The Stupid Father

When I worked as a Snap Fitness manager, there was this woman that would come in and watch the “Lifetime” network every single day. She would watch during the time when they, apparently, played all of those shows with the stupid, overweight father married to a supermodel. Every show was the same stupid plot with different actors. I became fascinated by my hatred of these shows and figured it would be a good place to start for this post.

I remember seeing lots of shows on “Nick at Night” as a child in which the father was a wise man capable of solving complex problems for his family with time left for ice cream and a laugh at the end of the show. It seems that in more modern shows, the fathers are all idiots. It’s like watching a show where my most irresponsible and inept friends have real responsibilities and the whole thing just makes me angry; especially since there are so many shows like this on TV right now.

A few clips of what I'm referencing:
"Still Standing"

"According to Jim"

"Home Improvement" (go to the 2:00 minute mark)

Apparently, I’m not alone in this observation. In doing a bit of research, I found many articles that commented on this phenomenon and suggested a variety of possible reasons for this. The main two are:

Rise of Feminism
In this school of thought, the idea is that these “buffoon” fathers came to be out of a need to offset the previous model of helpless out of the house wives. The problem I have with this idea is that despite the fact that the woman is smarter in these types of shows, she rarely works and ends up spending most of her time fixing all of the stupid mistakes made by the father whether in or out of the family. I don’t like this argument because it seems that it’s just another form of what we had before; a woman whose job it is to take care of her man. It also raises the question: why isn’t there a show in which a supermodel male is married to a less than “ideal” woman? I think I see a double standard here…

Masculine Ambiguity of the 1950s
If you buy into this one, it all starts out with Playboy. Apparently, when Playboy rose to fame because men were having hard time dealing with the constraints of marriage and families. Playboy glorified the bachelor lifestyle unapologetically, which lead to this idea that men were to behave in a certain way (don’t talk about feelings, be strong, get women, make money, drink scotch and wine). This kind of behavior seems fine, and often desirable, in many contexts. The belief is that it led to the current “buffoon” father figure because it suggested that a man’s priorities should lie elsewhere, which is why TV fathers seem so stupid all the time.

Stewart Hall comments often about how media re-presents reality so it’s based on some sort of truth out there. This may be true, but I worry about how playing up a small sample of men in a negative way might affect the population as a whole. I just spent a weekend in Las Vegas visiting some friends and saw the following instances that made me think even more about this blog post:

On the shuttle, a family gets on and there is only one seat left. The father sits down while his family is forced to sit on the floor with the bags. The father seemed completely oblivious as to why his wife was upset with him as she tried to keep the toddlers in line and safe as the shuttle rattled down the road. The father spent this time checking sports scores on his Blackberry. Perhaps this man was just a jerk, but boy did he play into the stereotype.

At Red Rock Canyon, which is a beautiful place to hike, a woman was trying desperately to keep her kids from wandering too close to the cliffs as they scrambled across the rocks. The father slept in the car listening to talk radio. When the kids whined, the father rolled the window up. Nice.

There were more instances in which it seemed men were playing into the media’s portrayal of the stupid father, but these were the best two. Sure, it’s possible that the shows are based on men like this, but these guys fit the stereotype so well (physically as well as personally) that it seemed like they made it their life’s ambition to be like that guy on that stupid show “Still Standing”.

I understand how these media portrayals came to be, but I still struggle with the idea that they were/are necessary for men to have an identity. I, personally, don’t identify with any of them. It seems that we should be trying to come up with characters that function in a realistic, team manner, much like a successful marriage does in reality. Two smart people that look average and don’t spend a lot of time trying to underhand each other in some sort of stupid power struggle that doesn’t really go anywhere. Wouldn’t that be something?