bah. simulpost. Disagree with Kimstu, of course.
Imagine how traumatic it was to first see Bruce Vilanch! No more could being fat, homely, and in need or a haircut be my declaration of heterosexuality.
As white, heterosexual, male I’m really sick how everything, EVERYTHING comes back to homophobia.
Newsflash, I’m not homophobic.
I didn’t hate Kennedy on Buffy because I’m homophobic.
I don’t hate Richard Hatch because I’m homophobic.
I don’t think Will and Grace is completely stupid because I’m homophobic.
And I don’t hate “male idiot syndrome” commercials because I’m homophobic.
:rollseyes:
Do you have any more recent examples? In the last decade or so?
True. I forgot about all the cornball superdads from the 50s - My Three Sons, Leave it to Beaver.
Offhand I offer Phoebe on Friends, Kelly Bundy, Grace on Will and Grace, Ally McBeal, Mimi Bobeck on Drew Carey. Then I give you the reality t.v. triumverate: Jessica Simpson, Anna Nicole Smith, Nicole Richie. There’s the main character in Clueless, Sally on Third Rock from the Sun, Absolutely Fabulous. Keeping Up Appearances. Since I don’t watch a lot of t.v. comedies I think that’s pretty fair list. Movies: Clueless, Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, Miss Congeniality, Bring it On, Legally Blonde, To Die For, Death Becomes Her, Pretty Woman, Election.
And with the possible exception of the “reality” idiots and Mimi Bobeck, I love them all. I’m happy to see women do comedy successfully.
I find this whole thread a little dense. All you’re noticing when you say there’s this recent “male-bashing” trend is that men do comedy more than women. Really, I’m surprised noone here is offended by Monty Python or the Kids in the Hall or the Daily Show - all or nearly all the actors in these shows are men. And here they are playing the fools all the time. I saw John Stewart asked this by some woman on c-span - why don’t they have (m)any women on the Daily show? - and he answered “we don’t think women are funny.” Probably half joke, half truth. After reading this thread I don’t know who’s supposed to be offended by that crack - men because they’re funny or women because they’re not?
I obviously have no hard facts on this, but just right offhand, I’d bet men outnumber women several times over as comedians (I can’t think of a whole lot of women in comedy). As far as comedy actors (SNL, Mad TV, various comedy troupes, etc.), on the other hand, I imagine the number is probably closer to even.
Maybe someone should do a study on which sex is funnier. 
For every stupid female in the sitcoms you mention above, there was at least one counter-balancing stupid male:
- Phoebe: Joey
- Kelly Bundy: Her dad and brother
- Grace: The whole cast was “screwy” (I don’t think Grace was seen as more stupid than the rest)
- Ally McBeal: Ditto (as with Grace)
- Sally on Third Rock: Dick & Harry Solomon
(I can’t comment on the other examples, because I didn’t watch those sitcoms)
But there are countless sitcoms with stupid males that don’t have any corresponding stupid female (at least in the main cast)
- Jim (Taxi)
- Ray Romano
- Tim Allen
- Paul Buchman (Mad About You)
- Jim (According to Jim)
- Homer Simpson (Marge and Lisa were always smarter than Homer and Bart)
- Bill Miller (Still Standing)
- Sean Finnerty (Grounded for Life)
- Doug Heffernan (King of Queens)
- etc …
You’re not seriously providing real characters as evidence are you? The “stupid male” characters are fictional and thus represent a trend in how men are represented. If some reality shows have men that are stupid, this does not count towards the thrend.
I think I agree that in movie-land there is more balance. It is is mostly in TV-land (sitcoms and TV ads) that the moron-male stereotype is shown all the time, and much more heavily than any moron-female characters.
I think all the characters (male and female) in those shows are acting like fools all the time, so there is some balance, which makes it OK.
On the other hand, in the Pink Panther movies (with Peter Sellers), he was the only idiot, but I didn’t have a problem with that because it was seen that he was an idiot because of his own idiosyncracies. He was not acting the stereotype of the "universal stupid male"TM and so was, for the most part, not part of the trend.
What lawn? And in the few families I know that DO have a lawn… gardening is woman’s work. Women like flowers, men don’t - at least officially. I know one Spanish family where the husband was the one who was “into plants”. Taking out the garbage is done either by the woman or by the kids - at the woman’s orders.
Unclogging toilets and cleaning the sink trap (which I do but lots of men are surprised I know how to do it, as if it was so difficult) are something that needs to be done very rarely. Preparing menus, buying ingredients, cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing - are a lot more frequent.
I did mention “statistics in the EU”, didn’t I?
checks
Yep. I did.
