Simpson on The Simpsons and Peter Griffin on Family Guy. These guys are stupid, they're foolish, they are disgusting fat pigs. And, not least, they're incredibly insensitive.

Their wives, on the other hand, are smarter, wiser; they embody all possible good sense and compassion. Their main lack of good sense might seem to be that they tolerate and forgive their husbands, as they always do, even when it's mind-blowing that they do. I'd like to see Marge or Lois say, "That's it, I've had it, this time you've gone too far. I'm through. I want a divorce." Don’t you think divorces have occurred with less provocation? So these women gotta be saints. And, even more strangely—here my non-mainstream sensibility might be coming into play—they continue to find their husbands sexy.

And there are a couple of TV commercials that depict men (a husband in one case, and a husband and father in the other) as stupid. In one, the husband set out to kill the weeds in the family's lawn, and killed the grass in the process. His wife has to indoctrinate him with the mantra, "weeds, not grass."

In the other one, for AT&T high-speed Internet, the husband—a middle-aged guy--can't seem to grasp that their new Internet service lets all the family's computers connect wirelessly, and keeps asking for his "Internet cord." Even his young daughter is far more savvy than Dad and keeps trying to explain to him.

It looks like there's a pattern here: at least four instances in which a male is depicted as stupid. The poor, patient, long-suffering females have to try to put up with them. I guess it's just part of the superior nature of women that they not only understand men and recognize all their foibles, they know it's woman's lot in life to forgive her man. Men are terribly flawed but hey, you know, they're good for something so we gotta keep them around.

I think the tables have turned: we used to have TV shows about shrewish, intolerable wives who got murdered by their husbands. And, as often happens, the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.

Nowadays, if it were women who were depicted as unfavorably as the men are in my examples above, we'd have all the feminist organizations up in arms and calling for a boycott of the TV show or the product sponsor. Note just the fact that we have the word feminism. What is the word for advocacy or defense of males? There is no word. I rest my case.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein