— by Chryseis
Although Father’s Day was this past June and it is now Thanksgiving season, I am thankful for the men in my life, especially my wonderful father and my loving husband. Both of them helped make me the person that I am today and, for this, I am most thankful. This holiday season, I want to express my gratitude by defending them against an unfair attack.
I was not in the least surprised to read several months ago Naomi Schaefer Riley’s June 14, 2016 piece in the New York Post titled “How Disney Teaches Contempt For Dads” (http://nyp.st/1UygloI). As she notes, studies show that Disney television programs depict dads as clueless dummies, the butts of almost every joke, incompetents, and bumbling idiots.
Hollywood’s negative portrayal of dads is not a new phenomenon. When I was growing up in the 1990s, I occasionally watched the sitcom “Married With Children”. The show was about the least brightest nuclear family in America, but the father Al Bundy was definitely the stupidest of that stupid lot.
The characters on the show were as fascinating to watch as old Warner Brothers Looney Tunes cartoons. They were all Wile E. Coyote incompetents and real life was the Road Runner who kept dealing them defeat after defeat. In pretty much every episode of “Married With Children”, real life delivered stinging but hilarious defeats to the Bundy family and its members.
I watched “Married With Children” with the curiosity that bystanders have for a traffic accident. Its cartoonish characters were so different from the people in my own life. Normal, everyday people make mistakes every day. Yet, for comedic effect, television made Al Bundy and his family complete screw-ups with no redeeming qualities. My dad was not perfect by any means (only God is perfect), but he was very, very far from the complete idiot that was Al Bundy.
My guilty pleasure nowadays is watching the show “Shameless” where Frank, the patriarch of the dysfunctional Gallagher family, is an alcoholic buffoon. I sure hope that there are not too many Frank Gallaghers in real life. America could not withstand this disaster,
There is no doubt that television and movies influence reality. In 2001, the non-stop action series “24” portrayed African-American actor Dennis Haysbert as the likable and super-competent President David Palmer. Even before then, in 1998, African-American actor Morgan Freeman was cast as President Tom Beck in “Deep Impact”. It was not surprising that, in 2008, the American people voted for Barack Obama and made him the first African-American President of the United States. Americans saw fictional Presidents David Palmer and Tom Beck excel in their roles and display competence and were persuaded that Barack Obama would also be a competent President in real life.
In the same way that television and movies were so influential in positively casting African-Americans as presidential material, their negative portrayal of white, heterosexual men also has real life repercussions. If white, heterosexual men are depicted on television as clueless dummies, the butts of almost every joke, incompetents, and bumbling idiots, everyone will treat them poorly in real life. These men will become so convinced that everyone considers them to be mediocre and, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, they will believe themselves to be mediocre and they will act in mediocre ways.
The very negative and stereotypical portrayal of white men in movies and on television are not for purely comedic effect. For more than a generation, university professors and academics have attacked and deconstructed white, heterosexual men in their academic journals for the purpose of advancing women and minorities in society. Authors, novelists, writers of educational textbooks, educators, and television and movie screenwriters carry the same attack into popular culture.
When I indirectly broached the subject with my female friends, the more liberal among them shortsightedly considered any attack on white men to be good for women and minorities. Their responses generally fall into the simplistic category of “turnabout is fair play” and “it’s about time that men experience on their own skins the abuse that they have inflicted on women and minorities”.
What all these people seem to ignore is that there are real societal costs to these attacks. More and more women these days decide to forgo marriage and family. What woman in her right mind would choose to marry a clueless dummy, the butt of jokes, the incompetent or the bumbling idiot? Although more and more women are desperately looking for “The One” they seem to never find him because they are conditioned by popular propaganda to consider all the men around them to be unworthy.
Married women also fall into the same trap. If popular propaganda tells women that their husbands are clueless dummies, the butt of jokes, incompetent or bumbling idiots, they are less likely to try to work things out and stick with them through the peaks and valleys of their marriage. Should we be surprised, then, by America’s high divorce rate? I did not think so.
