Somewhere along the line it became not only acceptable, but outright mandatory to portray men as incompetent, disorganized, and incapable of handling the simplest household tasks without constant supervision from a woman. In fact, they had become so stupid and irritating that they were even fair game for retaliatory violence -- such as the poor schnook in an on-line poker ad who ends up with a bandaged nose as punishment for not complementing his girlfriend's new outfit in an adequate fashion.
But as annoying as these on-screen portrayals are, I couldn't ignore the fact that, in many ways, they were not that far off from reality. Over the last few decades the "cultured man" has become something of a rarity, replaced largely by a growing tide of macho-men antagonistic towards culture, literature, female companionship (except for "babes"), and anything else that strays too far from the baseball diamond, football field, or monster truck stadium.
But this isn't what men were like when I was growing up: either in real life, or on TV. Aside from the rare blue-collar comedy, such as The Honeymooners and The Life of Riley, men on TV were portrayed as articulate and intellectual. They were shown reading books and listening to music. Sports didn't come up much, and when they did it was not to the exclusion of everything else. Perhaps most anomalous (at least compared to their modern counterparts), men appeared to actually enjoy attending movies, concerts and even plays with their wives.
This isn't to say that they weren't portrayed as klutzes. They were, but not ignorant, semi-literate ones.
There are some, I know, to whom this will sound like heresy. Conventional wisdom tells us that sitcoms from the '50s and '60s portrayed fathers as infallible rulers of their home. It is a truth that has been written about in sociological analysis of popular culture, commented on in passing by columnists and authors, and used as the basis of myriad stand-up comedy routines. It's also a truth that isn't really true.
Yes, the TV fathers were often right, but they were also often wrong. Ward Cleaver's first response when the boys did something wrong was to punish them, and it was always June who, before the episode had ended, showed him the wisdom of reconciliation and understanding. Even Andy Griffith, whose authority had little in the way of female competition, often required Aunt Bea's down-home wisdom to sort things out.
And then there's Father Knows Best. Neo-cons longing for the days that a man was the king of his castle praise it as an example of God's natural order, while feminists decry it as an abomination against women. What neither side has apparently bothered to do is actually watch the show. Father Knows Best came from a radio show called Father Knows Best? and the question mark in the original title was key to the premise -- father, most definitely, did notknow best. Although the question mark was dropped for TV, the good-natured dad, Jim Anderson, remained a bumbler who could never have survived without his level-headed wife, Margaret.
It was for this reason that I was so happy when The Dick Van Dyke Show debuted. Even as an eight-year-old I had become rather weary of the constant parade of hapless men. The Dick Van Dyke Show broke the pattern. Sometimes Rob was a jerk. Sometimes Laura was a jerk. Sometimes both were jerks. But best of all, for the most part the writers mined humour from situations that had nothing to do with the jerkiness of either party. The show was a revelation in both comedy and humanity. the relationship between Rob and Laura Petrie became a kind of touch stone for me.
And so it was only natural that, forty-odd years later after a painful dose of modern TV sitcoms, I decided to widen my net and try to find the new Rob Petrie: a man who was intelligent, well-read, cultured, and loved spending time with his female partner.
And I found him. His name was Will Truman and he appeared in the show Will and Grace. He is all the things I remember Rob Petrie being: energetic, well-read, interested in a wide variety of subjects, and anxious to spend time with his female partner.
He's also gay.
And suddenly I had a revelation. I knew why men had apparently become so stupid, so uncultured and so anti-intellectual. It isn't feminism, as some have claimed. Feminism can attack the male image, but it's powerless to make men conform to it. It may even account for some of the stupid men appearing on TV, but it certainly can't account for the rise of their real-life counterparts.
No, the real problem was the gays.
Well, not the gays themselves. They're completely blameless. All they wanted was to come out of the closet and be recognized in society; which they've been doing quite successfully since the '70s.
But with the growing empowerment of the gays, it was no longer safe to assume that any given male was heterosexual.
Until this time, gays had been virtually invisible. A man or young boy who didn't display interest in sports may be called "queer," but few believed it to be literally true. Now, however, any behaviour not specifically heterosexual in nature opened him up to serious suspicion. Men, especially homophobic men, needed to distance themselves from this suspicion and the best way to accomplish this was by over-emphasising those characteristics which were least gay. Since gays were seen as being cultured, uninterested in sports, and overly interested in the non-sexual side of feminine society, non-gays began moving in the opposite direction. They began to flaunt their lack of culture, their fanaticism for sports, and their complete distaste of women in any capacity other than sexual objects.
In other words, they decided that being moronic jerks was preferable to occasionally being mistaken for gay.
