Give a dog a bad name - and expect to get bitten
By: Amfortas
Feminism has long drawn attention to and fought against stereotypical and sexist portrayals of women in mass media, but new research shows that media portrayals of gender have largely executed an about-face in the past decade or so.
There is a deliberate and unprovoked “gender war” and the main target of discrimination is not women, according to research - it is men.
In this article I will look at the evidence - it is comprehensive - and the unintended effects. If indeed, they are unintended.
The Feminist so-called ‘Gender studies’ have claimed that mass media portrayals and images are key influences that both reflect and shape society’s views of women and women’s self-identity. They do not consider men.
As well as attacking so-called sexist media portrayals such as page three girls and “girlie” magazines, - which, incidentally feature young ‘empowered’ women taking their clothes off without a skerrick of duress and doing what they want to for copious amounts of money - feminists have challenged objectification, marginalisation, trivialisation and other negative portrayals of women in movies, advertising, TV drama and other media content.
Although it is increasingly hard to find any such representations not driven by women themselves, their argument that such portrayals are damaging have won eager support from legislators and from most media professionals including film makers, advertising producers and editors. After all, it is women who are the primary consumers of media’s fruits.
Until recently, gender theorists and media researchers have argued and lied or simply assumed that media representations of men are predominantly positive. Men have allegedly been shown in mass media as powerful, dominant, heroic, successful, respected, independent, they say, and in other positive ways conducive to men and boys maintaining a healthy self-identity and self-esteem. All things that feminists do not like one bit.
But hey, Errol Flynn died decades ago. Marlbro’ man too.
The mendacious feminist view has come under challenge over the past few years.
John Beynon, a Welsh academic, examined how masculinity was portrayed in the British quality press including The Times, The Guardian and The Sunday Times and more, over a three-year period from 1999-2001. He didn’t look deeply at the more crass tabloid press where matters are considerably worse.
Susan Faludi’s 2000 best-seller Stiffed: The Betrayal of Modern Man, also finds and exposed the myths and lies and rings alarm bells about the false image of men in our society.
Beynon concluded in his 2002 book, Masculinities and Culture, that men and masculinity were overwhelmingly presented negatively and as “something dangerous to be contained, attacked, denigrated or ridiculed”.
In Australia a broader and more extensive content analysis of mass media portrayals of men and male identity was undertaken in 2005 at the University of Western Sydney, by Dr Jim Macnamara .
It focused on news, features, current affairs, talk shows and lifestyle media, and found that men are widely demonised, marginalised, trivialised and objectified in non-fiction media content that allegedly presents facts, reality and “truth”.
Examine the quality and scope of the evidence. The study involved collection of all editorial content 9 no cherry picking) referring to or portraying men from: 650 newspaper editions (450 broadsheets and 200 tabloids), 130 magazines, 125 TV news bulletins, 147 TV current affairs programs, 125 talk show episodes, and 108 TV lifestyle program episodes. They were from the 20 highest circulation and rating newspapers, magazines and TV programs over a complete six-month period. Media articles were examined using in-depth quantitative and qualitative content analysis methodology.
This comprehensive and exhaustive research found, in volume, that fully 69 per cent of mass media reporting and commentary on men was unfavourable compared with just 12 per cent favourable and 19 per cent neutral.
Men were predominately reported or portrayed in mass media as villains, aggressors, perverts and philanderers, with more than 75 per cent of all mass media representations of men and male identities showing men in one of these four ways.
More than 80 per cent of media mentions of men, in total, were negative, compared with 18.4 per cent of mentions which showed men in a slightly positive role.
The overwhelmingly negative reporting and portrayals of men in mass media news, current affairs, talk shows and lifestyle media was mainly in relation to violence and aggression. Violent crime, including murder, assault, armed robberies and attacks such as bashings, accounted for almost 40 per cent of all media reporting of male violence and aggression, followed by sexual abuse (20.5 per cent), general crime (18.6 per cent) and domestic violence (7.3 per cent).
Disregarded is the fact that crime is a feature of a tiny minority in our society and the vast majority of men are law-abiding, family-supporting, self-sacrificing chaps going about their lawful occasions. Men who are increasingly dismayed at the ease and frequency with which women denigrate them.
