Taamar wrote:
It's unacceptable. Totally. And it's not even the Cosby Show I keep thinking of, it's Home Improvement and the Simpsons. Lovable idiot fathers whose wife and kids are smarter... WTF is with that? And you're right... the 'Claire Huxtable' thing is offensive. it wasn't funny when Archie abused Edith and it wouldn't be funny if Cliff abused Claire, so why should it be funny because the woman is the agressor? Maybe because she's physically less powerful, it plays the 'not what you expected' card, but it shows a seriously messed up dynamic and eventually becomes cliche. Still, it's hard to blame 'feminists' for something they aren't making.
I can't say I'm familiar with Archie and Edith; I think I've watched 1 episode in my entire life. However, it's not hard at all to blame feminists. The rise of this meme of stupid, inept husbands with wives that are smarter, abusive, or both and who have married these boobs for no apparent reason started in the early 1980s; right around the same time that feminism ran out of real discrimination to fight and had to start inventing it to keep the outrage going, and keep people like Andrea Dworkin who made their living off it, employed. These sorts of feminists are a relatively small group, but exceedingly vocal and very much in the eye of the press, an have been for ages, claiming to represent all women. It's very much the same thing as Jesse Jackson keeping his cushy deal going, finding ever-more-trivial racism to fight; like feminists he claims to represent the average black person to the public and fights off any cricticism with yet more cries of racism. The same
In any case, the problem is not that this meme is offensive (it is, but if it were only a matter of being offensive it wouldn't be an issue) but that it conveys the idea that
actions that are both illegal and wrong when done by men suddenly become okay when done by women. People get a great many of their ideas from what they see on television. This attitude is so pervasive that it permeates domestic violence training; domestic violence training almost without fail focuses on male-on-female violence, at the expense not just of female-on-male but also of same-sex violence, age-based violence and family violence that is primarily about alcohol and drug issues rather than the relationship of the people involved.
It is present in other forms of entertainment as well. In the last few years, just to take country music as an example, we've had major artists singing songs about a woman ambushing a man with a shotgun
after he gets out of jail for slapping her and shaking her, and one about a woman vandalizing a mans' truck for cheating on her. These were both sung by female artists, and both songs portray these actions as admirable. Again, the issue is not that it's offensive but that i's dangerous; real people get the idea in their head that women are entitled to physical violence as a tool, but men are not, and if they're entitled to something that extreme it's not hard for them to start thinking they are entitled to other double standards as well.
The real danger is not that most women (or men) conciously think this; if confronted with it most would disagree. It's that they unconciously assume it, especially if they never take any time to think critically about the issue. People like this are surprisingly common, and when they suddenly find out that the law does not tolerate such a double standard (well, usually it doesn't) they don't usually even get it then; they are in sheer surprise.
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And yeah, I've seen that T-shirt. it's meant to be dark humour, but the age group wearing it doesn't get irony and it's inappropriate. People WOULD be up in arms over a shirt that targeted girls like that, but somehow the 'girl power' message makes it OK? Nuh uh. 'Girl power' ought to be about liking yourself without hating someone else. Meanwhile, does what some kid I have no control over wears really have any bearing on my right to be disgusted by the way women are constantly bashed (as a group, not as individuals) on this board?
Women are not constantly bashed as a group on this board. They may occasionally get bashed, but again, that's right alongside the snide comments about men, pertenant or not to the issue at hand. We've got someone who specializes in this, we've also had cases over the years of "male ego" being used to address issues having nothing to do with gender when someone could think of nothing better to say, and there's been some fairly vigorous defenses of double standards relating to domestic issues other than violence.
What some kid wears is relevant to your "right to be offended" (whatever that is) because you're being offended is indictive of this unconcious double standard: bashing a particular woman or type of woman is somehow bashing all women and mysogenistic, but bashing a particular man is somehow not bashing all men. The second part of that is correct; the first part is not, and that doesn't even address the more generalized male bashing that does go on.
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I have no problem at all with guys saying 'that girl is a lying whore' when it's true. I have a problem with 'women are lying whores'. Similarly, I have no problem with 'that guy is an *******', I have a problem with 'Guys are *******s'. It's fair to criticize a person, not to paint an entire gender. "I think it's finally dawned on me that most women are lying whores" is not targeted at a specific woman, and that's what I'm complaining about, and no amount of 'well, women do it to men on TV all the time' changes the fact that I DON'T do it and I don't think anyone should.
I think it's fairly obvious from context that when Wwen says that, he means most women he interacts with. You don't see me getting all upset that he might be calling my wife or my daughter a lying whore, do you? To be fair, this sort of focusing on the specific semantics at the expense of context is a by product of the excessive "Words have meanings, ZOMG!" that gets used in Hellfire so I can't totally blame you for doing the same thing, but taking this as "bashing all women" is a bit much, especially since it's hardly "constant".
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Since I've got my panties in a bunch, the latest fad for advertising seems to be small precocious children telling their bumbling parents how to do something better. (learn to program a DVR, lower their car insurance, save water, refinance a house, buy mommy/daddy a gift). GRR!
Yes, this is unbelievably annoying.