Plus, I think another fundamental misconception these guys have is just how much casual no-strings sex is going on out in the world. They’re making some kind of assumption that above a certain level of attractiveness, that everyone is either in a relationship or hooking up like mad- like nobody actually goes home alone on a night out.
It’s not like that, at least not in my experience. I mean people do hook up, but it’s not nearly as ubiquitous as these guys must think it is. It’s like they heard every guy bullshitting about his sex life to other men, and then blew that up by a factor of ten, and get resentful that they can’t get in on any of that action. In reality, those guys likely hook up a lot less than their stories indicate, and the women they hook up with aren’t the best looking ones at the club either.
Another example of misuse of words is the term conspiracy theory. Just because there are true conspiracies, doesn’t mean that conspiracy theories aren’t nonsense, by definition. It’s not the literal meaning of the words, it’s the context and mindset.
Look at TV shows like Friends, How I Met Your Mother, Sex And The City.
These TV shows certainly imply that, for some people, there is indeed an unlimited supply of hot partners to hook up with, and even within a closer friend group. And the thing of it is, the characters aren’t even particularly portrayed as heroic, but as relatable, regular folks.
Now the reality as I understand it is that sexual activity is going down, because most sexual activity occurs in relationships, and indeed the number of people in relationships at any one time is going down.
So I don’t know what to think about these portrayals. Is this lifestyle available for anyone, realistically, where they don’t revel in their own opportunity, or just take it all with a shrug? Does it indicate a more stratisfied social society? I don’t know, but it is something that we are portraying in media, that these sorts of people supposedly exist.
The counter-argument is that fiction should be taken as an accurate reflection of reality? Really?
I suppose that means there should have been huge, high end NYC apartments affordable to 20-somethings with dead end jobs in the 90s. Right? Because it was on TV and must be an accurate reflection of reality.
Back in the 90s and early 2000s, it wasn’t ever like you see on TV. Maybe that’s just me and the crowds I hung out with, but there was NOBODY like Barney Stinson out there that I knew of. Even in college, where there was more opportunity than in the working world.
I think that the point made is that fiction shapes people’s expectations. Then reality does not meet those expectations.
And yes, I do think that Friends and similar media has made people expect that you can find huge, high end NYC apartments affordable to 20 somethings with dead end jobs, but while that is another false expectation that many take from fiction, that’s a discussion for a completely different thread.
That’s part of the point but not the main thrust. The point being made is that such characters (like Barney Stinson) must be based on real people who exist and they must be somewhat common, otherwise why would they be portrayed as such on TV? That was the entire last paragraph - why are these portrayals on TV if such people aren’t real?
The answer is: they don’t have to be real. It’s fiction. There may have been somebody sort of like Cosmo Kramer in real life (the character was loosely based on a real person, after all). But no, you aren’t going to have lovable rogues who, in real life, would have been institutionalized one way or another pretty quickly.
Likewise, there are certainly some men who are sort of the ‘notch on the bedpost’ sorts but they aren’t going to go home with somebody new every night or be considered nearly as charming or lovable.
“What? Characters on TV are huge exaggerations and there aren’t people exactly like that in real life? Why should we have known that?”
A teen or early 20’s, I don’t know that they have the life experience to understand just how different TV life is from real life. In a sit-com, or even worse, a rom-com, what is clearly toxic male behavior often is rewarded. It may be fiction, but it’s hard to see that fictional character get rewarded for behavior and not want to emulate it.
On the balance of things, I’d say that ‘Ten Things I Hate about You’ probably caused more people to go incel than reddit did.
I think it can be very hard to unpack and understand what in fiction is legitimate context for a world you don’t know, and what is just stuff added to make the story interesting. When my son was 5 or 6, it was very confusing for him to learn that unicorns were absolutely not real, but lava absolutely was–albeit not running through a villain’s . Both seemed like fantasy conventions to him.
When I was in my teens, I think I was really impacted by the stuff that shows up under “men writing women” discussions. I knew not to trust TV, but I read a ton of detective novels and I tended to assume that actual published authors knew more about human nature as a whole than I did. So, looking back at it, I can see I internalized a lot of ideas about how “normal” women think and behave that were actually total bullshit–but at the time, I just thought I was the weird one, or I didn’t know what was normal.
So yes, I can see someone watching TV and watching teen movies and knowing it’s fiction and exaggerated, but still think that a “normal” person has sex with 2-3 partners in high school, and with 2-3 different people a semester, or even a month, in college, even though in my experience that is far, far from the norm. One thing “incels” are really into is the idea that “females” all have these ridiculously high “body counts”. which they both bring up to slut-shame them but also as a form of misery-wallowing.
I think the shows I grew up with, 1970s-80s, the level of romance was at a more realistic level. Even on a show like Star Trek, with a character, Captain Kirk, who is now looked upon as a womanizer, the number of times that there was an actual consummation was not that many. Many attractive female guest stars, sure. Flirtations, fewer than the attractive guest stars, but sure. Actual consummations were a lot fewer than people realize, I think I read once there were only four, and a couple of those were actual LTRs.
Now there was plenty of unrealistic stuff on those shows like cops and PIs dealing with a murder and getting shot at every single week. But that’s information that’s more accessible to the average person, it’s not that hard to figure out that really didn’t happen to people.
How much sex other people are having is not exactly a matter of public record. A lot of the incels or people in that demographic also don’t have these big social groups that are implied on these shows. I never had that or anything close to that. So they’re isolated in that way too.
So now we have a decades long presentation of lifestyles that haven’t been debunked, laughed at, satirized for the most part, that are held up as attainable, aspirational for regular folks. We mock shows like Leave It To Beaver and even Friends for demographic reasons, not including people of color, whereas these other shows are excluding other demographics and we just can’t see it.
I think a lot of that depends on how you were raised. I remember having a lot of conversations with my parents about how ridiculous the TV world was; we were barely allowed to watch TV, and often when we did, we had lots of conversations about inconsistencies. Maybe the issue is that now we have people who grew up with TV in their rooms, watching shows targeted just at them. We stratify pop-culture so much by age (to better target advertising) that you just don’t have as much opportunity for those conversations.
Building on advertising, that’s also a place that makes it seem like everyone on earth is having more fun–including more sex–than you. That’s how ads work. I remember turning 21 and being really excited to be old enough to “go out drinking” and being honestly sorta shocked when I realized I was still poor and still too responsible to drive drunk. It may be the alcohol and car ads as much as the sit-coms that set up weird expectations in people’s minds. It’s hard to blame people for “believing this” when brilliant people are making gobs of money to convince the masses of exactly that.
For what it’s worth, my kid (10) is only allowed to watch TV/Youtube on the big screen in the living room–no TVs in bedrooms, no YouTube on a tablet. I don’t watch everything with him, but I try to low-key pay attention and we have a lot of conversations about what he is seeing–including ads. If he were watching the same shit in a vacuum, I am absolutely positive he’d have a warped view of normal already.
Odd that while today characters on TV have more sex than most people, in the '50s they had less, given that married couples slept in twin beds.
I wonder if that included the robot version of his old flame in “Shore Leave.”
In the first season he was married to his ship. Kind of changed in the later ones.
In the midern world, someone who could come by your house and cast “sleep” on you and you’d be guaranteed a pleasant night’s rest would be able to pront money.