Other topics of media coverage of men were fatherhood and family, male sexuality, work and career, and men’s social behaviour. In all of these categories, men were predominantly reported and portrayed negatively.
Fully one third of all media discussion of male sexuality examined in the study was in relation to paedophilia which demonstrates the appalling distortion inherent in debate on men, given that an infinitismal proportion of men are pedophiles.
Fatherhood, a prominent also-ran subject was discussed in 361 media articles and features during the period of the study. Some media coverage positively discussed men as fathers, pointing to increasing recognition of the importance of fathers in children’s lives. However, along with recognition of the importance of fathers and the depth of many men’s emotional connection with their children, discussion contained an almost equal number of criticisms of men as “deadbeat dads”, “commitment phobic” and as perpetrators of domestic violence and sexual abuse within families.
That sexual abuse is far less common in a family with a biological father in it than without – in fact, statistically negligible - is totally ignored or suppressed.
Men are exclusively portrayed as the perpetrators of domestic violence and child abuse despite evidence of violence and abuse committed by women.
The National Family Violence Survey in the US for instance found women just as likely to commit violence against men as men are against women, and a US National Incidence of Child Abuse and Neglect report in 2000 that found “where maltreatment of children led to death, 78 per cent of the perpetrators were female”, Where is that ever reported by our media?
What an image of men to present to the target audience of the media, the Primary consumer – women. They know that women want to see men as bad, it seems, in order to justify buying stuff from the media’s sponsors.
The media’s deliberate, contrived image of men is wrong. Very wrong. Factually and morally.
The Australian Advertising Standards Bureau reported in 2005 that TV commercials drew a record and increasing number of complaints from men during 2004 while those from women are decreasing.
The Australian Federal Government’s 73 Million Dollar advertising campaign against domestic violence which targeted only men as perpetrators of domestic violence and only women as victims was labeled “propaganda against men” with many men criticising its negative and blatantly false “stereotypical portrayals” as reported in The Age, January 3, 2005.
One notable Australian commentator described it as ‘the worst piece of deliberate Government black propaganda against a biologically distinguishable group ever seen outside of Nazi Germany”.
Doris Lessing, the famous British early feminist author, said at the Edinburgh Book Festival, in August, 2001:
I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed.
She went on to point out-
The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests …
Her audience was stunned.
One could add that intelligent, educated TV presenter and news editor women are as bad as their crude, nasty sisters seeking every opportunity to create a false image to suit their anti-male agenda. Indeed their University education in Women’s Studies lies at the root of their systematic and public misandry.
Stupid is also an increasing thematic portrayal of men, especially in television adverts which the Australian study did not cover.
Men are routinely portrayed as “fools, idle, good for nothing and inept” usually a second fiddle to their so much smarter and more decisive female partners. In adverts, the savvy, empowered, successful ‘Executive woman’ is married to a stupid boy-man who cannot open a can of beans and whose children are more capable at doing year 4 homework than he is.
Canadian authors, Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young in a controversial 2001 book, Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture reported widespread examples of “laughing at men, looking down on men, blaming men, de-humanising men, and demonising men” in modern mass media. They concluded: “… the worldview of our society has become increasingly both gynocentric (focused on the needs and problems of women) and misandric (focused on the evils and inadequacies of men)”.
This seems pervasive too in many TV ‘dramas. It is clear such TV shows seem to be preaching a message of ‘defer to the woman’ as the only way of impressing her or stopping her being violent - and failure to do so will result in a smack to his face.
Violence toward men, physical and verbal, direct and indirect, is treated as comedy or ‘deserved’. Whatever happened to ‘There is no excuse for violence’? .
Doris Lessing said “ Men seem to be so cowed that they can’t fight back, and it is time they did.
Now, how does one expect men to do this when there is so much legislation that forces them to keep their opinions and protests to themselves, and so much misandric vilification in all arms of our media-driven culture; the media that just won’t give men a voice?
With the rapid rise of female and feminist influence, seemingly devoid of the famed and hubristically claimed ‘empathy’ and compassion, our media Institutions are dominated by subtle verbal thugs.
