The Rawness

A common complaint from women today is how society, primarily through the media, promotes all these unrealistic expectations of women. Thanks to celebrity plastic surgery and airbrushing and photoshop in magazines and posters, a lot of men have delusions about what constitutes the average female body shape and typical cellulite levels. Plus feminists for the past few decades have been promoting this idea of the superwoman who can “have it all,” from the high powered career to the Prince Charming husband to the 3 kids to the Martha Stewart homemaking proficiency, all without missing a beat.  For these reasons, I agree with these female complaints to a degree, but they nonetheless become tiresome to me.  I’ll explain why.

One of the big problems I’ve complained about in this blog for a while is how much I hate the modern images of men we receive in the media, of the slacker slobs that often pass for protaganists in Apatow movies or the death of credible action heroes in today’s cinema. In the latter case, as I’ve pointed out in the past, how many (1) American (2) white men (3) under 35 outside of Channing Tatum can pass as credible action heroes? It’s for this reason I believe so many action heroes of yesteryear have been able to make credible comebacks: because Hollywood has yet to find any worthy successors. Despite being past their prime, we’ve seen recent successful action comebacks for Arnold Schwarzenegger (Terminator 3), Sylvester Stallone (Rocky Balboa and John Rambo), Harrison Ford (Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skulls) and Bruce Willis (Live Free or Die Hard). Notice in these movies there was usually a man from the next generation as a sidekick who was either unconvincingly (I can’t stress that word enough) being groomed as the next action hero (like Shia LeBeouf in Indy) or blatantly being shown as not being cut out of the same rugged cloth as the tough guy cloth as the older mentor (Rocky’s son in Rocky Balboa, Hipster Mac Commercial Douche in Live Free or Die Hard). So it seemed like either way, the modern generation of 18-35 year olds was getting reminded of its inadequacies. We either had movies where we were the protaganists and reveling in our underachieving slacker slob status, or we had action movies with the male archetypes of yesteryear reminding us of our inadequacies, either explicitly by outright stating it or implicitly just by a comparison of respective actions shown on the screen. Also, look at a trailer for what’s being touted as the hottest coming action movie of 2010 and see what you notice:

I think a big reason people long for these old school types of movies is because they’ve long become bored with how politically correct and lowest common denominator movies have become.  Every non-kid movie is targeted to immature 18-34 year old beta males with ADD or to narcissistic, empowered feminist Sex and the City fans.  I myself have made a conscious effort in recent years to watch old movies, either through cable programming on AMC, Turner Classics and Fox Movie Channel or through DVDs, and it’s been a mostly rewarding experience, but not totally.  Because as a result of immersing myself in this old entertainment, I’ve realized a different set of problems arising from the ones I had when watching modern entertainment; problems that made me identify with yet at the same time have less sympathy for the “unrealistic standards for females” debate I mentioned earlier.

One weekend I was having a movie watching marathon. I watched some westerns like High Noon with Gary Cooper, My Darling Clementine with Henry Fonda and Pale Rider with Clint Eastwood along with other classic movies. These were wonderful, inspiring movies but I noticed at the end of the day that I was feeling a little down and inadequate and felt existential angst building.

It took me a while but eventually I made the connection between my mood and the movies I watched earlier. I was feeling inadequate because I was doubting whether I was capable of doing the great acts of heroism and bravery these men onscreen were making look as natural as breathing. There were scenes where guys could easily have escaped to safety and taken the easy way out, but they decide to stick around and face down four guys singlehandedly in a gunfight. Or routinely walk into the heart of danger, outnumbers and outgunned, and win the encounter without even doing any violence, solely through masculine presence and badass intimidation. Walking through rooms of cutthroats and hired killers, right up to the boss of the crew, to tell him not to threaten women and children anymore or he’d have to answer to the hero. And no one raises a finger against him in the whole room, because he’s just that badass. Or on the flipside the guy who chooses practical self-preservation over commiting a suicide mission to preserve his honor and ends up getting shamed by his woman or by children into stepping up and doing the right thing, despite how impractical and suicidal it is. There were numerous times during these movies I found myself asking “Would I do that? Could I do that?” It’s hard to know exactly what you’d do in a crisis until you’re actually in it. You’d always like to believe the best about yourself, but you never actually know how you’ll perform until the moment of truth.