Statistics give averages and broad information, not details. My brother does the daily cooking, while his wife, who is actually good at following cookbooks (he can’t) does fancy stuff occasionally (a role traditionally reserved for the husband, in Spain: “yeah he makes a great paella but I am the one who washes the pan and he leaves the kitchen like Attila and his Huns went through”). Younger men are better at sharing work, according both to the statistics and to my own information. In many cases, both the man and the woman have never been “housebroken” before they got married: they had the kind of Mom who can handle everything so she just can’t be bothered with training - teaching someone how to fry an egg takes a lot longer than frying it. So they learn together, figure out who is best at what and split the work along those lines, not along some “tradition”. Good!
I used to write for a text-based internet game, and once my “editor” (American) laughed and said: “here I can see you’re a woman, you’ve actually given names for kinds of flowers… all the other gardens we have were written by guys and they just say ‘There’s some flowers here.’” — funny thing is, my English vocabulary for flowers isn’t so big and one of the other writers (male) was an agricultural engineer, working for Atlanta’s Parks and Gardens; he’d helped me figure out what the flowers names were based on my descriptions. So there you have the stereotype and the anti, all rolled into one.
I’m not morally upset about male bashing in sitcoms because I just see it as lazy writing. Let’s see if this formula is funny.
Broken Item + Man with Tools + Wife who wants to call Professional = Funny.
It takes some sort of mathematical whiz, or better yet a writer, to take this formula and make it interesting. Although to be fair it wouldn’t be very funny to show a competant man making repairs.
I suppose times change. There used to be a time when mother-in-law equalled a shrill, obnoxious, and overbearing woman who hated her son/daughter-in-law. Although you still find these in sitcoms, and indeed in real life, it isn’t as prevalant as it used to be. I’m sure that just about any example of male bashing we can come up with can be easiely echoed by female bashing. I don’t really think the problem is television.
How many people believe that girls are more mature then boys? I’ve seen to many teenage girls make bone headed decisions to believe that’s the case. How come men are compared to children when it comes to recreational items they purchase? I don’t hear women being compared to children for buying nic-knacks Anne Geddes calanders. Why is it acceptable to use the type of automobile a man drives as a penis gauge? In general I don’t hear people making comments about the size of a woman’s vagina in relation to the vehicle she drives.
I guess on the flip side there are probably hundreds of little things that women might notice but I never do. Not that I always agree with Bill Mahr but he did have a pretty good bit. If you stand before an audience and say “Men are smarter then women you will be booed. If you say women are smarter then men then they’ll clap.”
Marc
<nitpick>
Well, the fact is that you went through the trouble of describing the flowers, and then found a friend who helped you with the names based on your descriptions, while, according to your quote, the guys just said “There’s some flowers here”. So the stereoptype somewhat holds in this case.
</nitpick>
That’s a great list, except I want to nitpick some of them. Third Rock from the Sun definitely fits the “men are idiots” formula. Dick, the leader, is a bumbling fool. He’s cheuvanistic, unsophisticated, clumsy, and dense. Sally is really smarter and more of a leader than Dick, although she has her own foibles just as all the characters do.
In Legally Blonde, the boyfriend is portrayed as a total jackass, and the woman ends up smelling like a rose while he ends up being a big loser.
In Election, Matthew Broderick’s character is subjected to one painful humilation after another. The man is far and above the butt of more jokes than any of the women in that movie.
Other than those, it’s a good list.
Do you think there is no connection between the male bashing on sitcoms and the Bill Maher line you mention?
I think there is a connection, and male bashing on sitcoms (and TV ads) is a result not only of laziness, but also a result of a culture that conforms with Bill Maher’s observation.
He’s pretty astute, for a man. 
Yeah, if you’re a guy. Not that any ever have, but I theorize a woman could say “men are smarter than women” to some applause.
I haven’t found this to be true. What I have found to be true is that if you’re a woman and you defend men as far as male-bashing or say that men aren’t stupider and worse than women, you’ve got this distinct group of very loud people who will follow you around, call you names, say that you’re frothing at the mouth, pretend you’re a traitor to your own gender, believe that you are blind to reality, tell you that you’re a wannabe man with penis envy, and quite possibly even hate you.
It’s almost worse to be a woman who stands up for men than to actually be a man.
You forgot the ones who say you must not actually be female at all, catsix.
Oh, yeah. Those are harder to come by in real life, but occur on the Internet with regularity.
But, of course, Sally is also male. She’s a male in a female body. Much of the humor around Sally was her mental instincts warring with her physical ones.
That’s true, that does happen. I’d like to see, though, a woman say that men are smarter. It would be interesting to see the number and gender of people who react to it.