Two posts that ended up being about men

[trinityvixen]

I don't truck with that "five things make a post" idea, not least of all because on the way to collecting five things, I have probably already tweeted four of them and see no need to repeat myself. So this is a "two things make this not a tweet" sort of post.

I was trying to find a way to post about this round-up of The 7 Deadliest Deadliest Warrior Experts when I hopped over to Tiger Beatdown and had a full minute's worth of giggling over just the word Menaissance, to say nothing of the fits the rest of the article gave me.

Basically, they're two articles about masculinity, one that revels in it and one that mocks it. Both are fun reading and very funny, despite the lack of irony in that first post. I like that just as Sady Doyle skewers men who so desperately want the world of a fictional 1950s advertising firm to be their 2010 reality, there is a show that celebrates men who are, quite literally, mired in pasts that have been extinct nearly ten times as long. And they are on TV proving their manliness against other men who--shock!--allowed themselves to advance just a little further through history in order to learn the same, reductive "masculine" skill: how to kill the shit out of things.

In short, if you haven't seen the link between Rivers Cuomo's frequently icky lyrics and the direct need to measure you dick by the damage you inflict on other people (preferably those also having dicks since a) women aren't people, much less warriors, so killing them is laaaame and b) because that's the only way you know how to interact with other dudes)...well, you do now, I hope.

It is worth noting that I like the Deadliest Warrior show. I, like the Topless Robot guy and the nerd who runs the simulation data, quite enjoy seeing how weapons shape up against each other. More so than I give a shit about the testosterone fests that are obligatory (this show is on SpikeTV after all) between demonstrations of mankind's limitlessly imaginative means to crush, sever, brain, decapitate, pierce, or explode one another.

Comments

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

I've gotta give the feminist snark the edge over the strawman.

The Don Draper fanboys have about as much social influence as the Barney Stinson fanboys and the Hiro fanboys, which is to say, none worth speaking of. The fact that a few idiot professors and reporters with writers' block write something about it does not make it a "thing".

The TWoP forums are speculating that Deadliest Warrior will soon do a female warrior matchup, incidentally. The fact is that military combat was almost exclusively male until the last few decades, a few exceptions like Amazons and Joan of Arc notwithstanding; I don't see how you make a version of Deadliest Warrior that isn't pretty much entirely masculine.

Real men prove their manliness by winning large scale fake military battles with hundreds of miniature troops, incidentally ;-)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

The Don Draper et al. phenomena is part and parcel of the overwhelmingly naive mindset that the 1950s were an ideal time to which we would all be better off returning, when men were men, etc., etc.

It also happens to be one manifestation of masculine anxiety issues, which flare up in different ways. One of which is in displays of hypermasculinity, of which The Deadliest Warrior has to be one of the best examples. This is a show whose primary attraction is in seeing the destruction that men can cause, a premise that does not require the penis-measuring that goes on between displays but does rather invite it.

I never said that the show couldn't help but be masculine--historically, of course men would the prime warriors--I just said that its testosterone-fueled celebration of chest-thumping (in any form) is as over the top as it is unnecessary to entertain its viewers. Why go for the T-hose-down when you can just amp up the (gender neutral!) gore?

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, the whole Spike network portrays ridiculously macho men and caters to the demographic of macho penis-measuring idiot boys (The History Channel and Discovery provide some measure of similar programming without the trash talk). Oxygen and Lifetime do something comparable for the demographic of whiny fashion and victimization-obsessed girls. I just don't see where this says anything more than "there exist people who are idiots who a few of the hundred channels on cable TV cater to," and on the Mad Men side, "there are fanboys." The Don Draper fanboys are much less nauseating than the Avatar fanboys, at least...they dress better.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I fail to see where you divide the line between the two. I mean, "there exist people who are idiots who a few of the hundred channels on cable TV cater to" could just as easily describe the SyFy network--noted for having its share of fanboys (and girls) of its products. The fanboy mentality is very much one of escapism, just as the "I want everything to be Leave it to Beaver!" is.

Your level of nausea does not determine a difference between the two, though I sympathize with wishing to divide up the world into things that don't make you sick and things that do.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

The Don Draper et al. phenomena is part and parcel of the overwhelmingly naive mindset that the 1950s were an ideal time to which we would all be better off returning, when men were men, etc., etc.

This I do not understand. I get that people, in general, view the fifties like that. But--Mad Men? The entire fucking purpose of the show is to undercut that myth! To show in excruciating detail how unhappy people were, how trapped, how awful (AWFUL) it was for women-- The show is about busting that nostalgic myth. I just don't see how you can watch the show at all and not get that.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I believe some of the comments on Sady's post at Tiger Beatdown made this point, too. Believe me when I say that these revisionists are almost uniformly subtext-blind. And by "subtext" I mean "anything beyond the static image that fits their mindset."

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

As a reader of subtext, this is not subtext. It is text. It is what the show IS actually about. Don Draper--also not a hero. Pretty despicable guy. Complicated, likeable, but horrible, too.