Or how about the suave guy who has a snappy retort for every verbal challenge  thrown at him by a male rival or a female target who is testing him and resisting his wooing?  Who never lets himself get flustered by anything?  Who bursts into the boardroom and delivers the crunchtime presentation that saves the company and gets him the promotion?  The guy who beats all the enemies, solves all the crises and always gets the girl in the end?

Basically, when did we get this idea that women have a monopoly on receiving impossible standards to meet from the media and society?  Men have been dealing with unrealistic standards and expectations from society and the media for as long as media and society have existed!  A lot of what women complain about with body image and superwoman pressures from media and society is not that different than the pressures men get in regards to being both hypermasculine, suave, yet also sensitive to women’s needs. In some ways it’s even worse because while we’ve reached a point where thanks to public sympathy the term “real women” now means America Ferrera or average, slightly chunky women in a Dove ad, while on the flip side the term “real men” still conjurs the image of the hypermasculine, perfect ideal from these old movies, even among people who consider themselves progressive, modern and liberal. And it’s also worse for men in that living up to that male ideal is much more likely to lead to bodily harm and death than what a woman faces living up to the feminine ideal.  I realize now that a lot of this beta male media glorification is probably for men a backlash to media pressure in the same way this “real woman” let’s-let-ourselves-get-fat-without-guilt movement is for women.

I’m conflicted about all this.  On one hand, I agree with the idea that delusionally unrealistic standards do need to be exposed.  For example it’s ridiculous when both men and women think a woman with just a little cellulite, so little cellulite that she still has less cellulite than 3/4 of the adult female population, is bashed for being fat because the average guy has no idea how common cellulite actually is on women thanks to rampant photoshopping of models and celebrities.  But likewise when single decent men feel inadequate if they aren’t perfection squared (have to be macho like Eastwood, stoic and unemotional like Robert Mitchum, suave like Cary Grant, yet sensitive and big-hearted like Jimmy Stewart, all with an Ivy League degree and six figure salary before 30), someone has to be the voice of reason in that case too.  So far, so good, right?

Where I draw the line though is that there seems to be a growing movement among both genders to respond to delusional standards by going too far to the the opposite extremes and celebrating mediocrity and averageness.  We keep downgrading expectations and lowering the standards for average and above average to the point where people are actually suffering from too much self esteem for no good reason.  And at the same time, people’s standards for people of the opposite sex remain higher than ever.  They’re only lowering expectations for themselves.  So now you have chunky or fat chicks or underemployed airheads who can’t cook or clean and only know how to spend money expecting to land Prince Charming.  And you have videogame playing, Maxim reading, flabby manchildren expecting to land Katherine Heigl caliber chicks like Seth Rogen did in Knocked Up.  Unwarranted narcissism along with entitlement are out of control.

My take on it is, as bad as delusionally high levels of role models can be for one’s self esteem, the overly relatable and pitifully average role model is immeasurably worse.  At the end of the day, even if you scale them back some from dangerously delusional levels, our role models still need to be at a healthy level of unattainability in order to keep us aspirational.  We should only accept breaking even after trying and failing to win the big jackpot.  We shouldn’t set out aiming to break even as our ultimate goal from the very beginning.  If you’re a young girl, hit the gym and try to look like a supermodel not America Ferrera.  Try to be Martha Stewart.  If you’re a young guy, work on your game and aim to be as smooth as James Bond; don’t aim to be adorably nerdy like Michael Cera.  If you don’t succeed in the long run, so be it.  Sometimes things don’t work out.  It’s not the end of the world, don’t beat yourself up, don’t kill yourself over it.  As you get older and wiser, scale back your goals and your expectations accordingly.

(12 votes, average: 4.92 out of 5)

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