Silently Honest
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I'm pretty sure that'd just make things worse.
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Reon
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On another, unrelated, note; I was researching some other stuff, and male bashing is at a all time high. SOME people have contorted feminism from 'I want to be equal with a man' to 'I want to bring the man down below me'
ZenCat
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I'd like to see your research on this. Who are these SOME people who have contorted feminism? What do you think feminism's original shape was? Before it was contorted, I mean.
I personally suspect that male bashing is not on the rise... only the ability to male bash more easily to a wider audience (i.e. The Internet). And I would have serious doubts that male bashing (by females) was not on an equal level of female bashing (by males). I suspect they have been fairly equal since the dawn of time
Freedom
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A dear friend of mine is a single parent of two kids, one with special needs (kidkneys). She's actually divorced and the kids' father simply "disappeared" so he wouldn't pay his kids child suport. My friend is one of the bravest woman I've ever met, she works to provide for her kids, she is the emotional ground for them, a true rock. She has to constantly go to the hospital because of one kid's condition, and never plays the victim part. She's one of my personal heroine, and for the crappy ex-husband-who-doesn't-care-about-his-kids, well, who needs him, anyway? I remember my friend's ex been a very angry, emotionally abusive father. Though single parenting is not at all desirable, sometimes it can be a blessing in disguise. It's not easy, but barely anything in life is easy, anyway.
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Reon
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I'd like to see your research on this. Who are these SOME people who have contorted feminism? What do you think feminism's original shape was? Before it was contorted, I mean.
I personally suspect that male bashing is not on the rise... only the ability to male bash more easily to a wider audience (i.e. The Internet). And I would have serious doubts that male bashing (by females) was not on an equal level of female bashing (by males). I suspect they have been fairly equal since the dawn of time
It's not a 'group' of people , I just noticed a particularly high amount of disregard from some feminist. Feminism is about equal, is it not? Shouldn't that encourage the betterment of both genders? Not getting paid like a man but being treated like a woman? Unless you want to go 'real' far back and just avoid men at all, since we so typically violent.
Do you watch a lot of tv and such? Various commercials and shows show the man as a typically stupid husband who has no intellectual capabilities. (i'm not saying all) Still, watching tv tells me that 'Men ain't shit'
ZenCat
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Sorry, Reon. I don't see that at all. Though the rift is not as deep as it was in my Mother's generation, and progress is being made toward equal opportunity and pay for Women, this is still primarily a man's world. Men - on average - still get paid more than their female counterparts do, for the same job. This is still - gloabally - a Patriarchal rather than a Matriarchal society, and I really don't see that any really dramatic changes have happened as far as lessening the standing of Men in our world or culture.
Could it be that you're particularly sensitive about the subject for some reason right now?
Maybe you should watch something other than what you're watching on TV. I don't watch a lot of TV.... Bones, House, Top Gear, Saving Grace, Terminator. Those are our regularly viewed shows. Not one of them says to the slightest degree that Men Ain't Shit. Far from it.
Could it be that you're particularly sensitive about the subject for some reason right now?
Maybe you should watch something other than what you're watching on TV. I don't watch a lot of TV.... Bones, House, Top Gear, Saving Grace, Terminator. Those are our regularly viewed shows. Not one of them says to the slightest degree that Men Ain't Shit. Far from it.
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Reon
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Maybe I didn't explain myself, but I wasn't stating that this isn't a 'man's world' but that the portraying of men as 'stupid' has become more commonly accepted these days. I, actually, don't watch a lot of tv, I just asked if you did. Maybe your right, maybe it's just 'easier' to bash in general.
Oh, i'm sorry, I kinda forgot about your question about what I thought feminism 'was' and the best answer I can give is 'give me a time period.' Feminism, while having one core value, has seen quite a bit of change over the years.
Anyways, g2g to school >>;
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Reon I get what your saying. I have seen the commercials making the guy look like some bumbling bafoon. And hey most guys I meet are. Been going on for years. I am not like that I see stupid people!! Everywhere male and female... And Dad's get a bad rap these days because of all the ones who bail out. What is interesting is when I am picking up my daughter from school there are a lot of men picking up their kids. Which is encouraging to me. I like to see men acting like men again and stepping up for their kids.
