Saturday, February 12, 2022

On the other hand

As a woman, if most of your jokes or taste in humor is rooted in bashing or making fun of men, then you need to look within.  lol  

Just saying, since there's a strange idea out there that, like the modern enslavement of African Americans in our current slave state, ours is a country on par with The Handmaid's Tale where women are concerned. 

Someday men might stand up to this, but I'm not holding my breath. As I've said before, for men in the centuries to come, men today will not be held up as the ideal model. 

Robin Hood and William Tell and Ivanhoe and Lancelot
They don't envy me, (Electric Light Orchestra)

Don't worry.  I doubt they envy most men of the late 20th, early 21ast Century.  

2 comments:

  1. I've actually never met anyone whose 'taste in humor' was 'rooted' in bashing women or bashing men. My father got off some good quips on the subject of girl culture, quips of a sort I haven't heard in meatspace in the years since he died. NB, the midpoint of his natural life was around about 1954.

    Humor rooted in bashing men is a staple of advertising and situation comedy. Note, Bob Newhart (in his mundane life a married man with four children) in the course of assembling his first television comedy, insisted the main character be childless. The reason was that it was his view that were the main character a father, the writing would quickly default to plots centered around the buffoonishness of dad, forgiven by wife and children. Bob Newhart's 1st television comedy went on the air in September 1972. His second went on the air a decade later; the main character was also a childless married man. One of Mark Crispin Miller's more amusing publications was a critique of an ad for soap broadcast around about 1982 ("How Sexual Perversity Sells Soap") in which the principal is husband (employed as a sales representative) behaving like a hysterical clown. This has been characteristic of television for some time.

    There are a couple of exceptions which had wide currency, both of which appeared around about 1987. One was the television program Married...With Children. The other was the stand-up career of Sam Kinison. The former was an offering of the insurgent network (Fox) in its earliest years. The latter was confined to cable channels and late-night television. Both were considered rather outré at the time. (Barbara Ehrenreich referred to the former as 'relentlessly nasty'). Kinison died nearly 30 years ago and Al Bundy disappeared from the airwaves about 25 years ago.

    Personally, I can ignore the jokes. The trouble is, much public discussion and public policy is conducted by people who view the world with the assumption that women have options and men have obligations, or that women's preferred modus operandi is normal, men's deviant; or that men qua men have no function and no vocation. None of this is valid and we'd all be better off if it went away completely.


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    1. I've heard people say that All in the Family was the beginning of 'Father doesn't know beans' character in television. I don't know if that's true, but clearly by the 1970s, especially in the Norman Lear program catalogue, the man of the family was the source of jokes, always wrong, and inferior to all other characters in the room. That was one thing I remember in which The Cosby Show broke away from the typical mold.

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