In most media I think it’s become difficult to be honest in a both sides sense.
IRL I have been lied to by women. It’s part of putting ourselves out there, it happens. Not everything portrayed in media at any particular time is an accurate reflection of life; all eras have their biases.
I completely agree with this. Barney was portrayed as the coolest guy of the group. I mean multiple books were published written by “Barney Stinson” - one being The Playbook which was already referenced, but also The Bro Code. You had multiple things he came up with which have entered the public lexicon - hot/crazy, bro code, challenge accepted, lengend-ary, etc.
Just really weird for me - and the sort of thing that is cool about these boards. All too often I feel as though I am told I am NOT as sensitive to some societal trends/concerns. And here I’m questioning behavior towards women and having MANY folk say my concerns are unfounded. Which is fine.
My thoughts exactly, and it harks back to the archaic idea that men want sex and women don’t, the idea that your sex is some sort of precious jewel that must be guarded carefully and never given away lightly. It took us, as a society, a long time to move away from that, and I don’t want to go back.
Being charming towards a woman and making her feel beautiful and special in the hopes that she’ll sleep with you isn’t predation. When I was a young woman I liked men like the Barney Stinson character. They were handsome, good in bed and pretty much guaranteed not to get all clingy and needy, and I resent the implication that only a vacuous bimbo would “fall” for that kind of guy.
I’m not unfamiliar with HIMYM, but I didn’t watch it enough to be able to recall specific episodes. But there are two things that are my general takeaways from sitcoms of that era.
People were generally horrible to each other. Sexual predation was the least of it. Sitcom characters were always engaging in deception and trickery and psychological manipulation to make their spouses and family and dates and friends do something they didn’t want to do. Sometimes the characters in King of Queens and Everyone Loves Raymond were so horrible to each other I found the episodes unwatchable. At other times it was funny, because it was fiction and a sitcom, even if I would’ve been horrified if people I knew in real life behaved that way.
Young single characters engaged in lots of casual sex. It wasn’t just the Barney’s and Joey’s and other characters who were written as promiscuous. Frasier Crane had 57 intimate relationships. Jerry Seinfeld had 73. Elaine Benes, who was not portrayed as a slutty character, had 29. Even George Costanza, who was written as the opposite of a ladies man, had 47.
Now a lot of this is due to the nature of a long running sitcom, and the totally non-serious nature of the sitcoms of the day.
There’s no Qanon type conspiracy to insert rape jokes into sitcoms. You can keep looking for the evidence but it doesn’t exist. Barney is comic character, meant to be laughed at because of his outlandish attitude and obsession with seeking out women for sex. And it becomes abundantly clear, starting with the short clip being criticized here, that Barney really wants to find a woman he can spend his life with. And in the end he fails at that, at least in the result he expected.
There is nothing in the show indicating Barney is interested in having sex with women who don’t want to have sex with him. That would actually be counter to the character’s nature who is most likely to consider it a personal failing if a woman didn’t want to have sex with him. But you can’t understand that by picking out a 23 second clip and looking for a reason to find it malevolent in nature.
I think at one point Barney’s goal was to have sex w/ 200 different women. More recently, I think he gave a total of 238 or so - with 3.5 seasons to go!
That’s not true. His playbook is full of strategies for getting women with no interest in sleeping with him to believe that he is someone he is not, who they DO want to sleep with.
When I googled it, one source said Barney had 282 sex partners during the run of the show
He isn’t pretending to be someone else they know. He’s doing what the vast majority of people do when they are seeking an intimate relationship, they lie to make themselves more attractive. The character is a good looking, intelligent, financially well off young man. Women want to sleep with him already. How many of them do you think are honest about themselves with Barney?
Funny you mention Jennifer.
We just watched the ancient (1960) film BUtterfield 8, where Liz Taylor plays a character described as a “call girl”. I maintain she’s just a “good time girl”, as it were. She likes sex. A lot. She tells her mother she’s a “slut” (it was 1960 there). She uses men, she isn’t being used by them. She’s Barney, in a way.
But she’s not a whore. She makes a point late in the film where she says “this is the first time I’ve taken money”, and she wasn’t happy with herself for doing so.
But the movie made me think of Jennifer, and yeah, she’s totally a whore. She takes appliances (and who knows what else) to “date” rich old guys. The show was coy about whether she actually had sex with them, and I’m not sure even what my opinion is. If she is not a true whore, then she is guilty of “acquiring appliances by deception”. All I know, whether I had sex with someone or not, no one gave me so much as a toaster.
