Or dressing in bib overalls?
Seriously? You don’t see this as Ted’s embellishment of a story, or Barney doing something as a challenge? When was the last time you saw someone in full scuba gear in a bar? And how often did that work for them to get laid?
But that’s kind of the issue (and by “issue” I mean “thing worth acknowledging and talking about”) in my mind. There’s are ill-defined edges to the modern concept of consensual sex when it comes to honesty between partners, and when it comes to inebriation.
Barney’s whole MO is about using deception and alcohol to get women to sleep with him, including going through extenuating and elaborate hoax-type set-ups to pretend to be someone he fundamentally is not. It’s a completely legitimate question to ask “did your sex partner know they were having sex with Barney Stinson?”
The problem is not Barney’s character, but rather the fact that, as you say a “light-hearted sitcom” never goes there. It spends episode after episode leaving a trail of women who are intentionally targeted and lied to, and the series never asks “is this rape or some rape-adjacent really awful behavior? What about all of the women involved; is what happened to them funny?” The characters in the show (and thus the writers) pretty much respond to Barney’s actions with a “you dirty but loveable scamp!”
Having a character do what Barney does is not the issue, it’s the lack of in-show awareness/acknowledgement about how truly awful it is that makes the show a little cringey. The writers chose to NEVER address the possibility of really negative outcomes for the victims of Barney’s predation. It’s always for a laugh.
@Ann_Hedonia , you seem eager to defend the concept of a “sexually confident and assertive man looking for no-strings-attached anonymous fun and the women who sleep with them,” but I suggest that you’re glossing over a lot of obvious and and ubiquitous actions and character traits written into the Barney character that differentiate him from those people.
Look at the picture @Babale shared a few posts up. Barney is 100% the person who will promise riches, literally pretend to be someone else (including creating a false digital trail of the made up person to support the lie and keep from being found out).
Hot men eager to please don’t need to be defended here, and are not under attack when the humor of the Barney character through a contemporary lens comes into question.
But this begs the question: at what point does effective deception result in a situation in which people have sex with someone they don’t want to have sex with? I don’t know the answer, but I do feel that Barney walks that line all the time. And it’s always presented as fine. That’s a choice.
Yeah, exactly. And for all those doubting what is in the playbook, despite the examples I provided, here is how Barney describes it in the show:
@BigT I think a moment that sums up how the show treats Barney is his song/music video.
“Barney Stinson! That guy’s awesome!” Insists the song over an 80s power ballad, with footage of extreme activities like water skiing. But then it continues. We see Barney, in a pair of sunglasses, maybe a fake wig. “This isn’t Barney Stinson singing this song! That would be really lame!”
Again not a regular show viewer but reading along here …
“Scam” and “con” seem to operative words for Barney’s casual sex behaviors.
And it seems to me that writing borrows from tropes of other likable con artists - the con generally depends on the greed or other poor motivation of the mark.
His plays actually seen would only work on a woman motivated by getting a man’s money or having a famous man bagged to have on her belt or by revenge. The trope is the mark somehow deserves it.
Is that accurate?
I’m going to have to review some past threads concerning harassment and date rape. Because my personal impression (possibly wrong) was that MANY people and organizations believe consent must be considerably greater than Ann Hedonia is suggesting here.
In MANY (BY FAR NOT ALL) instances, the victim’s complaint impresses me as morning after regrets/second guessing of bad decisions, males being criticized for persistence, … In one ep, one of Barney’s past conquests follows him around and clues his intended bedmates in to Barney’s true nature. Is there any question the this woman would have characterized Barney’s behavior as harassment or their sex as nonconsensual?
I’ve pretty much accepted that that is the generally accepted current culture. From my perspective, what I see Barney doing is considerably worse than what I’ve seen reported in the news as unacceptable - and actionable.
Heck - just recently an Air Force General faced potentially 7 years in prison!!! for kissing and groping his sister-in-law. IMO - that guy is (most likely - I didn’t see/hear all of the evidence) a creep - but 7 years?
No. In a typical episode, he sees an attractive woman who appears to have been crying, so he considers her emotional vulnerable and plots how to bed her.
