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4 Media Myths About Men: pushing back against the stereotypes

4 Media Myths About Men: pushing back against the stereotypes

Last updated on: May 30, 2012 at 9:45 am by Tim Suttle

4 Media Myths About Men: pushing back against the stereotypes 2012-05-30T09:45:00-06:00 Tim Suttle

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The portrayal of the modern man in media culture continues to baffle me. Most men I know are nothing like what you see on television. Don’t get me wrong, I can laugh at the stereotypes without taking them too seriously. But, watching yet another show portray men as stupid, selfish, lazy, and horny is starting to become tiresome. I am a walking, talking male contradiction – which makes something I like to call “normal.”

For me it works out this way: I love to read theology and yet I follow Nascar closely. I love college but not pro football. I would rather attend an academic lecture than a baseball game. I love the Family Guy but will opt for a good documentary if it is on. I enjoy the History Channel and House Hunters International. I try to shun sentimentality but have an incredible soft spot for my children. I have many friends who are men, and many friends who are women and I can have fruitful, challenging, and meaningful conversations with both. I am – as are most men – more complicated and three dimensional than Peter Griffin (I hope), and yet I’m not above enjoying the exploits of Ron Burgundy.

It’s challenging enough to navigate what it means to be a man in our culture without reinforcing the stereotype that we are all stupid, selfish, lazy, and horny. I mean, we are those things, but we are so much more than those things. Manpacks ran an interesting story on these four themes that I really resonate with:

TV’s been getting a lot of crap lately for how it portrays women, and rightfully so. But the solution isn’t to turn to men as a source of low-brow gendered humor. Unfortunately, the past year has brought with it an onslaught of shows (How To Be A Gentleman, Last Man Standing, Work It, Man Up, A Gifted Man) that lampoon, caricature, and pigeonhole masculinity.

Here are some of the myths these shows (and countless others) are teaching our culture about men:

1. We’re stupid.

The trend is to paint guys as stunted, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals whose palette of emotional vocabulary is limited to “happy,” “mad” and “boner.” TV guys can never communicate with their emotionally advanced girlfriends, so they end up getting into all sorts of improbable hijinks.
This, of course, can’t be true, by the very fact that we’re watching the show and understanding that the dude is being an idiot. But whatever, verisimilitude schmerisimilitude.

Girlfriend: “I’m disappointed, Steve. We had a date for tonight and you blew me off for game sports beer BBQ fantasy poker night with the boys. You’ve really let me down, and if this keeps happening, resentment is going to start interfering with our relationship.”
(Girlfriend walks out.)
Steve: “What’s got her panties in a knot?”
(Laugh Track)

Which brings us to:

2. We’re selfish.

This is sort of an extension of the stupidity. The idea is that because we’re too stupid to put ourselves in other people’s shoes, we can only act in our limited self-interest.
Look at a pair of classic TV couples: Homer and Marge Simpson and Peter and Lois Griffin.
Time and time again, the plot of an episode revolves around something careless and thoughtless Homer or Peter did, and Marge or Lois trying to fix things.

Marge’s main character flaw is that she cares too much about her family.
Homer’s main character flaw is that he’s borderline retarded and sociopathically carless.

Show me a TV show with a caring, compassionate husband and a wife who’s always screwing things up with her selfishness and I’ll show you a cancelled TV show.

Girlfriend: “Babe, did you finish?”
Boyfriend: (snores)
(Laugh Track)

Which brings us to:

3. We’re lazy.

Picture a guy, or a group of guys, sitting on a couch facing a TV, pizza boxes and beer cans strewn around like shrapnel, the faint glow of the tube illuminating the strings of drool that creep out over their chins. It’s not hard to picture, is it? No, because it’s an image you see all the time on TV.
Think about it: why are you picturing it from that angle? Because I told you to–yeah, okay, fair point. But honestly, that’s how you usually see it, because it’s usually on TV.

Yeah, sometimes men do indulge in an evening on the couch watching the game. You know what else men do? We build roads, we build buildings, we build machines that build roads and buildings. We take care of our children, we cook dinner.
And sometimes, yeah, we finish two medium pies and some cheesy bread from Dominos in one sitting. But you know what? We earned it.

Wife: Dave, did you bring the twins to Karate practice?
Dave: No, honey, the game’s on! I gave them the keys to the car. They can drive themselves.
Wife: Dave, they’re ten years old.
(Laugh Track)

4. We’re horny.

This is possibly the most classic stereotype, purveyed by almost every TV show and movie that focuses on men. And I’m not going to lie here…we are. We still have the intrinsic programming handed down from our primitive ancestors to constantly search for viable mates in order to contribute to the development of the species. But you know what else we have? Empathy. Civility. Algebra. And a handful of other things that the apes just haven’t figured out yet. And we can (and DO) use those things to moderate our behavior, because we’re freaking human beings.
Our eyes might wander without our permission, but our hands don’t.
To propagate the stereotype that men are slaves to their penises is no better than propagating the stereotype that women are slaves to their emotions.

Pop culture is saturated with these stereotypes. You might even see traces of them in real life, BUT it’s up to us to work against them with everything we do, lest we be doomed to live life like clowns in a 3-walled living room with a live studio audience.

Girlfriend/Boyfriend: “And that’s a BUT we can all get behind.”
(Roll Credits)

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