What TV commercials, TV shows, Stories you were told, Movies, Plays, Books and Common Sayings appear or sound discriminatory towards men AND/OR whites?
BTW, I asked this question once before on some other board, and for some reason some people were offended by the quesion (worded this exact way). Racism and Sexism doesn’t necessarily discriminate.
Why is it “White Men Can’t Jump”? Huh? Something about the Man being laden down with plundered wealth, isn’t it? Isn’t it!? What about white women? Can they jump? This blatently presents the stereotype that the white man is no good at sports. I am offended to my very core.
What? The movie’s about basketball? And one of the main characters is a white guy? And he jumps? And it’s a comedy? Never mind.
Nearly every sitcom I’ve ever seen portrays men as oafs. (Lovable oafs, sometimes, but oafs nonetheless.)
Most fairy tales portray the man as simply a two-dimensional plot device to save a woman.
The common rhymes about what little kids are made of (“sugar and spice and everything nice” vs. “snips and snails and puppy dogs tails”) have always sounded misandrist to me.
Nearly every word about men that comes out of the mouths of my two female roommates is sexist to the core. (Usually they’re joking though. I think. 
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Funny you say that. I was just watching “I LOVE LUCY” the other day, and I thought to myself that things are/were just opposite these days.
Shows like The Simpsons, The Cosby Show, Going Pains, that one show with Steve Urkel… All have grown men acting ether immature, impulsive, ignorant or stubborn. They often find trouble and their wives bail them out.
(for The Simpsons, if not Marge, Lisa the 8 year old)
Everybody Loves Raymond is another. But I see thing changing now.
“I Love Lucy” is still the only TV show I can think of in which women are depicted as dingbats who get into trouble, and must be bailed out by their more level-headed husbands.
Otherwise, from the very beginning of televisiosn, it’s been just the opposite. Men are depicted as bozos who get into trouble because they don’t listen to their infinitely smarter wives. That’s true on…
The Honeymooners
The Flintstones
The Munsters
Home Improvement
Malcolm in the Middle
The list goes on. Mind you, I’m not really complaining. The fact is, comedy needs silly people to do stupid things. If male comedians are doing the silly things, that means they’re getting the laughs, which is what any comedian wants anyway.
You can’t be dignified AND funny!
That’s a good point, astorian. Also, I think when women aren’t involved in actually making the programs or commercials it’s weird to think of sexism against men showing up in them.
Oh come now, let’s not go too far with the selective memory. The dimwitted wife is as much a staple in sticoms as the dimwitted husband. How many episodes of Dick Van Dyke did Laura do something stupid so Rob could be level-headed? Want to convince me that Peg Bundy was any more intelligent than AL in Married With Children? Who’s the Boss featured a woman who was so incapable of keeping house she had to hire a former pro baseball player. Webster went a step further in featured a wife who couldn’t even deal with a foster child.
Of course there’s also a considerable subgenre of comedies where ALL the adults are stupid and clueless.
Hehe. See “Friends” for the above.
Other than the aforemention WMCJ, most modern horror movies (and their spoofs) make some mention of the white girl who runs upstairs instead of out of the house, or trips over grass in the woods (Scream, House on Haunted Hill, Scary Movie) , and other cliches. But then there’s also usually the obligatory joke from the black character of how he’s going to be the next victim (Deep Blue See, Jason ??).
I wonder, though, if the apparent lack in stupid female characters is simply because male-centered entertainment does not generally include a lot of developed female characters in comedies. Sitcoms (in my opinion) are more geared toward females than males. Male-targeted entertainment doesn’t need to include dumb chicks who get into trouble to be sexist – objectifying and marginalizing women (like in the Man Show) is, in my opinion, much worse.
Jack Benny could. Jack Benny was cool. 
RR
I dunno. How many?
I thought these two were fairly evenly matched in their white trash cunning.
