Mark Buehner wrote [Feb 7, 2008 06:41 AM]:
Find me a sitcom where the husband isn’t an overgrown adolescent on the receiving end of serial ‘life lessons’ from his spouse (or children!). From television to movies to commericals, men are portrayed as inept boobs…
I understand somebody has to be a foil in television, and since political correctness has ruled out women and basically everyone else the brunt falls on men. Fine, its just another cross men will silently bear…
It not just television ads, but virtually all media and marketing. Next time you watch a couple being interviewed by the news-media, note who does all the talking. Or after viewing or listening to an ad, do a mind exercise of “turn the tables” by swapping roles between genders or races. You might be surprised at how biased or bigoted the skit now seems. Or just mull over this post from the personal blog of someone in the marketing biz.
I submit it’s the way we are “wired” as a blend of the hunter yang and the gatherer yin. The former is disinclined to let feelings get in the way of facts, the latter is disinclined vice versa. In concert one complements the other, but once the household’s daily need to choose one brand of, say, breakfast cereal over another supersedes the need to fend off sabertooth tigers, bridge a stream, or fabricate (and use) tools, marketing distorts the concert.
(As SWLiP [Feb 7, 2008 05:36 AM] wrote: “The irony is that successive generations of male heroics have made the world safe enough that women no longer need heroes…”)
Grown-ups, both men and women, have it within them to distinguish between fact and feeling, between virtue and vanity, and between ideology and mythology. Boys and girls, less so.
Perpetual childhood is not exclusively a guy thing.
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