ZenCat
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Hey look, I found an article on the topic:
"DUMB AND DUMBER": MEN AND WOMEN IN ADS
posted Tuesday, 20 March 2007
Dumb And Dumber
By Lorraine Duff Merkl | March 19, 2007Men are looking bad in plenty of ads these days. "Father Knows Best," last week's article in this section, by Glenn Sacks, makes a good argument for that. But we've gotten to the point where the "smart" women in the commercials are looking pretty bad themselves.Another "smart" woman appears in a yogurt ad that opens with a father reading the paper to his family at the breakfast table. (Hey, at least this fella can read!) He quotes from an article about how a particular brand of yogurt helps your digestive tract and announces, "We should get this." Of course, the wife has already purchased the product–in fact, the family is sitting around the table eating it. Perhaps she's one of those women for whom "clueless" is a turn-on.
Take the wife in a recent cell-phone commercial who suffers in silence while her husband, like a toddler with his first toy, marvels at the fact that the phone can take pictures, which can then be IM-ed. At the dinner table, he takes shots of the condiments he wants his son to pass to him. The wife, at her wit's end and acting more like the mother of a small child, tells her husband, "Give it to me. Just give it to me." He pouts like a petulant little boy, then hands her the phone. I suppose this interaction is supposed to make the woman seem like a force to be reckoned with. All I can think when I see it is, She married this dolt? Was she desperate?
It is understandable how this wise woman/dumb man dynamic came about.
In the '50s and '60s, father was the only one allowed to know best, and wives and mothers were decorative and domestic. One fur ad from the period showed a head-to-toe profile of a woman with a toy wind-up key in her back. The headline read something like, "What to give your living doll."
Gloria Steinem & Co. changed all that. They brought to light that women were capable of so much more. Females headed families; they could head corporations. Eventually, advertising reflected this. Remember "I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan, and never let you forget you're a man?"
It wasn't enough, though, to show women as capable equals. To drive the message home that women were just as good as men, they had to be shown as superior–which means there had to be an inferior. Getting over on the kids wouldn't be much of a coup. No, she had to be smarter than her husband. And everyone agreed that was OK. Men had been "the man" long enough. They were due to be knocked off the pedestal.
And so, over time, they fell. Whether the product was dishwashing liquid or a car, peanut butter or power tools, the kind but bumbling idiot guy was shown the light by his take-charge, CEO-caliber wife.
Decades later, the man still is being bossed and minimized. But do women still need him to be?
We are almost a decade into the new millennium. It's no longer a "surprise" that women head households, corporations or countries, that women are more than capable. In fact, the woman-on-top scenarios that served women well for many years are starting to make them look worse than the men.
If a person cannot show herself to be competent, effective and gifted without making someone else look useless and foolish, well, how insecure is that? Not to mention, kind of nasty. All TV wives seem to do is roll their eyes, sigh and give their TV hubbies the "That man" head shake. Was he the consolation prize because the handsome, intelligent guy she really wanted to marry got away?
If all these women portrayed in commercials are supposed to represent how females really are, then women have extremely bad judgment. How else would you characterize someone who chooses a buffoon as her life mate? We could give the benefit of the doubt and surmise that there were no smart guys at the bar where she used to meet men, and she got the best of the bunch. Or figure that her ego was just too fragile–and she deliberately picked someone less than herself.
Just as Mr. Sacks is offended by how husbands are dramatized on TV, I'm embarrassed by the portrayals of their wives. I don't like to see marriages break up (even ones that were only meant to last 30 seconds), but I secretly harbor a wish that these aforementioned spots would end with the guy sneaking off with his suitcase to find a woman who can be intelligent and take-charge without being condescending and emasculating.
The new Gap ad with Claire Danes moves us in the right direction. To the Annie Get Your Gun tune "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better," Danes dances competitively with her boyfriend in an effort to win his pants. In the end, she gets them–partly from cunning and skill, partly because he lets her. It's all in good fun, and they end up not as winner and loser, but happily together.
