I see your point, but isn’t it pretty obvious that that’s the case to some degree?
When was the last time a sitcom had an episode where the husband (who’s used to working) had to stay home and deal with housework/childcare and was shown to be totaly inept at “women’s work”? Now when was the last time a sitcom had an episode where the wife (who keeps house and cares for the kids) had to go to work and and was shown to be totaly inept at “working outside the home”?
That’s a really good question. There are some stirrings in the world of education, that the boys are being left behind in favour of focusing grade school education on girls. In my own world, my husband hates the negative stereotypes of men. I don’t know if it is hurting him in his life in any material way, but he hates them, just like I hate negative female stereotypes even if I am not substantially hurt by them on a daily basis. I’ll ask him about this.
I think the damage caused by negative stereotypes is subtle but real; it is an attitude of disrespect and assigning one sex superiority over the other. It is bad in the same ways that condoning sexism against women is bad.
I think the more usual stereotype has the previously SAHM totally kicking ass and taking names, because it’s not like you’d expect the men to actually be any good at what they do every day. :dubious:
Big time.
I must be sexist against myself. :rolleyes: If men are creating, writing, starring in [when was the last time the smart, tolerant housewife was the star of the show instead of the dumb guy?] and running the networks that make money from these shows and watching them, are they the victims? And if so, how?
I find the sitcom pairings of fat, stupid husband with beautiful, intelligent wife to be just as bad for women as men. The woman still has to be thin and beautiful to be with this clueless guy. No one comes off really well in this stereotypical marriage. Stupid or intelligent, a woman still has to be beautiful to get any guy, apparently.
I am trying to come up with an example where a less than attractive woman is paired with a good looking guy and not have it played off as a joke, but I can’t come up with one. The least attractive wife example I can come up with is Roseanne, but she was about equally matched, I would say. And that show broke all kinds of stereotypes.
Imagine the indignant screaming that would issue forth if the gender was reversed in some of the “men are idiots” advertising and entertainment programming out there.
Or lets try music. Imagine “Goodbye Earl” by the Dixie Chicks with the genders reversed.
That’s something that I don’t understand; why would the men who run the networks and make the programming decisions perpetuate these negative portrayals of men? Are they under the impression that this is what the general public wants to see? Do they think that what liberated women want to see is subjugated men? Are their wives making them do it?
That deserves the caveat that Earl is an abusive, violent husband. When a song with ‘senseless’ violence like Eminem’s '97 Bonnie and Clyde comes along, some people do get upset.
Because it makes them money - and, in my opinion, because they don’t feel harmed or affected by the stereotypes.
There’s some evidence that it is, seeing as how dumb husbands have been a staple of sitcoms for as long as they’ve existed and a staple of humor for centuries.
Now you’re onto something. These men probably just need some spare time to golf and hang out with the boys, so they let their wives make a few crazy programming decisions… 
The stereotyping of male as hapless boob has always bothered me, too, not in the least because I heard it from actual people that I knew. In some ways, though, men were complicit because they stereotyped women and went along with the stereotypes of themselves; so while the women snickered at their husbands who ‘couldn’t even boil water’ (and I had a male relative by marriage who boasted of exactly that about himself), those men would retire with their cigars after dinner to talk poitics and leave the women to themselves to ‘chat about women’s stuff’ (the subtext being, obviously, that women don’t want to bother their pretty little heads with such complex matters.
In neither case is the stereotype helpful; in some ways it helps to depersonalize people. And, while the more enlightened folks understand that stereotypes are bogus, I have read on message boards and heard people IRL parrot the stereotypes as gospel.
I also think the ‘macho man’ stereotype unfairly characterized male-type people as unfeeling robots; expected to have/show zero emotion - and it’s my own little theory that this has, at least for some people, caused women to think they can’t actually hurt men’s feelings. The other side, of course, is that people who are not permitted to show any emotion can become depressed (and, in men, act out with anger).
Sadly, as with so many other issues of stereotyping, some people cling to their beliefs tenaciously and refyse to be persuaded of the unfairness of it all.
I just want to take this opportunity to mention that I recently watched some old tapes of soap operas from 1989 (for the humor value) and was struck by how sexist the commercials were back then as opposed to now. Every other commercial seemed to feature a hapless housewife who was always opening a closet and having stuff fall all over her, opening the wrong cabinet and causing pots and pans to tumble out, spilling something, tripping over something - and I just thought, “if these commercials were on TV today, it would probably be a guy doing all this embarrassing, clumsy stuff and not a woman.”
However, I don’t watch TV. Except for the Sopranos, which doesn’t have commercials, and the World Series. So my exposure to commercials is very limited, and I don’t actually know for a fact that it’s any different now.
