Stochastic Terror, Part II: Whitewashed

Yesterday, we talked about the Five Christians You Meet in the Movies.

And it started me thinking.

Last year, I started but didn’t quite follow through on a statistical study of race and gender characteristics in TV advertisements, as well as the tone or general sense of stereotype associated with the “Characters”. Spoiler alert: white males are subject to a certain…stereotyping, outside of ads for home improvement, sometimes. The numbers were jarringly uniform; there seems to be an unspoken (maybe) pact to portray white males as dim buffoons at best, cads at worst.

And while I don’t watch a ton of TV, I see enough to know the parallels are there.

There are five kinds of men – of all races – visible on television, either programming or advertisement, today:

The Impotent Buffoon: The most notable example of this “male” is the “boyfriend” on most TV/streamingt shows aimed at Millennials and younger. Mewling, incompetent, the inevitable inferior in the relationship whether he knows it or not. The first crisis in the plot inevitably shows him to be about as useful as a set of debate notes in front of Lieutenant Governor Flanagan. This is also the “husband” in most TV ads, these days; schlubby, married to a woman who’s waaaaay out of his league (and, in many cases, with kids who are made to appear much, much smarter than him). In a recent development, that incompetent male isn’t always white anymore (the guy in the “WeBuyAnyCar.com” ad jumps to mind).

The Douchebag: These are the people that all the “Jocks” in every John Hughes teensploitation movie grew up to be. The recent simulacrum of this type was the “partner” FBI agent in the (often excellent) Christina Applegate/Linda Cardellini streamer Dead to Me; a youngish man with all the physical symbols of being upper-middle class; he went to a pseudy-Ivy on, of course, a lacrosse scholarship, and exudes the casual arrogance that the modern TV viewer has been trained to expect to shortly see torn straight down by his senior partner – a (grabs checklist of modern “virtue” tropes) Latina single mother who worked her way up from a street, uh, FBI agent. (Sub-flavor: The gay douchebag, who usually ends up being the good guy).

Old Money: The definitive versions? The senior partners in the arbitrage firm in Trading Places.

The Melodrama Villain: Usually middle aged or older, usually coded as American aristocrats. If a show needs an “evil” Macguffin, it’s usually one of these guys. Even in car ads, for crying out loud, the “baddie” usuallyl resembles the “Goldstein” character in the Macintosh “1984” ad.

The Bankable A-Lister: Bankable A-listers are always exempt from all these tropes. Competent, intelligent, hot…perfect. The sort of thing that we’re supposed to be moving away from when the character is female.

Now, on level this is all good critical fun.

On the other hand – remember the complaints of African-Americans to Stepin Fetchit and Amos and Andy, or Natives to a century of movie stereotypes of Indians, or Latinos to decades of “lazy Mexican” tropes, who asked “why should our young people grow up with this vision of themselves all round them in popular culture?”

They were right.

If you’re a young man today, growing up as a generation of young men that’ve had their boyish “male” traits sanded off or drugged into submission by a feminized school system – and whose very testosterone levels are being eroded by diet or environment or God only knows what? When you look at pop culture around you, what do you see?

The loudest voices in our culture telling you “your type” is impotent, ineffective, useless, and if you draw a winning ticket in life’s lottery, anything from insufferable to evil?

Perhaps the proper term isn’t “stochastic terror”.

Maybe gaslighting?

Grooming for failure and misery?

Intergenerational abuse?

The more I think about it, I’m talking myself back to “stochastic terror”.

25 thoughts on “Stochastic Terror, Part II: Whitewashed

  1. Last week I had some concrete work done at my place. Tear up about 50 sq feet of an old slab, haul away the refuse, pour a new slab (abt 2 yards), brush finish.
    3 white guys did it. Started at 7 AM, done by 10, no drama.

  2. MP, I had the opposite experience. When I was moving, truck driver complained about how slow and useless the two-man crew in MN was compared to his crew in TX. Men in MN were white (of course!) and guys in TX were black. You can’t judge a book by the cover, nor should you.

  3. Actually I am in Wisconsin, JPA.
    Not judging a book by its cover, just imagining the project would have been cast differently if it had been a sitcom episode.
    For decades I worked in technical fields dominated by white & Asian males, and I am unhappy about seeing men (of all races) depicted as slobs and idiots. Who keeps the lights on, who keeps fresh water flowing to your taps, who builds bridges & dams & highways? Men.
    Back in the 50s and early 60s, you could spend a week consuming media & never know that the US had any black or Asian citizens. I am seeing the same disconnect now between life as it is lived and life as it is depicted. In life as it is, brilliant men are making the world work and making it progress technologically, but in the the media men are portrayed as clueless, stupid people who are incapable of taking care of themselves or who are violent and threatening.

  4. It’s nothing new. 15 years ago I was surrounded by young men who were surrounding my daughters. I despaired that the only male “models” they were seeing represented were either Homer Simpson or Pro ‘Rasslin types, with hardly anything in between. I opted for trying to teach them, rather than shoot them, so I started a Fundamentals in Film “class” every few weeks where I selected films with plenty of action (know your audience, which is also why I provided a lot of food with the movie) but also strong examples of positive male behavior, followed by discussion questions that zeroed in on those traits. The young men responded pretty well to it; the movie “Glory” especially generated a lot of engagement afterwards.

