Misogynistic, homophobic, racist and otherwise exotically phobic entertainment is regular fare for the culture of dumbed down dumb ass consumers. Otherwise critical thinking might spread and ruin the mass purchase of perfectly unecessary excesses. What would happen to the GDP, then so carefully monitored by deficit-phobic GOP?

The one inference the author makes that I disagree with is that she says misogyny is not entertainment.

The empirical evidence shows that it is, very much entertainment, and popular entertainment at that, that sells well, just after Entertainment Tonight! and before Dancing With The Stars.

I’ve long noticed that many of my fellow males will do anything to prevent their fellows from doubting their “manhood”, say anything, commit, ultimately any atrocity rather than face looking weak.  Like Marty McFly in Back to The Future who will ruin his life again and again just by someone calling him “chicken”.

Poor Sheen looks haggard… and sucked dry.

I hope he pulls up soon from his nose dive.

Men vs women..please. What a waste of time. This article should have been
about..how we don’t act like adults. That would be a great article..maybe Ruth
marcus will take that on.
IF..our constitution is the ‘law’ of the land..is Obama acting like an adult in
bombing Libya? He really does not have the authority to do that. So then..is Hillary
Clinton wrong(non-adult like)too? Most members of congress?
Does that mean people like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinch are acting like adults? As
they oppose Obama?
Are liberals acting childish when they take to the streets when a republican
president bombs a country, but are silent when a democrat does it?
To me an adult means you take complete responsibility for every aspect of your
life. Your word is your bond. You are an example to children.
How would this place look if we took those 3 things on?

I’m glad this article was written because there is a
on “growing” problem with misogyny mixed media. 
Judging from some of the above comments I can see
that the “tolerated by women, encouraged in men”
holds true.  Not all.  It seems that men (not all
men) have issues with masculinity. To be stuck in the
so-called “man box” is the premise of domestic
violence and rape against women and girls.  Women
shouldn’t stand idle when sexist or misogynistic
remarks are made. It reminds me of a time when these Buddhist Monks raised their cowls up to cover their
eyes when a woman wearing next to nothing walked by;
rather than to abdicate responsibility of their own
actions unto the woman, they took it upon themselves
to be accountable for their own actions.  Men seem to
feel that they have a right to the objectification of
women, gee wonder where they got that idea from?
Media perhaps?  Tony Porter a leading anti-sexist
lecturer and founder of “A Call To Men” covers this
ongoing problem with men and masculinity issues.  At
one point Tony goes on to tell other men, “stop
acting like men”....Bottom Line, misogyny and sexism
shouldn’t be mainstream but the fact that it is
should be a clear indication of how desensitized
Americans along with other countries have gotten.

Bigotry has become big business like everything else in our corporatized country.
You’d think there would have been massive consciousness raising from the O.J.
Simpson horror show. Women have to become more confrontational about all this
abuse. I really don’t understand why Americans are so passive these days after
such a rich history of fighting for equal rights.

what an ill-written rant this article is.  lumping all
these men under the banner “mad men” seems ridiculous
to me.

discrimination and misogyny are very real issues and
deserve a more serious treatment than this tabloid pap.

It’s interesting to me that some women seem to feel that they have the right to speak for all other women. And not only that, they have the right to decide what is best for them, what their hopes should be, what their political view should be, and what they should think.

They go so far as to belive that those who think and feel differently than they do are defective in some way, and need to be viewed as defective, and that their views are defective because they come from a defective individual….

Creativity in Modern America

Hey. I think we can work with this “mad man” trend and tie it in with the “Kill Team” story and come up with at least some fab T-shirts and other stuff. Let’s see. We just need a slogan. How about
“Uuhh, cause it’s fun.”
No, wait, how about…

So the article above mentions some important examples such as:  “Why does George Lopez feel it’s all right to call Kirstie Alley a pig on his talk show?”

I have heard liberals, educated liberals, in fact educated feminist liberals, say things about conservative women much worse than the above. Well, such awful remarks… i wont repeat them… lets just say that some of them are recent and fit perfectly into this article… but its strange… they are missing from this article.

Here is a clue for you, Marcia Alesan Dawkins: You cannot free some women from bondage and leave the rest in chains. By your silence about the terrible treatment of conservative women, you give tacit approval of that treatment, yes, you approve the chains that you wish conservative women to remain burdened with, which I say backfires on you, Marcia Alesan Dawkins. Because by approving bad treatment of conservative women, you unfortunately empower everyone to treat all women that way. Get it?

Do you care? Please answer.

Anybody?

From the article: “We fail to realize our power to turn these images off and demand that different and more humane images of men and women be the norm. Even more tragically, we fail to acknowledge that consuming these images implicates us in misogyny, regardless of how genuinely we wish they did not.”

You liberals certainly do ‘fail to recognize’, and it certainly is ‘tragic’; but how ‘genuinely’ you wish for an end to misogyny is questionable. I am a conservative fundamentalist Christian and even i can see how dumb and weak and false the article is. Yes, even a mind that is pathologically burdened by religious memes sees the glaring hypocritical flaw which everyone passes by without a thought.

Very very poorly done. Awful.
Heart breaking. I like to argue and debate but this is just too much.

Here is some good news: You Leftists can get rid of me at last. If you cant even acknowledge this elemental point: that all women need to be treated fairly: especially the women whose political opinions you dont like. If you cant bridge the gap here, surely nothing I can say about more complex topics could ever be understood by you. Because this particular case is so easy, so elementary, so obvious.