Angela was a divorced woman with two kids and a professional career. Sure, she could have had her promiscuous mother help out instead of hiring Tony, but then we wouldn’t have seen that painful tension of a would-be romance between these opposites. Who’s the Boss? More like Where’s the remote?
Nor could the husband. That was the premise. It was a Diff’rent Strokes ripoff in which a childless couple get a crash course in parenting when an orphaned child appears on their doorstep.
Why? 
Old timer checking in. Many of the older sit coms featured the ding bat wife (I married Joan, My little Margie for example). and of course many, many shows had the ‘rock’ of a father figure (My 3 sons, Father Knows Best, The Real McCoys etc.). For a less cob webbed example, THe Brady BUnch. Mom, stay at home w/6 kids all in school still needed the help of a live in housekeeper who cooked and cleaned. Maybe it was all that ‘not having sex’ that wore her out.
And, there’s also something to be said of the use of a dingbat dad in a comedy. It would be comedic because it’s against type.
Some TV adverts I’ve seen recently that are sexist:
-“It’s a well known fact that men are more intelligent than women” Male office worker out-performers a female co-worker due to his selection of toiletries.
-Barbie doll doesn’t give Ken a slice of cake. Ken is upset and slugs Barbie so hard she falls into the swimming pool.
-Group of men out for a drink. Encouraged by the others, one sneaks up on an attractive female stranger and magically whips her underwear out from under her clothes. Everyone laughs.
-Man discovers diet-beers. He goes around and punches out his local female shop assistant for not telling him about it sooner.
-Man decides to turn his life around by getting new job with recruitment agency. But step one of his get-a-life programme is to dump his no-good leech of a girlfriend. Girlfriend looks shocked, but no-one cares 'cos obviously, being a typical female, she deserved it.
-Man finishes delicious breakfast and looks forward to a bit of bed action with his partner. Unfortunately she is rubbish in bed and he isn’t shy about telling her this.
All shockingly sexist adverts you can’t believe they’d try to use to sell their products. Well, they would be, if they were true. What I’ve done in my descriptions is reverse the genders and altered the product information to fit. Otherwise they are all real adverts I have seen recently.
Somehow the advertisers think it’s ok to be sexist towards men and use negative stereotypes in a way they wouldn’t dare do with women. Quite apart from it being sexist, it’s just as insulting to woman, as they believe that the best way to appeal to the female consumer is to belittle men. Is the only thing that catches the interest of women their opinion of men? I don’t think so. Yet a large percentage of adverts aimed at woman almost as a rule contain an incidental dig at men.
Yeah, I know it’s all supposed to be light-hearted humour, but some actually have an unpleasant edge of revenge to them. And just 'cos your making something out as a joke doesn’t make it acceptable. The Advertising Standards Authority have also noticed this…
So you piqued my curiosity, Futile. What are the ads to which you refer?
I really think there are prejudices of all kinds on TV, But it seems that there’s less attention brought to prejudices against males.
When I see a show like The Man Show, I see both sexes being stereotyped. It doesn’t matter who makes it, (I would think mostly men in this case). I know a lot of men who contribute just as much, or more, to any male stereotypes or misconceptions of men in general. It feels like these people are trying to speak on MY behalf all the time.
I’ve seen many ads for shoes, sport drinks, and women products that are supposed to seem empowering to women. In reality they are PROBABLY just trying to sell the product. In a world where the man is usually the hero, I can understand where one would, for once, want to see the woman being the hero… Men are, however, often the villains.
“What Women Want” mockery of both sexes. The man is basically saying that if only men weren’t such dumbass we would realize that women are thinking on a higher plain. How could anyone, even a woman, make a movie about what women want? Different women want different things. It’s not as if they are all one of the same.
I think almost everything sexist works against both sexes.
And the women are sitting around whining about how the price hasn’t come to rescue them. So it’s hardly like fairy tales are full of strong female characters either.
FACT: Women just do more spending on more diverse products than men. What we guys have to do is buy more household cleaners and whatnot. Then we’ll see more pandering towards our side, level it out a bit.