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-UE
So I was watching the Style Network's Built...
Which is a show about attractive guys wearing wife-beaters while they do renovations/model/aidoru I don't remember, it has an odd feel. The men are basically stereotypical cardboard cutouts (despite it being a 'reality show'); the dumb/boastful one, the cute one, the reliable one, the one here to make sure our cast is ethnically diverse etc and all the women they work with do is belittle them (and are portrayed as intelligent and business minded), while their (obviously female since #nohomo) clients ogle them at treat them as meat objects. Their boss even gives off a slight pimp/madame vibe.
Of course, if this were a show about women, it'd be getting flack and would be off air in less than a season (unless it was on I guess Spike or something) but since it's men it... apparently doesn't matter. It bugged me that it took the usual 'positive discrimination' and turned it into a whole new problem. Is it really solving a problem if instead of decreasing the level of objectification for women in media face you increased the level of objectification for men? Is that even the equality anybody desires at all?
Comments
Well, if there are viewers for this sort of thing, probably someone desires it. Although maybe not for "equality", perhaps.
Honestly, I'm not even sure how equality works in this kind of context. If it's just cheesecake for women... at least hope nobody takes this as a serious example of how to treat people?
?
Protip: The term 'cheesecake' is used exclusively for female fanservice. The male equivalent is 'beefcake'.
It's not the fanservice that bothers me at all, it's the portrayal of the men.
If this were a show about women being portrayed as cardboard cutout idiots whose only job is to look pretty while their customers act like leches it would get more (negative) attention.
Of course I understand that taken in a historical context we'd all be more sensitive to a show that objectified a group that had faced centuries of objectification already, that doesn't exactly justify the existence of something like this.
And yes, I'm probably making a bigger deal out of this than I should be.
I don't quite get why this is any more degrading than porn, except that (I assume) this is on a channel that gets more subscribers than any porn company...?
Most porn is degrading.
@fourteenwings: This is definitely something that should be criticized, but be careful not to fall into the usual trap of blaming feminists for supposed hypocrisy or something like that - in fact, a great feminist FB page I follow raised a fuss about this, another horrible case of the objectification of men, a short time ago.
The term "feminism" is slightly misleading in that it doesn't mention the emphasis that both sexes should be treated with respect.
It also leads some idiots to think that respect is a zero sum game. Which it is not, by the way.
Yeah, of course, feminism is only bad when it comes to extremists (as with most things)
wow
Yes. Also, iunno, but you'd kind of expect anything that wasn't porn* to maybe have higher standards since the mediums (genres?... whatever the difference between porn and live-action TV is) work differently?
* No offense to porn, but it's danged porn
It's because, while patriarchy does have aspects that are potentially harmful for (some) men, it's still women who get a much, much shorter end of the stick, enough for the claim that they are the oppressed gender to be correct. I think that raising awareness that patriarchy has drawbacks for men too is good enough.
There is no such thing as "extreme feminists". Feminism is all about achieving equality between genders, and you can't go extreme with that. Sure, there is that (incredibly harmful) stereotype of feminists as man-haters who want to establish female dominance but: 1. those women are very rare in the actual feminist community and 2. they're technically not feminists, but female supremacists.
True. My mistake.
I guess the real litmus test of how problematic it is is how likely are those guys to be treated like idiots and objectified when they leave the set just for looking the way they do.