The spot is a little too light and fluffy to suggest the entire male/female dynamic in commercials is changing. But as I said, it's going in the right direction.
Unlike Mr. Sacks, I think we need more than a less-demeaning portrayal of men. I think we need to raise the "relationship" bar. Perhaps a little marriage counseling is in order as we create the characters who represent our clients' products. If you're an ad man, ask yourself if you would want to be the partner of the smug, disdainful shrew you've created. If you're an ad woman, ask yourself whether you would even want to meet, much less marry, Mr. Duh-how-do-you-get-the-stain-out? Then maybe couples in commercials will start to seem better together than apart.
How refreshing it would be for a truly smart, capable female consumer to see her television counterpart getting insights and support from a smart, capable partner she's proud of. You know, the kind of man that a take-charge woman would actually choose.
. [FONT=Arial, sans-serif][FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]Text and photos are reproduced under the Fair Use exception of 17 USC § 107 for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use.http://battlinbog.blog-city.com/dumb_and_dumber_men_and_women_in_ads.htm[/FONT][/FONT]
acd
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I see no problem with it, if the single parent is stable, emotionally well-adjusted, and responsible. My mom was a single parent and she set an excellent example. She left an abusive marriage as an uneducated and unemployed housewife with two small kids. She finished school, graduating third in her class and worked long 12 hour shifts, making sure we had everything needed and then making sure that on her days off she spent time with us. Someone said one problem is that single parents rely on external supports, such as family (which is true, as that was the only way we were supervised when small and she was away.) Despite all those pressures, she made sure she took us to volunteer at nursing homes and such. There's good and bad in everything. Single parent families can produce children that are just as stable as any child coming from a two parent home. A single parent home is healthier for children than a two parent home in circumstances where the parents have an unhealthy relationship with one another, as it sets an example for aggressive behavior and it also sets an example for children to grow up and expect nothing more out of their future romantic partnerships.. I think...........
arbygil
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*Very* cool, merry - I think if it's necessary to be a single parent, then a child needs to have broadened horizons to accept other folks in other circumstances. But it is tough to do it one one's own. Most of the time single parents are busy making sure there's food on the table, that the child has clothes, and they get to school on time. Because that's all they have time for.
acd
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arbygil-- You're right, too. I think that it's neither wrong nor right to bring children up in a single or two-parent household. People have the potential to be adaptive and resilient in difficult and even near impossible circumstances.. To be concise, one isn't necessarily better than the other, in my opinion..
KingOfSpades
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I was raised by a mom and dad who should never have gotten married or had kids in the first place...my dad was an intellectual genius but emotionally stunted and an alcoholic...my mom is bipolar and, at the time, was an alcoholic as well (she no longer is). they had no business having children.
when i was about 20 my parents adopted to more children....my dad passed away a year later and my mom has been a single parent raising them. she still drank for the first three or four years after the adoption, hung out with violent and abusive people. she sobered up after that but still has a lot of issues from her mental illness. she has moments of lucidness but is also exceptionally needy.
i think too often people have kids because they want someone to love them, instead of having kids because it's an appropriate thing to do. it is really hard to raise kids and sometimes people underestimate that. i think most of our problems on this world are on account of bad parenting -- brainwashing kids to hate other people, or be greedy, or have no compassion for others.
a single parent can be enough, if that person is prepared or can learn to take responsibility....on the other hand, you can have two parents (or four, or eight, or a million), who, if not prepared for the responsibility of children, will not be what that child needs....my $.02
when i was about 20 my parents adopted to more children....my dad passed away a year later and my mom has been a single parent raising them. she still drank for the first three or four years after the adoption, hung out with violent and abusive people. she sobered up after that but still has a lot of issues from her mental illness. she has moments of lucidness but is also exceptionally needy.
i think too often people have kids because they want someone to love them, instead of having kids because it's an appropriate thing to do. it is really hard to raise kids and sometimes people underestimate that. i think most of our problems on this world are on account of bad parenting -- brainwashing kids to hate other people, or be greedy, or have no compassion for others.
