Major Networks to Offer Us Shows about "Wimpy" Men Who Need to "Rediscover Their Masculinity"

It's shows like these that make me grateful I know longer watch much television - and what I do see is on Netflix or it's sports on the internet.

It seems that Hollywood has become infatuated with white, emasculated men who are trying to - and it pains me to use this phrase - "man up." But as the author of the Jezebel article mentions, it's much worse than that, at least for men.

I'd prefer to address the fact that this issue is arguably just as hurtful to men as it is to women.

What's interesting about the trend is that, in many ways, one of the reasons we keep hearing about the ‘masculinity crisis' is because it's being pushed to the forefront under the guise of "Women are becoming too powerful, so men are becoming wimps. We must put a stop to this!"

If men are that shallow, if we are that threatened by women who have (or are getting near) equal power and status as men, then I guess we deserve to be made fun of in stupid TV shows. But I don't think we are that lame.

In the last couple of weeks, no less than four articles have passed through my feeds that look at this new television trend, referred to as "manxiety." I'm offering up three of those articles here.

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From Time:

High Manxiety

By James Poniewozik Wednesday, May 25, 2011

A writer (David Hornsby) gets a trainer (Entourage's Kevin Dillon) to teach him to be less refined and more crude Greg Gayne /CBS

You would not think that TV would be a sphere of life where men feel endangered. Katie Couric is being replaced by a dude. Men host every late-night show outside cable. Entourage has somehow managed to run for more seasons than Sex and the City.

But at May's upfronts — where networks announce their fall schedules to advertisers — there was a pattern: sitcom after sitcom about how today's men are besieged and need to rediscover their masculinity. Among them are How to Be a Gentleman, in which a metrosexual writer hires a trainer to dewussify him; Last Man Standing, with Tim Allen as a ­sporting-goods-company executive beset by girlie men; Man Up, in which a group of male friends worry they've lost touch with their inner warriors; and Work It, in which two guys dress in drag (à la Bosom Buddies) to land jobs as pharmaceutical reps. Attending the upfronts, I heard references to the emasculated modern man so often, I started crossing my legs.

This theme of manxiety comes around in our culture like Halley's comet. It was, more or less, the theme of Tim Allen's last ABC sitcom, the power-tool-centric Home Improvement, which resonated with the Iron John men's movement of the time. Then it was the philosophy of Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla's The Man Show, which argued that guys needed a place to be guys besides ESPN, and ESPN2, and the Internet, and also the world.

What's men's problem now? According to these shows, we've become soft, feminized and alienated from the physical world. On Last Man Standing, Allen records an online-video rant: "What happened to men? Men used to build cities just so we could burn them down!" A Man Up character's wife tells him, "Your grandfather fought in World War II, your father fought in Vietnam, but you play video games and use pomegranate body wash."

So men today are emasculated because we smell nice and don't kill enough people. This is what I like to call a TV problem. In the world outside sitcoms and Old Spice commercials, the bearers of Y chromosomes worry about a lot of things — money, health, marriages, raising our kids. Whether General Patton would have approved of our body-care products comes somewhat further down the list. (See if this is the end of the mancession?)

One man-focused show that gets this is TNT's dramedy about three longtime male friends, Men of a Certain Age, co-created by Ray Romano and returning June 1. In January's midseason finale, the trio went on a road trip to Palm Springs to play golf and — on the verge of their 50th birthdays — get colonoscopies. "We're getting older," Romano's character says as they await their results. "It gets real, you know?"

The new manxiety sitcoms shy away from getting quite so real. But the trend may be a way of sublimating a real problem: the insecurities of the "mancession," in which men lost jobs at a higher rate than women did. The irony is that the job wipeout most deeply affected working-class men — guys who would love to have the luxury of worrying about being spoiled and overevolved — but the new sitcoms are mostly about white collar professionals, because network TV wants upscale audiences. (Second irony: one of the few shows to treat layoffs in a blue collar town seriously is Glee, the pomegranate body wash of television.)

But maybe men, in TV and life, would be better off letting go of some old ideas of masculinity. Charlie Sheen's meltdown — all that aggression and Darwinian gamete spreading — was old-school manhood taken to its farcical extreme. And it fit the themes of his sitcom, Two and a Half Men, about the bachelor-pad exploits of his alter ego Charlie Harper.