Amazing how some people can take a fantastically complicated text with shades of gray and characters that are allowed to be both likeable and immoral and just miss all of that.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

You and I are both assuming too much when we think they miss the subtext. It's entirely possible that they haven't even watched the show to have subtext to miss. They just see what they see--men being MEN--and hear what they want to hear--that Draper guy sure gets the ladiezzzz---and that's all they care about.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I would actually say that Draper's arc of the first season is that the pressure to be macho has so divorced him from his authentic self (literally) that he is unable to make human connections. So when a woman who is his equal, who he could really connect to, really love, appears, he's unable to reach out to her.

That's kind of the whole point of the his character on the show: on the surface, the perfect man. Dapper, talented, succesful. But as the season goes on, you see that he is driven by fear and shame, that he is so afraid of losing that image that he runs from one situation to another with no real understanding of why he's always driven to do so.

But yeah. You're right. They've probably never seen the show. And the clothes are awesome.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

There's also the scary other option: that they see only how he treats women and ignore the rest of it--the shame, the loneliness--because they like shaming women more than acknowledging their own problems.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Well, Joan of Arc more led than fought...

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Ooooh. You're tweeting. That's why you're posting less.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I don't even tweet that much! I think I'm just posting less in general.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I've finally seen an episode of Deadliest Warrior. It was Shaolin monk vs. Maori warrior. And a -- I don't see why you would devote your life to honoring a tradition that is basically just beating people with a rock until they're dead, and b -- I love that at the end they say "the computer says Shaolin monk wins." I was like--what is the methodology of this computer program? I mean, what the hell parameters are they using? And then they have actors "reenact" the ultimate battle.

...But the weapons demonstrations were kinda awesome.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

It's hard to argue against people preserving their culture, even if it is a martial or violent one, provided they don't actually hurt anyone doing it. Especially those cultures that have otherwise been overthrown or forcibly sublimated by western cultures. Doesn't mean I don't think it's stupid when anyone spends their lives learning to use obsolete weapons (my Viking and Scots brothers included). But if they want to preserve a culture along side that expertise, I guess I can't complain.

I do love the computer system and how the handwaving about what it's doing when it ranks the matches indicates how badly Spike is reading its audience. It assumes that only meathead males are interested in what is actually an extremely nerdy exercise. Yes, manly men are the ones doing all the destroying, and it's all a show of warrior prowess, which provides a lot of the entertainment, don't get me wrong. But the presumed premise is the match, the competition. We need to see how the rankings work in order to buy that, say, a pirate can take on a knight and win. I mean, they have a true-to-life nerd doing the computations (he's a video game designer, too!)--let him have a half-hour special about how he's coming up with these numbers!!!

But, yes, the weapons demonstrations are awesome.

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

Where do you find this crap?

(Yeah, I just deleted a loooong, rambling comment and decided to go with that, instead.)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I find it on the internet. Where else?

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

I guess. Her post just seems like an awful lot of misplaced punctuation over what amounts to "some dumb guys". But that more general phenomenon is so pervasive, it hardly seems worth chronicling.

It reminds me of those men's retreats where a bunch of balding, middle-aged guys go out into the woods and howl at the moon and crap like that (in between checking their Blackberries). Except now they're...what? Going to try to make their wives bring them their slippers and light their cigars and shit? Good luck with that! Puffed-Up Dumbasses vs. Wives wouldn't be a very good episode of Deadliest Warrior, though, because it's obvious who's going to win.

That's the thing - I know you can't speak for the writer of the other post, but you do realize that stupidity like this, mock-worthy though it may be, isn't actually a threat to the progress women have made over the last half-century, right? They're not actually going to turn any 2010 homes into 1950s sitcoms. Hell, I strongly suspect no 1950s homes were, either. Although it'd probably be funny to watch them try. There's your sitcom right there.

I do appreciate that someone pushing this idea wrote a book, though. A BOOK! WHAT! "Real men" don't read books, let alone write them! They're too busy hitting balls with sticks, or watching other men hit balls with sticks and commenting thereupon, or doing something involving internal combustion engines (NOT reading about them!)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I don't think the author reads it as a threat to women's progress. She writes a feminist blog, so she writes about issues of sexism. The point is not that we might de-evolve from a more enlightened society into a less enlightened one but that the same sexism that used to suppress women is still fomenting in the form of resentment that women can no longer be (openly) repressed (in this country). That sort of resentment is still a problem, and it is worth mocking the shit out of it where it pops up.

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

They're too busy hitting balls with sticks
This is true only if the balls in question are attached to another man.
Real Men don't have time for silly games! Real Men are out doing REAL violence!

[saikogrrl.livejournal.com]

I don't get why so many women like Mad Men. I watched half an episode and found the sexism so offputting that even hot Saffron from Firefly being in it couldn't save it.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Still haven't watched it, so I couldn't say. I hear that the series addresses the pitfalls of that sexism, but I haven't seen it to know.