About the presence of female and male role models in media and their educational function

[matrixmann]

What kind of role models do young males have these days?
Okay, you can go with your father, you can go with your brother, you can go with any other male relative you're close to or that exists in your regular surroundings.
But what if none of that exists?
What, if none of that is good for anything, do you have to offer as a replacement?
For the youngsters, you may have a little yellow sponge, but be that TV show as stupid as it is. Aside from that, you barely have some catchy figures that reflect a character which gets stuck in your head.
For the elders, media offers a few superheroes, depending on where you live, and some wannabe figures and epilepsy causing action figures whose profile as a person is very flat or not acurately reflected due to them being actually suited for a more adult audience.
The almost matured do already have the musicians left, and some more or less flatened video game figures which do nothing more than shooting abstract figures and some humans.
The musicians partly can be used as a role model- strongly depending on who it is.
The wider the age turns up, the lesser you find some.
The last instance are some old-aged action heroes from the last century.
Apart from the numeral appearance, does that carry some variety?
If you look what had been done on the side for females, it is downright a shame.
Females can be the clever one, females can be the heroines, they can kick somebody's ass, they can kill people, they can be sensitive, they can be a mother, they can be a boss, they can earn money at all, or they can just be the princess in the pink fairy tale land.
In some rare occasions they're even allowed to be the antagonist.
What media offers as a role model for males simply can be reduced to the sharp shooter on his never-ending quest to destroy everything, being downright stupid all the time or playing the kong trying to impress the ladies and defending his territory.
Aside from that, the only thing you get offered otherwise is the softie that nobody likes. - Or, to be exact, that the females like, but his own members of the same sex detest because his touchy-feely kind gets him more female companion.
The media also continues to enhance those types.
Compared to the change that had been done to role models for females and the change still being done, it is an evidence of incapacity.
Especially because female role models become a topic over and over again, but male ones get completely locked out.
Like "males know how males behave from the moment they're born".
In regard to the fact that lesser and lesser boys grow up without their fathers (Gayropa ≠ gay: "If you ask why there are no men in the West or wannabe strongs, then ask why their dads were so proud of them that they needed to disappear"), more surrounded by female educational personnel and women in care positions, and lack of reasonable male figures in their close environment this issue becomes a serious problem.
Males become torn between trying to fulfill what society demands of them and their imagination of themselves.
They're missing a guideline how to please everyone else's needs while still maintaining their identity and their identity as a male.
Instead they get filled with clichés.
And the female educational and care personnel can't make up for that because women don't behave, women don't think and, above all, women don't feel like males.

Comments

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

I agree, but you forgot about athletes. Young males typically use athletes as role models. You're right though, there are not many male role models for children and teenagers and so you get weirded out computer nerds and video games addicts.

Male teenagers are really difficult for people to interact with- female teenagers too. So, adults avoid them. Teenagers are getting more annoying and not less so. I'm sure it will all come to a very bad end.

I think a huge problem that is coming up is a big increase in males wanting to become females. It's a huge problem because much more often than not after the sex change, the person discovers that she still feels terrible and maybe worse.

I don't know how to handle talking to young adults males/male teenagers though. They are really arrogant and conceited. When you tell them your opinion, they think you are wrong and they are right. So, you would either have to yell at them or just not talk and mostly I just don't talk to them and I think that's what most adult males choose to do.

Teenagers are not looking for guidance anyway. They are staring at their fucking cell phones all day and night.

[matrixmann]

Indeed. These are some I forgot.

I don't know about that. Something that I assume maybe can be very disturbing in that situation is, depending on your look if somebody is easily able to spot it or not, that you've become female physically, but still after a great amount of time it can still become a question "You once were a dude, weren't you?". Like 20 years of living as a female are not enough to make clear what you are and what you're not. But, as I said, I guess that also depends on whether you can easily spot it on someone by his look or if you cannot.
Which kind of people may become a problem in this subject may be the younger generation. They've been very much influenced by media and other parts of culture to what is it like to be a woman and how you state you're a woman - I may assume that this might lead to a problem towards "what will life be like when you're female". A good part of them maybe will assume like life's daily duties will pass from them. Or in their jobs they will not be judged anymore by the performance they deliver, but by the gender status they have.
This is a topic that is mostly locked out in reports in mass media about the subject. And where do people most easily get their information about the topic (inclusing youngsters)?
Like, they get to assume everyone can be like Conchita Wurst.

It may not look like it, but this topic also appears in the text. I only didn't name it that clearly.
What young males get delivered as a role model and which they definitely adapt some behavior from are gangster rappers.
They run around on the sidewalk, brawling, showing off with their cell-phones and the music that's on it, they literally behave like apes, like the king of the world, and talking to them you see there's nothing on a higher intellectual level that comes out of them.
Talking to them "there's something more to get", they make a fool of you and treat you like an old geezer. And you didn't even start with the real talking of the old geezers "get a job, don't drink, do something useful".
That's really just the behavior of gangster rappers - but only they take it just for real.

The only thing clearly can work against that are other types of role models, and, above all, father figures.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

I agree about father figures, but now women are choosing to divorce and then take income from the male and then not work much. I have substituted in a really wealthy area and I have seen that. It is amazing to me how poorly educated a lot of divorced mothers are. I saw one that couldn't mutliply or divide fractions, but she was a Special Ed teacher's aide!

