Gender double stadnards in pop culture

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There is a double standard in our culture that while (and rightfully so) violence against women is abhorred and unacceptable, violence against men is actually considered hilarious. Here are some pop culture examples which illustrate this:
In the TV show "Allie McBeal", the title character is often shown beating a "man doll" she keeps to take out her frustrations with men (when in reality, she has had many good looking and successful prospects whom she rejected because of her own insecurities). Could you imagine the public uproar if a TV show depicted a man brutally beating a "woman doll"? Why is it accepted when its the other way around?
In the Season One episode of How I met Your Mother titled "Return of the Shirt", Ted decides to attempt dating one of his exes again. When Ted broke up with this woman on her birthday for the second time, she assaulted him using Krav Maga. This is woman was never arrested, and it never even occurred to anyone to press any charges. In fact, no character on the show (including the assault victim himself) even stops to think that it might have been, in any way, wrong to assault a man using an art which is specifically desinged for killing people!! !! But everyone did agree that dumping her on birthday makes Ted a jerk, of course.
In the Meg Ryan film Serious Moonlighting, when her husband announces that he is leaving her for another woman, Ryan knocks him out by hitting him on the head with a flower pot, then duct tapes him to a toilet and leaves him trapped in their house until he changes his mind. Now, if a man kidnapped his wife and locked her up for attempting to leave him, that would of course be abhorrent. And a movie depicting such would be considered a horror or crime drama. But Serious Moonlighting is a comedy, because apparently when its the woman who abducts the man, then that's just funny.

In the show Inuyasha I always hated how Kagome sat Inuyasha but most people seemed to be fine with it. I considered it to be abuse.

If you don't watch that show Kagome has a magic necklace that she can use to slam him into the ground. The word she uses to activate it is "osuwari" which is a Japanese command for a dog to sit.

Looks like abuse to me.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ouDQ3yO3Ak[/youtube]

How many sitcoms feature a doofus dad and an all-knowing mom?

It's okay to show a man getting insulted, pranked, and even smacked - just to get a few laughs - but no one thinks it's funny when even one of these things happens to a woman.

Basically, men are allowed to be angry and women aren't. It's "funny" when a woman is angry because she's "weak" and the man is supposed to be physically a lot stronger.

And of course, men aren't allowed to cry and women are. I think it's humour just playing to stereotypes. However, I hear stories of women offering to fight men (for real) and people consider it hilarious. Also as a woman you aren't taken seriously when you start arguing with another woman. It's called a "b!tch fight/slap".

I've made a post about this sort of thing before - basically saying that (TV adverts in particular) in order to make the woman look smart - they make out the man to look dumb, and the woman as the know-it-all. I find it very patronising.

Frankly, Hollywood likes to emasculate men at every opportunity in film and TV.

To make women look smart, Hollywood has to make men look dumb.

Why not just make women look smart? Is it really that difficult?


Unless the man is the lead in an action/adventure movie like The "James Bond", "Die-Hard", and "Terminator" series'.

Violence can often be a humorous element in the entertainment industry. That's why the first movies were so into slap stick. Now we see men beaten by women in some sitcoms as a continuation of that tradition. It's meant to be fun because women are weaker and it's humiliating for a man to be beaten by a woman. Who doesn't grin when a small woman beats up a guy in those series? lol
It's just the way it is. Nothing to get upset about, it''s just entertainment. (And if anyone should get upset, it should be women, because it kind of says that our anger doesn't matter; which is a continuation of the discrimination against women, and a continuation of saying "you're so cute when you're angry".)
Men are much bigger and stronger than women, so it can never have the same humorous element if a guy beats up a woman. In the same way, there are comedies where adults are beaten or kicked by children, where the same element is used because it's a child beating the adult.

There are scenes in some sitcoms where men (Ross in Friends and Alan (not to mention Charlie) in Two and a half men, for instance) use sex to get revenge over women in their lives. I can't imagine they'd use it for women in the same way in shows like that. (Although in Ross' case it wasn't used for humorous effect).

I remember that scene where Ally McBeal beat up the doll and it made me laugh so much. She spoke for a lot of women in her frustrations with men. No matter how successful she was, Ally always doubted and had personal problems. It made the show all the more better and the character more real. Ally McBeal was a very good show.

I think our society just hates men.

I think it has to do more with who's stronger. I think if there was a body building woman in a show, it would be seen as ok for a man to hit her.

Exactly. That's why I find it so patronising. Like they can't find any other way of making the woman look smarter.