I was watching a little bit of Bill Mahr�s stand up routine the other day, and he brought up a really good point that, the more I think about it, the more I think its true. It seems like more often than not these days, men are being portrayed as complete idiots on TV. Now I know that a lot of men are complete idiots, but this isn�t what I�m getting at- after all, there are a lot of women who complete idiots as well. Recently, Everybody Loves Raymond went off the air. It was, by most accounts, a very successful show. Right around the same time, Family Guy came back on the air- again, a very successful show. In both of these shows, the husband is portrayed as an idiot. In Raymond�s case, he�s just kind of generally dumb- saying stupid things, doing stupid things, etc. etc. while his wife�s soul job it seems is to correct him when he does something dumb and rub his tummy and tell him its all going to be OK. With Family Guy, they take the same premise and multiply it by 1000. The Simpsons is the same way- Homer is a complete moron, while Marge holds the house together. I think this same premise holds true for several TV shows. I don�t really watch much TV and can only think of a few more (The Cosby Show, Home Improvement, That Dumb-Fuck Show with Jim Belushi), but you get the idea. Now as a guy, I don�t really have any problem with this. I love Family Guy, I love The Simpsons, and I thought Raymond was a pretty good show. My problem with all of this is that if you were to put a family oriented show out there where the wife was a complete idiot and her husband was the one to keep things in one piece, people would be screaming about mysogony and degredation towards women. I could be wrong, but I don�t think so. There have been some shows featuring ditzy blonds and dumb women, but NONE of them are married. NONE of them have kids- Suddenly Susan comes to mind as does Friends. But man, I think if you were to put a show on the air centered around a family where the punch-lines were always about the wife who can�t drive, is always wasting money on shoes, can�t figure out how to program the VCR, etc etc, a lot of women would go bat shit. So why don�t men get all pissed off when shows like Home Improvement come around? Because we don�t really give a shit, that�s why. We think its funny. We know its stereotypical, but we don�t really care. I think women feel more vulnerable to those kinds of things because of all the shit they�ve put up with over the years. I just wonder what it says about society that even today, we don�t feel its OK to poke fun across both sides of the isle. Things are still more difficult for women than for men. They get overlooked, sexually harassed, paid less- so of course they�re going to get a little peeved at being portrayed as dependent on their husbands- those wounds are still pretty raw. Why haven�t we gotten past all of that bullshit yet? I think we�ll know we�ve truly reached equality when we can see a TV show where Chrissy from Threes Company is bumbling around the house like a retard while her stalwart husband keeps her in line and raises the kids.

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