How do you think it affects Justice in the Family Courts, where an Industry of rent-seeking hangers on suffused with false and awful images of men, pass judgement.
Men are less ’cowed’ than chained to a post in the back yard, like a dog.
Let us examine the effects of this chaining up. I want to show how women have lost a valuable resource – thrown it away - the care and concern of even the nicest, kindest and most intelligent men that Lessing refers to.
And worse for women - Mistreated dogs bite.
I have provided a lot of detail from contemporary research which shows the systematic destruction of masculine reputation foisted upon us by an anti-male media, driven by the education women receive in our Universities.
Men are rubbished and calumnised daily. Good men; ordinary, hard working men; family men. The good name of men is soiled at every opportunity by ordinary women repeating feminist AgitProp.
Women have eagerly adopted the habit of disrespecting men, making it a sardonic sport, so much so that even an early feminist like Doris Lessing is horrified at the destructiveness, callousness, crudity and downright lies.
What can men do about it? What are men doing about it?
Men are generally doers rather than talkers, present company excepted. And when good men stop doing what good men do, women lose out.
Anthony Nazzaro writing for the National Organisation for Men has pointed to incidents, behavioural trends. Lets look at some:
The Baltic Sea; Estonian-Swedish ferry sinks, over 800 die. A disproportionate number of women drown. Many say the “Law of the Sea” (women and children first), was forgotten, and “The Law of the Jungle” (every man for himself) prevailed. The screams of women drowning were heard by many men, it was reported.
Montreal, Canada; 14 women students were killed by a mentally disturbed man. Many media commentators were bothered by the fact that the male students didn’t risk their lives in an attempt to ‘protect’ the women. Feminists used this as yet another male-bashing exercise. They have an annual ‘protest’ accusing those boys and all men of being complicit.
New York City, the Twin Tower Bombings: in the panic to get out of the buildings, some women reported of being shoved out of elevators by men. One or two of the 300 odd firemen who died in the inferno perhaps? Was it the actual the case that women were pushed out? Maybe it was just a whine from a woman or two who broke a heel. But men were criticized, in a tragedy.
On the radio in the UK, a lost child, a little girl, is reported as found wandering the aisles of a ‘businessman’s ‘ train from Glasgow. Women phone in condemning men on the train for not ‘helping’ the child. Their tone is heated, bordering on calls for lynching. The many business-women passengers who did not help are not mentioned.
A small girl wanders from a kindergarten in England; she drowns in a pond. A man-hunt looks for a van seen in the area. The man is found and cleared but is vilified for not stopping to help a wandering child. He says, “I was afraid to talk to a strange child and be accused of being a paedophile”.
In the book “Male and Female - A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World’, there appears an opinion “that men have to learn - to want to provide and protect others, and this behavior, being learned, is fragile and can disappear rather easily under social conditions that no longer teach it.” Or deride it.
Phyllis Schlafly, a well known American writer, has written that male soldiers are now being trained to disregard female soldiers’ pain and suffering if captured, since the sexual assault of a U.S. female POW during the gulf war (who turned out not to have been sexually assaulted at all, by the way). She’s afraid if this attitude gets out to the general public, it could be devastating to male-female relationships.
Well it has, and it is.
Destroying chivalry by continually criticizing it and blaming men for being polite and helpful is one thing, but are women willing to forfeit the paternal feeling that most men still have for them?
Ooow now there’s a provocative word, but when did feminists every keep to real meanings of words? Paternalistic used to be a positive word, rubbished by feminists.
Many men are no longer more outraged by women being abused than by men being abused.
Today, men are starting to refuse to see themselves as the providers and protectors of women. In an equal world why should they be? The provider protector role we are told is ‘oppressive’. This archetypal male role has been rubbished - by feminists and their legions of media whores and legislators.
Women are hardly noted for stirring themselves to provide for and protect men. Quite the opposite in fact. Every opportunity to abandon men is taken, as Doris Lessing pointed out in disgust at her feminist sisters.
Women can take back the night on the one way streets all they like.
