Re: net-kook kiddies miss blackface [Re: Man, I am getting real sick of TV


"Mark Borgerson" <mborgerson.at.comcast.net> wrote in message
news:MPG.1e457c0d9095ac6398a0ee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> Society says...
>>
>> [...] As for the interest the kooks are showing in
>> "blackface", well, those kiddies are too young
>> to remember when Bill Cosby was the *** of
>> men-are-stupid gags on his own show. But the
>> kiddies could watch Bernie Mac and that show
>> running now with one of the Wayans brothers
>> on it and see the same thing: regardless of his
>> color, the man is portrayed as the idiot and the
>> woman as the one who has the smarts to fix
>> everything.
>
> If you're talking about "My Wife and Kids" with
> Damon Wayans,

I dunno if that's it. I only channel-surfed on through
this show, whatever it was, and never stayed long
enough to see the show's title.

> [...] IIRC, none of the female family members on that
> show were capable of fixing anything more complex
> than toast for breakfast.

Reality TV, huh? ;-)

Still, the segments of the show I peeked at showed
the females getting their way and the man ending
up bewildered about how that happened most
of the time.

In his book _The Stronger Sex_, sociologist Robert
Driscoll points out that there's more than one way
to judge who is the strongest in a social group. There's
raw physical strength and there's who gets her own
interests served most of the time. Women have much,
much more of the latter sort of strength than men but
perhaps because we don't have a word for it, that
strength -- power -- that women enjoy goes largely
unrecognized. As a result, womenfirsters of all sorts,
especially their feminist faction, can pretend that there
is a "patriarchy" in which men dominate and set the
rules for only men's benefit.

> According to my daughter, it's off the air now [...]

This Wayans show I'm talking about -- I've seen it
in the past week. Could be another show, could
be a re-run. I don't know.

Then there's four-fingered yellowface for the kiddy-kooks,
the Simpsons...

--
Men have trouble putting their finger on women's strength
and power. It's like Miss Piggy saying, "Moi?" There's no
vocabulary for talking about women's power. It's easy to
deny. We need a vocabulary for tagging, discussing and
calling women's power into account.

Jack Kammer, in _Good Will Toward Men_
hb, page 21; St. Martin's Press - 1994.
http://www.erols.com/jkammer/index.html


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