While men and women are the biggest losers from Hollywood’s popular propaganda, we should not forget about the children. Instead of delivering positive, valuable, and life-affirming lessons, Hollywood poisons the impressionable minds of innocent children. More young children grow up to be men who never attend college or who drop out of college or turn to drugs or commit suicide or actually become the clueless dummies, the butts of jokes, the incompetents, and the bumbling idiots. The damage to America can last for generations.
Instead of belittling white men to benefit women and minorities, Hollywood should do its part for the betterment of our country by creating positive role models for women, minorities, and white men.
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How Disney Teaches Contempt For Dads
Naomi Schaefer Riley
New York Post
June 14, 2016
“Every 3.24 minutes, a dad acts like a buffoon.”
That’s the conclusion of a small study done by a student at Brigham Young University after watching eight hours of the two most popular Disney “tween” shows featuring families. The results of the research — “Daddies or Dummies?” — are not particularly surprising.
Are “Good Luck Charlie” and “Girl Meets World” any different from previous sitcoms like “Roseanne” or “Home Improvement”? A 2001 study by Erica Scharrer in the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media found that the number of times a mother told a joke at the father’s expense increased from 1.80 times per episode in the 1950s to 4.29 times per episode in 1990.
But what’s interesting about the new research is that the author, Savannah Keenan, also looked at the reaction of the children on screen to their fathers’ displays of cluelessness. At least half the time, children reacted “negatively” to these displays — by rolling their eyes, making fun of Dad, criticizing him, walking away while he’s talking or otherwise expressing their annoyance.
This behavior, especially on Disney shows, has become the norm to such a degree that parents regularly tell me they don’t allow their children to watch the channel. There’s no sex or violence — but there’s only so many times they want their children to watch their counterparts on screen ignore, insult or pretend to humor their parents for laughs.
We should probably be most concerned when dads are the butt of the joke. Decades ago, when the place of men in the family and in the work world was clear, the use of comedy to make the powerful powerless was understandable and helped lighten the mood by humanizing the authority figure.
Sure, kids tried to put one over on their fathers and sometimes they got away with it. But there was a sense that a father’s authority was something you had to work to get around. And that doing so came with real consequences.
Whether you were the teenage girl trying to sneak out on a date with the wrong boy or you were a kid who got caught breaking a vase when you were playing ball in the house and then lying about it, it was Dad’s rules and Dad’s wrath that you feared the most.
Today’s sitcoms, by contrast, often show dads trying to act like mothers have traditionally — and failing miserably. In an episode of “Black-ish,” the mother and father learn that they haven’t been saving as much money as they should have. The father, played by Anthony Anderson, was supposed to be in charge of the finances.
Not only does he prove to be an incompetent money manager, his wife, played by Tracee Ellis Ross, also says that if he doesn’t get his act together, then he’s going to have to start dealing with the children’s lives more — taking them to doctor appointments, worrying about their schedules, etc. — a fate he seems to fear more than death.
Not only has Anderson failed in his traditionally male role, but the assumption is that he would be a total disaster performing his wife’s duties.
He comes off looking like an idiot, and his wife — even though she acknowledges that she doesn’t like to do the family budgeting — looks like superwoman. She’s an Ivy League-educated surgeon running a house with four kids. All she wanted was her husband to be putting aside money for college, and he couldn’t even manage that.
Maybe the problem isn’t simply that men are portrayed as bumbling. Women in popular culture — and also in journalism — are portrayed as the people who can do it all. They’re showing how it’s possible to juggle careers and children, all without missing a beat. Can you imagine a popular comedy in which a woman really is falling down on the job?
The sitcom “Mom” offers viewers this contrast. Allison Janney is the aging recovering addict, a mother who did everything possible to screw up her daughter’s life. But the daughter is managing to raise children of her own, hold down a job, keep her mother’s predilections in check and even date occasionally. She’s got this all covered.
In a recent episode of “Girl Meets World,” the father, Cory, played by Ben Savage, tells his daughter and her friend that a fight between Superman and Batman wouldn’t be fair because one has superpowers and the other one doesn’t. His wife, Topanga, played by Danielle Fishel, gives the punch line: “Sort of like when you and I fight.”
The question is if women are really superwomen, how are men supposed to be anything but buffoons?
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.