Feminist legal scholar and Harpy Professor Catharine MacKinnon has said that the increase in domestic violence and rape are symptomatic of male attitudes toward women. Hah! She would say that, wouldn’t she.
What increase? She speaks absolute nonsense. There has been a consistent decrease in domestic violence and rape against women in all western countries.
It is women’s domestic violence and false allegations of rape which has seen a marked increase. More lies and vilification from the Women’s Studies Departments infecting our Universities, and our legal system, but then what can one expect from such a rabid liar as Professor McKinnon.
She emulates Professor Mary Koss who fabricated the infamous and ubiquitous 1: 4 women raped statistic by deliberately falsifying self-selected data collected through the Feminist Ms Magazine. Despite being exposed and torn apart by Christina Hoff-Summers’ in her book “Who Stole Feminism?”, there is barely a Women’s magazine in circulation that has not continued to repeated this wicked lie to terrify its readers and turn them against decent men.
Liars. Men-Haters.
Women Professors of Lies are to be found in every Australian University too. Professors whose careers have been made as rent-seeking scum, founded on the most outrageous personal and professional falsity.
Could Feminism’s AgitProp Gender Politics, designed to suborn women, have changed men’s attitudes so that men now see men and women as just people? Have feminists pushed women off the pedestal? Perhaps they have opened men’s eyes to an historical Confidence trick. Is this a good condition for our society?
According to a recent poll, many fewer men would give up their seat in a lifeboat to a woman today, quite a difference from the 1912 Titanic disaster where mostly women were saved. Even more than children. In a riot, disaster or war, will it mean every man and women for themselves?
Many men today demand that women be obligated for the draft and combat along with men. Mel Feit, of the National Center for Men, in the USA has stated that “a male body isn’t any more capable of withstanding a bullet than a female body.”
Women hold political office and Board-room positions, and are police officers and some are even firefighters. Why should men still risk their lives to protect them?
Geraldo Rivera on a show regarding male-female violence stated, “The way I was brought up, men should always protect women.”
But isn’t this attitude patronizing and demeaning? Feminists tell everyone it is, taking every opportunity to berate men.
Some women call this equally disrespectful attitude, misogynistic. What a friggin’ nerve. Some men call this result of societal equality, poetic justice.
If being equally respected is what women want, then perhaps women could make a start on being respectful and change history – and herstory while they are at it. They have had several generations of feminism and equality but seem yet to make that start.
Meanwhile being equally disrespected could be a natural and inevitable by-product of their systematic disdain, even if back-firing on women.
It seems to me that to stop this rot in society and specifically the media and the Law- sponsored, forced-redundancy of men, will need a revolution in society. Maybe brought about by calamity.
If, say, an invasion was to occur and men were to turn their backs on the defence of the nation as we are now “redundant” what would the prevailing attitude of the female gender be then?
If such an invading force was one that sees women as nothing more than chattel to be used abused and discarded at a whim, would we then as men be good for something — ahhh yes we would be good at defending the freedom and advancements that these women claim they have gained for themselves.
This shows that the claims the femanazis have made in respect to the advancement of women are nothing without the men to protect and ensure those gains. They are only guaranteed existence by a willingness of men to uphold them.
But why should men stand up and defend the rights of the feminazis and their followers who label men redundant, violent, abusive, child abusers, perverts, rapists etc as they are fond of vomiting in the main stream media. Remember the feminist catch-phrase? “ALL men are rapists”.?
Perhaps it will never come to be that men will en-masse turn their backs in such a situation as we all have mothers, sisters, daughters and female relatives whom we hold dear to our hearts.
But even these are increasingly disrespecting men, divorcing and dispossessing their husbands and estranging themselves and the children from their fathers. Children, particularly girls are developing an horrendous image of men, starting with their fathers. They will grow totally distrustful of men altogether. Boys self-esteem is terrible as they look to a future when they too will become the men they see portrayed. There is a self-fulfilling prophesy bearing down on us.
80% of divorces are initiated by wives, wanting to rid themselves of the men Doris Lessing spoke about. Nice men. Intelligent men. Kind men. These men are deliberately mis-labeled and dragged into the family Court, sometimes by policemen who have thrown them out of their homes on false allegation. Men’s are dispossessed of their homes and their families in ‘The Best Interest of the Children’, Adolph Hitler’s wicked phrase. It is not only men’s image that is ruined.