a single parent can be enough, if that person is prepared or can learn to take responsibility....on the other hand, you can have two parents (or four, or eight, or a million), who, if not prepared for the responsibility of children, will not be what that child needs....my $.02
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Both of my parents are recovering alcoholics, who have never drank while I've been alive but have dry alcholic tendencies. Just relating ^_^
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Reon
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Dry alcoholic tendencies? What are those (if you don't feel comfortable talking about it, it's allright)
Soulful
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It's not a 'group' of people , I just noticed a particularly high amount of disregard from some feminist. Feminism is about equal, is it not? Shouldn't that encourage the betterment of both genders? Not getting paid like a man but being treated like a woman? Unless you want to go 'real' far back and just avoid men at all, since we so typically violent.
Do you watch a lot of tv and such? Various commercials and shows show the man as a typically stupid husband who has no intellectual capabilities. (i'm not saying all) Still, watching tv tells me that 'Men ain't shit'
I've seen some commercials like this - I think that's the media, not feminism. I don't say that to blame the media, but honestly, how often does the media (especially TV and advertising) relay things honestly and accurately? They glamorize a snapshot of reality - the very one that will affect us the most on some level or get a rise out of people. I don't appreciate the commercials I see in which couples make fun of each other or are just plainly disrespectful to each other. There's a cheerios-cereal one I'm thinking of at the moment with some guy steve and his wife, eating cereal in the morning, indirectly telling him to shut up. As a person and a woman, I find it appaling and hurtful. In a relationship, I expect 4-way respect: that both my partner and I have it for ourselves and for each other. Neither men nor women are stupid. It's the stereotypes I don't appreciate. That, and mean judgment - which is sometimes the hallmark of ads.
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Soulful
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I agree with the article. It's addressed many things I've often thought but couldn't put into words nearly as well.
It's such a back and forth game with this whole sex/gender thing.
What if, instead, we all had healthy self-esteem, loved ourselves, respected ourselves, and were capable of respecting and loving other people. What if we were in relationships because because we have so much love to offer and share. So much to learn and grow through? I feel very naive about this subject, so I am trying not to assume things - but do you think many people question why they are in a relationship? It seems to be human nature combined with social expectation (and economic reality at times) to enter into a partnership with someone. People flock to being in a relationship because it just feels so much better usually. But do they even question what the purpose of that is?
I like this here:
"As I see it, a relationship has two very important purposes - a Practical Purpose and a Higher Purpose.
The Practical Purpose of a relationship is simply to have someone with whom to share oru lives. Traveling the road together can be a truly joyous experience. It feels wonderful to have a loving partner by your side in good times and in bad. But sometimes problems with money, sex, children, work, and the like can make the journey together very difficult. It is for this reason that we need to have a Higher Purpose.
The Higher Purpose of a relationship is our commitment to learn how to become a more loving person - despite what problems come up. It is our using all the problems as a vehicle for seeing what we need to work on within ourselves to keep love in our heart. This Higher Purpose is also about learning to pay attention to all the good in our relationship. Too many of us don't even seem to notice the good." - Susan Jeffers
What do you think?
(Having written all that, I don't think it applies to abusive situations in the sense of - oh, just try to stick it out. Hell no.)
But it seems that sometimes people don't question why they're in a relationship, or seem so focused on what they need from that relationship. How much more rewarding is it when you're together because you have so much love to share and offer.. both for yourself and the other person. I really like what the author wrote because notice how at the end of the day, the purpose is so that YOU can grow. And I like that. I feel we live in a culture that is skirmish about doing positive things for oneself and treating yourself as a priority. I don't understand why it's like that. I like what the author wrote because once you get past any possible "that's being selfish" messages (I don't think it is selfish), the responsibility for yourself really rests in your hands. And that's empowering. Relying on someone else to make you okay, make you feel good, and tell you who you are (or how you are) is disempowering. As much as we need social contact on some level because we're human, I feel we still have a long way to go in balancing that with truly taking responsibility in and for our lives/ourselves.
Any thoughts?
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I was happiest when my parents were single (They divorced when I was 4). When either of them were married, I wasn't as happy. I actually prefer single parent homes. It fosters a much closer relationship.