I agree with nearly everything you say. I guess I'm very conservative compared to most people in Southern California. My big problem is that I'm not religious at all and I'm not interested in the business world. So, it doesn't feel comfortable to me to be around other conservatives.

I can make really left wing statements too though, but about things concerning worker's wages, unions, funding of education, etc...

I was thinking the other day though that being moderate or between the two prevailing positions of liberal and conservative is sort of rebellious nowadays because it involves thinking and actively disagreeing with most things you hear or read.

What's going to happen, I think, is the younger generation that is not interested in male role models will someday be without jobs and THAT! might bring back the male role model.

[matrixmann]

This thing about divorce, there you said something. Same way it also runs in my country.
I may need to explain the legal situation first because you will see the (even greater) ridiculousness.
If you've been married, here in Germany you need to first must have had a year of seperation and then you can file the petition for divorce. The only times where this doesn't apply is when it's a case of hardship - but I don't know how exactly that is defined. Lots of cases where you might think it's a hardship of broken trust, you have to get the regular way through even though.
Then you have the issue with aliments. Through the time of the seperation as long as the divorce isn't official the partner who earns more money in his job has to aliment you.
After the divorce, under certain circumstances, even too. (For example, children - aliments for the children themselves; if they're still infants and the partner who has them can't do a job because of them, he can also claim aliments for himself.)
Because of other social reasons, it pretty often is the divorcing husband who has to pay. (If she earns more than him, then it can also be her.)
Then most often the divorcing wifes get the children after it. It somehow is like a natural law that authorities and courts induce...

So, you see, there are circumstances that aliments flow often enough and there's one general cash cow who gets forced to open the wallet.
These are laws and orders made in the time where wifes still needed to ask her husband of they're allowed to get a job.
Even though the dicisions of the courts have a little changed over time for the part of the aliments of a partner after the divorce, that they rather become forced to work for an income of their own if there's no reason that hinders them from doing so, but the rest of all that orders - and other court decisions around that topic, see the problem of who gets the children - look so much like made more than 50 years ago. And they were never adapted to the newer times.

So talking about that men feel like left behind or exploited.

There's no need to regard it as "conservative".
If you have your viewpoint and you can underline it with unemotional arguments, then there's nothing one may complaint about.
Nothing to say about my own direction, but within myself I think "conservative" is the last thing I would attach to myself. Think I rather sometimes sound like a commie (by European definition).
And I do find my doubts on many things as well which walk down the direction that you find.

To "bringing the male role model" - that's what I fear. I don't guess they're going to take healthy role models. They will be willing to drag the role models of one hundred years ago out and throw all of the equality movement and rights for gays and transgenders on the stack of oblivion. In other words, you can also say they will try to bring back fascism.

[mandarinsun.livejournal.com]

Thinking about it from the other side now though, masculine men were never very open or encouraging towards me when I was younger. When I think of masculine men, I think of very competitive men that do not take the time to do anything that isn't bottom line in their best interest.

So, though I agree with what you have said, men may have brought the way things are currently on themselves.

It's difficult though because the masculine credo is to do things by yourself, but if that message never gets to 95% of the population because men that live it aren't interested or capable of communicating it, then I agree that society suffers, but you can easily see why and men are partly to blame for not being more interested in passing it down as role models earlier on. It seemed like in the 1980 and 1990s, and 60s and 70s, it was much more possible for men to take the time to be role models, but how I remember it was that they weren't interested in it.

It really also has to come from the obviously best males, if you have a movement where just any men are supposed to pass down values what ends up happening is that real loser type men think that everyone should start listening to them. I vaguely remember a Promise Keeper's movement that felt like that. It felt like a bunch of evangelical Christian loser men wanting to boss everyone around.

[matrixmann]

I guess the ignition spark that needs to come is that admitting all this focussing on what is thought as female needs and that you're not evil if complaining about it in a healthy unemotional manner is wrong. I guess one thing in the game definitely is "the shame" or the feeling of doing something very evil if you think such thoughts.
Because - look at who complains about women's dominance.
I think that no-one wants to be regarded as one of those hillbillies and people from the very much of yesterday.
That's what they aren't.

[onb2017.livejournal.com]

I agree with you on that. I know lots of families where mother babies her boy and he turns into a little girl. And about media perpetuating the image of a sensitive man, that has emotions and likes to dress etc. I agree on the role of the society.

[matrixmann]

See why I bring that up so srongly?
The thing of chemicals in food is one thing, but one doesn't know still how deep the impact is.
Socialization and psychological aspects - these are some things which can be considered as true as there are a hundred years of information and research about human behavior which can tell you that both things play a role in who somebody is.
So to say, it's something whose probability doesn't need to be put into question. The probability is very high.

[onb2017.livejournal.com]

No, I never said chemicals are important it is 1/100 of the problem if so. I am just relying on experiments myself. But otherwise I totally agree with you on the idea that there are social reasons for that.

[matrixmann]

Well, maybe also my head interpreted something the wrong way... Is always able to happen.