Men just might leave all women to themselves.
It will not be from anger. Despite being so mistreated, men in general have not shown anger toward women. But men are feeling profoundly disappointed, disillusioned and disgusted.
Western women have not raised any objection to being manipulated by feminism. Instead they have embraced it’s seductive, destructive mantras and mendacities. They punish faultless men who they see as all the same. All bad. They have permitted calumny and few have raised objection like Doris Lessing. They have chosen to follow a pernicious and socially destructive Marxist-Feminist agitprop path to a bed of their own making that they have to lie in.
Alone.
No doubt they will blame men, for being commitment phobic.
Notes
(This article accompanies a podcast by Amfortas produced in conjunction with Christian J.)
Benyon, J. (2002) Masculinities and Culture, Buckingham: Open Uni Press
Nazzaro A. The screams of women : Men’s increasingly dispassionate feelings about women. The Backlash! - January 1995 Organization News - National Organization for Men
Macnamara J. Dr, an Australian scholar and author of Media & Male Identity: The Making and Remaking of Men, Media Research findings from a PhD research thesis completed in 2005 through the University of Western Sydney released by Palgrave Macmillan, London in September 2006.
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4907
Regarding McKinnon’s lies, the best evidence comes from the US Justice Department’s annual crime victimization survey—which compiles numbers based on interviews with some 75,000 Americans, rather than from police reports. The survey found that in 1979, the rate of rape was 2.8 per 1,000 people over age 11. In 2004, it was 0.4. per 1000
Some experts say that because the survey was redesigned in the early 1990s, the most reliable data come from 1993 and after. Even here, though, the trend is the same, with a drop of 75 percent. That translates into hundreds of thousands of rapes that didn’t happen.
When reporting has increased by 1/3 and rape rates dropped by 85% this means one thing: An increase in false reporting:
While researchers and prosecutors do not agree on the percentage of false allegations, the consensus is that approximately 40% to 50% of charges are clearly false.
This number does not include unresolved allegations held “in limbo” where evidence is too weak to try the case even under shield laws, relaxed rules, and comparatively weak evidentiary standards applied to rape cases:
- A survey of all the forcible rape complaints during a three-year period at two large Midwestern state universities found that 50 percent of the accusations were false.4
- In a nine-year study of all resolved rape cases in a Midwestern U.S. city of 70,000, the accusers recanted their charges 41 percent of the time. The 41 percent figure does not include the other accusations that the police department recorded as unfounded, for which there was insufficient evidence to establish the assault.5
- According to a report of the Defense Department Inspector General released in 2005, approximately 73% of women and 72% of men at the military service academies believe that false accusations of sexual assault are a problem.6
The culture of false allegations of violence bears unacceptably high costs. Families and innocent lives are destroyed by our wasted tax dollars, while real cases go ignored or unprosecuted. Judges and juries are fooled and make bad decisions.
See also RADAR ALERT: Beyond Duke: About Half Of All Rape Allegations Are False
Professor Mary Koss.
Ms. Magazine commissioned University of Arizona public health professor Mary Koss to develop a’ different way’ to measure the prevalence of rape.
Rather than asking a random sample of women about rape per se, Koss asked feminist magazine readers if they had ever experienced actions that she then classified as rape. A self-selected cohort who felt aggrieved responded.
One question, for example, asked, “Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn’t want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?” –‘because’?? a question that is ambiguous on several fronts, including the woman’s degree of incapacitation, the fanciful causal relation between being given a drink and having sexual intercourse, and the man’s presumed and calumnised intentions. Koss’ ‘method’ produced the 1:4 rate, which Ms.Magazine then published.
It was a flawed study on a number of levels, but the most powerful refutation came from her own subjects: 73% of the women whom the study characterized as rape victims told the researchers that they hadn’t been raped. Further, 42% of the study’s supposed victims said they had had intercourse again with their alleged assailants — though it is highly unlikely that a raped woman would have sex again with the fiend who attacked her.
Despite all this, the numbers have stuck.