Uhm… all this stuff about who does what in TV commercials and sitcoms is nice and all, but people tend to step outside reality a bit when they’re watching these shows. I mean, the biggest movie in the theaters right now has everyone rooting for pirates to beat the British navy. Is this terribly unfair and prejudiced against the Brits? Certainly there’s a growing genre of anti-British entertainment. Heck, when I was living in London, everyone was wringing their hands about how awful Mel Gibson’s The Patriot was.
I suppose one could say that this stereotyping of British people as bloodthirsty, anti-freedom, bumbling evil idiots is a stereotype… and a subtle one at that. Ooohh… subtle bigotry… so subtle nobody actually believes in it!
I just have to repeat my earlier question in an different way: is anyone’s real-life view of men actually being colored by this silly little dramatic device? I mean, are women now beating out men at getting top jobs in business because laundry detergent commercials are making HR managers think that men, as a whole, are incompetent boobs who can’t be trusted, while women can do anything?
I can hardly see something as being harmful if nobody actually believes it. I just don’t think people take the jokes or commercials seriously, no more than people don’t try to hold conversations with Great Danes because they watched too much Scooby Doo as a kid; nor are pie-throwing scenes in old movies a glamorization of violence, principally because there’s not a lot of people going around throwing pies outside of movies.
I think commercials can reflect attitudes that the society holds.
Everyone always seems to harp on the fat, stupid husband/beautiful, intelligent wife mismatch, but very few actually notice that many of these shows go out of their way to point out that the fat, stupid husband and the beautiful, intelligent wife were friends for years (sometimes since childhood) before they became man and wife. If you’ve really found your soulmate the looks thing dries up pretty quick.
Of course, what do I know, I’m a schlub with a beautiful wife.
I think that when it comes to those commercials where the wife jokes about the husband not understanding how to do some household chore it comes out of the fact that there are many, many women who do feel they are the only one doing that chore and advertisers guess that those women will see the humor in it and they’re right. I’d say the odds are good that if you are getting paid well to make decisions about what’s on TV, then you don’t care if your wife thinks you’re an idiot for not being able to change a toilet roll. Especially if you never change it, and yet there is always toilet paper on the roll when you sit down. You’re the one getting paid and she’s the one jumping to attention every time she walks past an empty toilet roll. I think these jokes only bother the guys who actually do change the toilet roll. They’re not getting credit for being such good people.
One thing is that those kinds of stereotypes aren’t usually anything to do with who’s smart. They’re really about who’s taking responsibility for the small and unglamorous details of life and who’s playing dumb to get out of it. I think it’s more a stereotype of a kind of relationship with a certain dynamic where couples don’t function equally and the woman is overfunctioning on stupid things like whether her husband will be uncouth at the big dinner or whether he can dress the kids in acceptable outfits or change the toilet paper roll. There are a lot of things that appeal to men that play on the other side of that. In Canada it seems to be a popular theme in beer commercials that the drooling beer drinkers conspire to do something dumb that the girlfriend doesn’t want them to do. There are plenty of people who find that whole arrangement of the nagging woman and the boys-will-be-boys man to be charming and natural and something you just can’t do anything to change. I think most of this type of humour is really aimed at those people. As a woman, I don’t get offended when I see that nagging woman stereotype because I know that there are plenty of women who do that and that it’s their own choice. I don’t care if someone finds that hilarious. I think if I were a man I would just say, well, yeah there are couples like that out there. Good for them, I hope they yucked it up.
I guess I’m saying that those stereotypes are about couples, not about men.
I’d guess that the few men who are making the programming decisions and making themselves a big pile out of it don’t care too much about the rest of the sex. 'Twas ever thus. Talk about the ages in which women had no power, and it was the case that 99%+ of men had no power either.
As to being under impressions, I guess what happens is that TV shows attract ratings and hence generate interest for advertising space, and if either the shows or the ads themselves weren’t pulling in the consumer spenders (mostly women) then they would be pulled. So you don’t need the TV programmers to be henpecked - merely to respond to what the audience is lapping up.
BRAVO! BRA-VO!
I’d say the odds are even better that neither TV execs nor their wives change their own toilet rolls. :dubious:
While I do agree that the commercials and TV shows depicting men as idiots and women as the competent shepherds of these poor fools have gotten out of hand, you have to keep in mind that the reason that men are, for the most part, the fools on these shows is that it is the men who are the stars.
It is the fool that gets the laughs. The men are the “idiots” because they are the stars of the show. Lucille Ball was the star of “I Love Lucy”, and she was the buffoon. The straight man is always going to seem to be the “competent” one.