Standards Impossible - 3/9/2014

So Jennie Breeden posted a great comic tonight on The Devil's Panties about impossible physical images that the media puts up for both men and women to aspire to. She makes a good point, and I'm going to riff off on the part of it that has bothered me for a long time.

First, yes, the physical models that women are told to try to be are not only unrealistic, they are hurtful and wrongful. Ladies, be who you are, as healthy as you feel comfortable being, and forget what's on the billboards and movie screens.

But the things that I see in media relating to men are different. It's far less about what we look like and much more about who we are and what we should be. In TV and many, many movies, we are presented as stupid, unaware, selfish, foolish, incompetent, insensitive, incapable, moronic and laughable. The triumph of any given episode of a sitcom is almost invariably the main male character having the epiphany that the women in his life are right, he's an idiot, and he needs to do what they tell him.

I'm a male person, and that's what I grew up on.

The flip side is James Bond. Also known as Jason Bourne, Sherlock Holmes, House, Dexter, Walter White and a thousand others. All competent or super-competent in some way, at the cost of doing or being horrible in some way. James Bond is a womanizer destined to die alone in some ugly place. Jason Bourne is hyper competent at almost everything, but being in his vicinity is practically a guarantee of being killed. Sherlock Holmes (the Cumberbatch version), is a self-admitted sociopath, incapable of empathy and good only for solving crimes. House is the most brilliant doctor on the planet, apparently, but also a drug addict and a vile human being. Dexter and Walter White are criminals, good only at destroying the people around them and society itself.

Occasionally, the media gives us a male who is not built along these lines, just as it occasionally gives women positive models (Camryn Manheim in The Practice is a good example). But they are few and far between.

And what it comes down to is that the media makes its money by giving us something that they tell us we want. If it's something that pushes us down, then they can be the ones to pull us back up. If we live our lives based on what the media tells us we should want or be, then we sacrifice what it is that we should be, what we can be, what can bring us satisfaction and a good life.

So tell the media that it's very nice that the pretty people have jobs, enjoy the movies for what they are, and don't tell yourself that living up (or down) to those images and characters is a good idea.

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