Postby Varislintu » 2016-03-19, 16:35
I feel like every single American media product that counts itself as comedy or partially comedic, has at least one joke where something is disparaged by likening it to the female. If nothing else, at some point someone says "Hello, ladies", to a mixed group or a group of men (case in point: the movie Deadpool, which I watched recently). In Finland, it's less present in media products (at least so articulatedly) but there is definitely a cultural trend of men policing each others' masculinity vs. femininity in groups, especially the adolescent or young adult kinds.
Also, I'd be curious to know how Vlürch sees this in a larger, historical context. Is he seriously claiming that women invented the concept of the female being 'less' or 'more pathetic', without any feedback from the male-dominated society?
I just read a little article about Britain's first professional author, Aphra Behn (1600s) in the Finnish feminist magazine Tulva. After she published her first play, she got a lot of feedback from men about how it wasn't proper that a woman writes and publishes. In the foreword of her second play, she writes (and I translate back from Finnish), "I ask only for some right to express my masculine side, the poet in me". Is Vlürch positing that for example Behn is simply expressing her natural female nature in viewing her skill as a "masculine" side of her, trapped due to unfortunate fate in a less valuable female body? That for example Behn is not reflecting in any way what men thought at the time?
I would see women disparaging men by likening men to women as regurgitating the same ideas that were present in Behn's time, in the 1600s. Those ideas are still fed to us in our modern cultural products -- the women mentioned have simply adopted them instead of the other alternative, consciously rejecting them. I would see them as part of the problem, yes, but hardly the source of the problem. The source goes back way, way further.
Last edited by
Varislintu on 2016-03-21, 5:59, edited 1 time in total.