“Oh, I once pulled The Soul Man. There was this beautiful girl who only dated black guys…”
[woman at another table turns around]
“Barnell‽”
Nope. The plays where he corners women whose significant others are late or standing them up; the plays where he pretends to be injured or disabled to take advantage of sympathy; the plays where he convinces a woman that her SO cheated on her and she should get back at him by sleeping with Barney, the plays where he pretends to be a woman to date lesbians…
Also, saving the world. “I must away!”
“They all deserve it” is typical of con men. No, they don’t all deserve it.
I used to read a little bit of that PUA community. Occasionally on dating sites you will see a post from a mid to late 30s woman that makes it abundantly clear she is looking for a marriage with children ONLY at that point, please do not bother her if you want something else. The PUAs joke about these women and think it would be a great “prank” to lie to them and get them to sleep with the PUAs anyway. That is how they view the world.
Both genders are capable of lying and deception. In the short term both genders need to vet the other. In the long term, deeper deceptions, the blame falls more and more on the dishonest one.
If people are leveraging MeToo for morning after regrets, that’s wrong, but people typically hijack those sorts of concerns for their own purposes. Shaming and shunning often gets out of control.
If we scrub all of these sorts of people from our media, we’re just inventing the new Hays Code, where media doesn’t reflect reality.
I don’t remember that bit, and it may not have been admirable, but it’s funny. And that may be all that the writers were going for.
Wait, what? The “vast majority of people” would pretend to have an entirely different job or other life circumstances if they thought it would make them “more attractive” to potential partners?
That’s… concerning.
You think that a young attractive female character behaving in a way that there are already classic disparaging gendered names for (i.e., “gold-digger”, “whore”, etc.) wouldn’t be criticized?
And then there was “the naked man” gambit (NOT IIRC employed by Barney). 
It was - it worked for Ted and Lilly, but not Barney - so 2 out of 3 times, just as Barney guaranteed
Remind me; what was “the naked man” gambit?
I think focusing these debates exclusively on the male characters misses a great deal of what the debate is actually about. I haven’t actually come across much retrospective criticism of Happy Days, but the “objectionable” part isn’t Fonzie himself so much as the interchangeable female vessels who seem to exist solely to give him pleasure and affirm his status as the king of cool. What might be objectionable is that women IRL don’t come when a guy snaps his fingers, unless they’re being paid, abused and/or part of a cult. The wish-fulfillment aspect of a character like Fonzie is pretty obvious: who wouldn’t like to snap their fingers and have a beautiful (and willing) woman materialize on his arm?
I think Happy Days gets away with it for two reasons: 1) Henry Winkler plays Fonzie in such a fun, harmless way it undercuts the objectification, and 2) Fonzie’s prowess with women is really there to contrast with the utter haplessness of Richie, Potsie and Ralph, who couldn’t emulate the Fonz if their lives depended on it.
I think the other guy gave the stats for success.
Basically, the guy just takes off his clothes while the woman is out of the room, so when she walks in, she sees him naked.
This is utterly absurd. Someone who pretends to be a nice person but is actually a horrible asshole is a bad thing, even without sex being involved. Someone who tricks you to get close to you only to discard you, who completely lacks any empathy for you: that’s a sociopath. And they hurt tons of people, women and men and nonbinary people. It has nothing to do with considering women to be children.
That said, when we’re talking about the creeps who do this to women, we’re usually talking about barely legal adults. I know story after story of women who thought they had met this guy they were falling in love with only for him to abandon them. There’s a reason why the entire Pick-Up Artist community is decried as misogynist bullshit. They see women as lesser being to exploit. You trick them to get laid.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. What you describe also describes how abusive relationships start. The abuser always seems nice at first, before they start abusing.
Hell, I can go back even further. Lying to get something out of someone else is wrong. There’s some debate about lying not to hurt someone’s feelings, but someone who lies out of selfish desire? That person is a bad person.
I am genuinely astounded to be reading this. I would have thought I was reading something from a clueless guy defending his own dishonest practices. It’s clearly exploitative, in the same way any sort of deception to get something you want is exploitative.
The fact that some people can see through the deception doesn’t make it okay. Those aren’t the ones these creeps prey on. They prey on those who they know can’t give informed enthusiastic consent, which is the actual criteria.
If you don’t believe in that, then you’ve just said that con artists are okay. It’s not like consent concepts only apply to sex.