Yet this is the fundamental problem on almost every Truthdig article. You want your side to be free to use all sorts of methods for your own causes. You do not understand the consequences of what you are saying, you do not think things through to the bottom line, and this causes ineffectiveness and over time results in more rage against conservatives and even each other.

If you want prejudice, if you want distance, if you want ineffective rage, you get plenty here on Truthdig to keep you stoked. Who am I to disturb you?

DavidByron

What a spew of hatred and violent emotions along with speaking to me with condensation and disrespect for simply, without accusation, making an important observation of my life.

Your reaction is typical of the shut-down response.  I’m not interested in having a conversation with you on this site—- ever.

I read nothing but the same old stuff said here in these comments that have been said for decades .... sigh. How about a real life example. Many years ago I was on a message board with a man who was about to have a sex change. Of all the things he imaged would happen in his/her life, she never ever imagined the about, intensity, and level of hate, intolerance, bigoted assumptions and expectations the she got after her surgery to become a woman. All I and the women on the message board could say was “Welcome to our world”.

Hey Charlie, you are looking pretty old these days! You might try a little more…... sleep!

A tyrant beating an innocent can seem as inhuman as observing a collective grovel in the dust. It is degrading and dehumanizing for an individual to ascribe himself to a collective.  It is also a fear of freedom.

kerryrose, no doubt you are used to your sexist crap spewing going without comment, but when someone does comment on it you don’t get to pretend they were “violent”, OK?  Can’t actually inflict violence by reading a comment.

Your comment is an example man-hating by spreading ridiculous and fraudulent rumours of male violence about.

Next I expect you to accuse me of raping you.

DavidByron

wow such a violent reaction.  Need I say more?

kerryrtose is another example of the man-hating sexist.

Just as with the Nazis and the KKK the bigot has to constantly make up fraudulent examples of the hated group allegedly “oppressing” the haters, or having bizarre conspiracy plots against them.

So kerryrose imagines all men despise her because of some weird conspiracy.  She doesn’t consider that maybe people in general, regardless of the gender, show and receive disreespect all the time and that’s just life.

Oh no.  it’s all the jews fault you see.  or all a Catholic church plot.  or in her case its men doing evil.  THAT is the reason.

Simple bigotry.

Bobi6 repeats feminist lie #1:

“I was shocked to learn that women still only earn about 63 cents to every dollar earned by men - for the same jobs, same working history etc.”

That’s a bigoted lie.  This sort of filthy lying sexist shit is what helps destroy the pseudo-left in America.

Another knee-jerk man-hating feminism piece. 

To be male is to be evil and violent according to feminist bigoted logic.  The Nazis said much the same about the Jews and all hate movements say such things about their hated groups.  Feminism differs only in that it is acceptable in its society (as Nazism once was in Germany).

In fact men are the victims of violence far more than women and our popular culture celebrates violence against men.  Violence by women against men is seen as “empowering”.  One recent popular movie featured the male lead being raped by a woman and then having to apologise to his gf for “cheating” on her.  Male rape in prisons - so popular it may dwarf all rape outside prisons of either sex—is a joke on late night TV.

This anti-male bigotry (feminism) is a cancer on the pseudo-left in America.  Fortunately not many feminist articles appear at this site.

I have always thought that it was just me, but from the time I was a child I have noticed that the men in my life, despite any accomplishments or caregiving, from my brothers, to my ex-husband, to my teenage boys, and to professors and co-workers speak to me with condensation and/or disrespect.

I have always been curious if other women endured or ignored or never experienced this treatment.

*Addition*

After all misogyny just like racism doesn’t just affect the particular group in
control even if its rendered illegal, what happens is the attitude imbeds itself into
the fabric of a culture expressing itself within those who we would consider
victims as well as perpetrators of behaviour.

I agree wholeheartedly with Prisnersdilema’s summation of the issue here.

Its interesting Dawkins focuses on celebrity culture as opposed to the misogyny
tucked away in mainstream culture *yes folks media culture is NOT reflective of
the mainstream but a grandiose distortion*.  Instead of focusing on Sheen why
not focus on the women who allow themselves to live as sex objects for money
or fame?  Lopez language isn’t a picture of misogyny but rather reflective of
how society views the obese and overweight.  Loughner’s mental health IS the
issue not his rant concerning women.  ‘Sister Wives’ about a polygamist
Mormon family is also not a sign of misogyny since all of the women have
decided to enter such a union out of some fundamentalist religious convictions;
I personally don’t see anything wrong with these women choosing to marry one
man.  In American contemporary culture we should be asking why women are
opting for the role as the sexual object as opposed to gaining attention from
their other attributes, its something feminism needs to address as society
becomes more and more pornified.  The real issues are still living wages for
women, reproductive rights and the attack on abortion and PP. The real issues
are women still having no where to go or social assistance when they are trying
to leave abusive husbands, after all they are the real ‘mad men’.

Not really, why should the media bemoan something that is soley a creation of itself..

How foolish, to pursue the old liberal ideas of cosmetic change, after the battle has been lost, and liberalisim has turned into nothing but a lighter version of right wing conservatism.. Because, it offers nothing that is substantive..

The corporate owned media, has created Charlie Sheen, and those like him, he is a perfect reflection, of it’s values, and its betrayals, of this country…

This has nothing to do with discrimination against women, cosmetic change has never meant anything, it is only another diversion…

****************

I bet natalie kenly’s parents are beaming with joy that she is
‘comforting’ charles during his long exhausting trips. Guess that
keeps them from paying her an allowance. Somebody need to
check that olsen girl’s I.D. Not that it would matter, celebrities
get away with murder with out the responsibility.

Nothing to disagree with here.