So it was telling that the biggest sitcom announcement of the upfronts was CBS's replacement of Sheen with Ashton Kutcher, a guy who started his career as a model, is monogamously married and looks like he uses styling products. Probably nice-smelling ones! However Two and a Half Men changes, Kutcher's nice-guy public persona already marks a different idea of alpha maledom from the violent torpedoes of testosterone that made Sheen such a headache for CBS. Tim Allen and company may beat their chests, but in the real world, sometimes it's better to man up by manning down.

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From The Boston Globe:

Male idiocy on display in ‘Franklin & Bash’

TELEVISION REVIEW

June 01, 2011|By Matthew Gilbert, Globe Staff

FRANKLIN & BASH Starring: Breckin Meyer, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Malcolm McDowell, Reed Diamond

On: TNT

Time: Tonight, 9-10

You know how there are shows about “Animal House’’ partying and juvenile idiocy and they are dumb fun and you wouldn’t want to watch them with your mother or your college professors but you still somehow manage to find enough time to see them anyway?

Well “Franklin & Bash’’ is not one of those shows. “Franklin & Bash,’’ premiering tonight at 9 on TNT, is not a guilty pleasure, because there’s no pleasure here to regret, just strained, sexist, frat-boy self-love. The goal is to drop a Judd Apatow bromance — between Breckin Meyer’s Jared Franklin and Mark-Paul Gosselaar’s Peter Bash — into a wacky David E. Kelley courtroom dramedy, but the result has none of Apatow’s sweetness and all of Kelley’s worst, quirk-filled impulses. It’s a headache cocktail.

The fact that TNT has scheduled “Franklin & Bash’’ as the summer lead-in for one of its best series, “Men of a Certain Age,’’ is programming irony of the worst kind. The new show celebrates the bratty, smarmy side of masculinity, with a pair of young lawyers who tirelessly remind us they are too cool for the room. “Men of a Certain Age,’’ meanwhile, is a light, poignant glimpse at the humanity lurking beneath the flatness of male cultural roles. Turn to TNT at 10 and save yourself the disruptive elevator ride from the bottom to the top.

When friends and legal partners Franklin and Bash aren’t chasing ambulances, they spend time debating entertainment matters involving the likes of Jessica Rabbit and “The Flintstones.’’ It’s a challenge to write post-Quentin Tarantino guy banter that is more than just hipster filler — banter that brings out something of the guys’ characters. The “Franklin & Bash’’ writers, including executive producers Kevin Falls and Bill Chais, fail on that score, as the boys only seem to be bragging about their pop-culture knowledge like high school sophomores.

In the courtroom, Franklin and Bash are anarchic and theatrical — see the witness remove her blouse on the stand! See Franklin get thrown in jail for undermining the judge! — which catches the eye of the head of a major law firm played by Malcolm McDowell. He wants to shake up his firm, especially his uptight nephew, played by Reed Diamond, and so he gives Franklin and Bash a pair of gorgeous offices and carte blanche. “You’re F. Lee Bailey meets Barnum & Bailey,’’ he excitedly tells them, simultaneously describing the guiding principle of the series. He’s a bit of a nut himself, and he finds vicarious enjoyment through the escapades of his scrappy new hires — such as when they brawl on the courtroom steps to draw the media away from a client’s disastrous press conference.

The show is filled with sideshow acts, including a clean-freak legal researcher with agoraphobia (Kumail Nanjiani) and a driven attorney (Garcelle Beauvais) who seems willing to sleep her way to the top. The boys often retreat to their man-cave-like home office, where they play video games, dance with hot women, drink from the full bar, and sweat it out in the hot tub, which gives Gosselaar an opportunity to reveal his backside tonight. (As a nod to McDowell, the office includes posters from his movies, including “A Clockwork Orange.) And the cases are contrived to titillate: a professional dominatrix trying to prove she’s not a prostitute, for instance, and a woman accused of “intentionally oversexing’’ her husband to death.

But none of these tightrope walkers, clowns, or jugglers succeeds in making “Franklin & Bash’’ less than annoying or more than male exhibitionism. It’s a circus, but far from the greatest show on earth.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. For more on TV, visit www.boston.com/ae/tv/blog.

