In the short video below, Sarah Haskins humorously draws attention to the tendency of television commercials to feature husbands who are, more or less, bumbling idiots.
While this is a negative stereotype of men, it also excuses men from responsibility for housework. So men get negatively stereotyped, but they also get out of cooking, cleaning, shopping, paying bills, childcare, and even masculine jobs like fixin’ stuff and lawn care. How convenient.
I’ve seen this play out in real life many times. In fact, three times last week various friends of mine on Facebook updated their status to say something like: “Husband has the kids today! I hope they survive!” It’d be okay with me if I never saw that status again.
I think it’s a really interesting exercise to try to think of negative stereotypes that apply to privileged versus oppressed groups and contemplate whether the stereotype actually functions to benefit or hurt them. Shall we?
Update: Around 10pm I went through and did a mass purge of comments on this post. I removed pretty much everything from this evening & probably removed a few legit comments in the process. (They’re not completely gone – I saved them all… ) This clearly went downhill fast & went well beyond the standard trollish comments. -Jon