I’m pretty sure I thought this at the time the show was new, though I was much younger and was not wise in the ways of the world. I hadn’t even seen Breakfast at Tiffanys yet. I didn’t know how to describe what I thought of her, but I knew I didn’t like it or think she was a “good guy.” Even with the gender double standard, I’m not sure her character could fly today.
Someone hasn’t watched the show, or read the tie-in book:
Yes. Barney will (for example) pretend to be a famous baseball player, pretend to propose, pretend to be going blind, etc. (he also claims to go to amnesia wards to pretend to be an amnesiac’s husband, but I think he’s joking). To be clear, I loved HIMYM and thought Barney was often funny. He’s just not a very nice person. He does take care to make sure that his dates enjoy their time with him (so he’s better than Quagmire, who really doesn’t care), and he is appalled at the thought that he might have forgotten a woman he slept with.
Maybe that’s why the “Bro Code” joke didn’t work for me. Of course, Barney slept with Robin. I wouldn’t ever imagine that someone like him wouldn’t. It’s a surprise that he feels bad about it - and apparently it surprises Marshall too (and perhaps Jason Segel is playing the scene a bit too real - at least to me, it doesn’t seem like Marshall is giving Barney a hard time. It seems like Marshall is trying to piece together what’s Barney’s telling him, and appalled at what it seems like the answer is). But other people are not required to interpret the scene the same way as I did.
I was young when I watched WKRP in Cincinnati and I believed Jennifer was simply arm candy for those old guys. I believe there are older men who serve a similar role for some women; they’re there as escorts to fancy events, and know how to dress properly and can dance.
I watched the movie Ziegfeld Girls not too long ago. Pretty sure Lana Turner - and other “girls” - received all manner of benefits from “stage door johnnies”, with no clear indication that sex was involved. (At least at first.). Sure, that was 41…
By using what strategies though? If he was promising them riches or jobs drugging them or threatening them, that sucks. If he was getting them into bed by pretending to be nice and charming and treating them like they were the most beautiful and desirable woman they’d ever met, I don’t see that as coercive.
I think predation and coercion are horrible, and if you widen the definition of non-consensual to “failing to disclose all your personal flaws before obtaining consent”, you’ve weakened the meaning and given cover to real abusers. If you convince a woman you’re a sweet and sensitive guy when you’re not, and she gives her enthusiastic consent to to sex because she thinks you’re nicer than you are, that’s not rape and it’s not necessarily wrong. Women aren’t children and we aren’t imbeciles and we know that guys are really nice to us when they want to get us into bed and we factor that into our decision.
I also think that guys who are not so good with women, the “nice” guys, will sometimes observe this and think “that angel of been crushing on can’t really want to sleep with that player, he must be tricking her into it.”, because they don’t want to admit to themselves that she’s into him.
By pretending to be specific rich or famous people, including setting up an entire fake personality on the internet, with fake articles and wiki pages about a fictional billionaire’s son. By pretending to propose to them and making them think they were gonna get married. Stuff like that.
Overly complicated Wile E Coyote style stunts (and that’s really not an exaggeration whatsoever) designed to trick women into sleeping with him.
Like, you’d see Barney walk into a bar in a cast, or a SCUBA suit, and you won’t think “is he OK?” but rather “how is he using this to get laid?”
WKRP’s Jenniffer, as I would have looked at it across time, is implied to be someone who was no fool and did not prevent would-be sugar daddies from showering her with gifts, but at the same time avoided becoming beholden to anyone, and she’s shown in-show to be one of the most competent people in the cast. Though she does have quotes like “I like older men, they’re mature and kind… and they tire easily” which are left to the audience to imagine about.
I love how a bunch of people who clearly haven’t seen the show are over here going “he’s just acting sensitive to be more appealing to girls, what could be wrong with that? Woke police alert!”
Meanwhile Barney is like:
One of the plays we see Barney working is knocking on a woman’s door and telling her that her husband and his wife have been sleeping together, then suggesting that he and the women “get even” by sleeping with each other.
That doesn’t even make sense. Which part exactly would be the wrong part? The part where Derek Jeter or the rock star has his employee go talk to the woman, instead of doing it himself? Does it suddenly become ok, if he does it himself? Or is it just the mere thought that someone has enough power/gravitas/whatever to be able to do that in the first place?
Also, are we basically saying celebrity men have to only date/go out with/sleep with women of similar power levels, i.e. celebrities? That’s also absurd IMO.
Seems to me that the critical point is the application of that power imbalance, and whether or not it is coercive or oppressive, not its mere existence.