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From Jezebel:

Why Are Men Feeling So ‘Manxious’ About The Rise Of Women?

Lane Moore — If you haven't noticed that men are apparently sick and tired of women trying to force this whole ‘equality' issue on them, you're about to.

A wealth of shows announced at this month's upfronts (where TV networks announce their fall line-ups to advertisers) are tackling the rise of ‘wimpy' men who need to "rediscover their masculinity". The following shows are included in the line-up that will likely be coming to a TV channel near you:

How to Be a Gentleman, in which a metrosexual writer hires a trainer to dewussify him; Last Man Standing, with Tim Allen as a sporting-goods-company executive beset by girlie men; Man Up, in which a group of male friends worry they've lost touch with their inner warriors; and Work It, in which two guys dress in drag (à la Bosom Buddies) to land jobs as pharmaceutical reps. Attending the upfronts, I heard references to the emasculated modern man so often, I started crossing my legs.

I could go on and on about how this "Bros Being Bros Who Put Bros Before Hos And Other Words That Rhyme With Bros (maybe something about Bose speakers?)" TV line-up is largely ridiculous and vaguely disturbing, but I'd prefer to address the fact that this issue is arguably just as hurtful to men as it is to women.

What's interesting about the trend is that, in many ways, one of the reasons we keep hearing about the ‘masculinity crisis' is because it's being pushed to the forefront under the guise of "Women are becoming too powerful, so men are becoming wimps. We must put a stop to this!"

This mind-set completely ignores the possibility that pushing for a regimented view of what is masculine and what is not is undoubtedly contributing to the ‘crisis' itself.

What exactly is it about Tim Allen's co-workers that make them "girlie men"? Do they listen to their wives? Are they "whipped" (ugh)?

And when the fuck have you heard a group of men say they are seriously worried about losing touch with their "inner warriors"? Do these men also have spirit animals? I'm not sure. But they do have overly dramatic speeches about how men are hunter-gatherers (that is, unless they are fags):

According to these shows, we've become soft, feminized and alienated from the physical world. On Last Man Standing, Allen records an online-video rant: "What happened to men? Men used to build cities just so we could burn them down!" A Man Up character's wife tells him, "Your grandfather fought in World War II, your father fought in Vietnam, but you play video games and use pomegranate body wash."

Laugh line! Pomegranate body wash! That's a woman thing used by a man! And seriously guys, why aren't you murdering more people?

In an article on Feministe in 2008, Jill wrote about the remarks made by pastor Ken Hutcherson of the Antioch Bible Church that stated:

During his sermon, Hutcherson stated, "God hates soft men" and "God hates effeminate men." Hutcherson went on to say, "If I was in a drugstore and some guy opened the door for me, I'd rip his arm off and beat him with the wet end."

Jill's response to the comment:

Unsurprisingly, Hutcherson later defended himself by saying that it was a joke. There is something very, very wrong with a masculinity premised on violence. There is something very, very wrong with a masculinity that sees femaleness as so insulting that men should react with full outrage if someone treats them like a "woman" by holding the door.

The idea that men who possess "female" traits -though it seems that not even these TV shows are certain as to what those traits are (aside from smelling like fruit and not fighting in a war, any war at all)-are considered to be repulsive and worthless is a very dangerous notion indeed.

I do think we're seeing an increase in gender role awareness as well as a rise in the amount of attention paid to how harmful it is to both parties, which is terrific. But the fact that we're also seeing a rise in television shows depicting a particular type of masculinity that puts a focus on dominance and submission is disconcerting to say the least.

Since I could talk about this for days and still only scratch the surface, I fully encourage you to discuss this in the comments. It's a heavy issue that deserves as much examination as possible from all sides.

(And if you'd like to read more about this topic, I recently started reading Kay Hymowitz's "Manning Up: How The Rise Of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys" and thus far, it's fascinating.)

Tags: men, masculinity, media, television, stereotypes, Franklin & Bash, sitcoms, today's men, besieged, rediscover masculinity, manxiety, How to Be a Gentleman, metrosexual, writer, dewussify, Last Man Standing, Tim Allen, beset, girlie men, Man Up, male friends, lost touch, their inner warriors, Work It, dressing in drag, Jezebel