    The thing is, most of my selections were older movies since I’m an older guy. The most “recent” film was “The Dark Knight”, and we went through the Band of Brothers series as well. In those days I was always on the alert for movies that would meet my criteria. Nowadays I don’t watch TV (I’ve lost interest in most streaming shows I’ve tried) and very few movies, so my antennae aren’t especially tuned to that now, and the young guys have gotten older (and even matured). I don’t know if “good guys” are holding their own in the modern media or not (but it’s always bracing to watch The Critical Drinker on YouTube take apart the latest movies and shows.

    I have to admit that there are things that could be explored in the “This is the way” Mandalorian series. I will say that the movie “Copenhagen” about what may have gone on in the 1943 meeting in that city between quantum physics pioneers Werner Heisenberg (Daniel Craig) and Niels Bohr (Stephen Rea) was incredibly captivating. Too talky, and likely too intense, for a young audience unused to wrestling with nuance, but still very visceral and dramatic in its own way. I’d love to do a breakdown of it sometime on the “fusion” of science, morality, and ethics – and especially in the way we decide “good” guys and “bad” guys.

  5. Not judging a book by its cover, just imagining the project would have been cast differently if it had been a sitcom episode.

    LOL! Got it!

  6. I listened to the Beeb’s _In Our Time_ podcast this AM. Host & two academic historians, one male, one female, discussing the rule & legacy of the Athenian politician & poet Solon. At one point they discussed Solon’s granting of citizenship to all Athenians other than women & slaves. The female historian then explained how Solon had improved Athens by inviting “crafts people” to settle there.
    Now this academic knew that none of the people invited by Solon to immigrate to Athens were women. It would be difficult to imagine a class of people more subjugated than Athenian women. They literally had no freedom outside of the home, and in the home were subject to the absolute rule of their husband or a male relative.
    So the people invited to immigrate to Athens were “craftsmen,” not “craft people.” As a reasonably well read person, this retconning of the past & the mangling of language to fit woke sensibilities is infuriating.

  7. Speaking of managing language; SpaceX described the terminus of today’s launch as a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”. Not since the Pentagon coined the phrase “a vertical predawn insertion” have i enjoyed a euphemistic turn of phrase. Although I believe the SpaceX quote originated in the 60s space program.

  8. That might be Musk’s sense of humor, Mr. Bodine. He enjoys the silly use of language. I think he named one of his recovery ships “Of Course I still Love You.” Musk made the tip of his Starship rocket pointier as a riff on a movie where an evil dictator redesigned his world-killing missile to have a pointier tip.

  9. Interesting question: Kim Potter, the Brooklyn Center cop who shot (accidentally) Duante Wright will be released on Monday after spending 16 months in prison for manslaughter. Do you think that Potter would have received the same sentence if the circumstances were the same, but the person she shot had been white or Asian?

  10. Pig, indeed, RUD is an old term. See interview with Musk in March – he expected 50% success rate from the launch and 100% success in gathering data to correct mistakes and make sure next launch will have a higher success rate.

  11. This rocket is a prototype, and the booster has never flown before (let alone with Starship on top!) so this attempt was highly likely to fail, but what Musk is doing in Boca Chica is incredible. Starship is as important as the jet airliner, the train or the Model T; bringing mass transit to space.

    Given he already has 5 more ships lined up to fly after this, he is highly likely to eventually succeed, but getting the worlds largest, most powerful rocket, the most advanced and efficient engines, and the first fully reusable rocket into space will be some achievement.

  12. When Feynman released his report on the Challenger explosion, he noted that while NASA engineers put the chance of a booster failure at 1/10,000, the Engineers who actually built the boosters put the chance of booster failure at 1/100.
    Every spacefaring nation has tried to make a reusable launch system. It’s the only way to significantly reduce cost of launch to orbit. Good luck to Musk, but it is a very difficult problem to solve. The space craft is under highest stress and making the most intense use of complex technology during liftoff and reentry, and those are the points where you can’t abort and try to assess and fix a problem.
    It was not coincidence that one space shuttle failed on launch and one failed on reentry.

  13. The rocket cleared the pad and reached an altitude of 39 kilometers. Knowledgeable observers understood well that this alone (the fact that the rocket cleared the multi-billion dollar “Stage Zero” launch and capture tower) was hugely important (and ensured that another test will be possible within the next three to six months).

    Analysis from reputable (and long-time) observers of Starship development have suggested that, based on their observations of this booster’s behavior, the problems began when a hydraulic power unit near the base of the booster exploded.

    Note: The HPU was designed to pressurize systems that are used to drive gimbal drives that can redirect rocket exhaust. More recent versions of the Starship booster and Starship will not use hydraulic gimballing systems, relying instead on electrically driven equipment.

    That may not explain why the second stage failed to separate… but we’ll likely hear about this in the coming days or weeks.

  14. Back to the subject, it’s struck me for a while that when you (Col. Grossman being quoted here I think) suppress the masculine traits of the majority of men, what you’ve implicitly done is to make the rest of society defenseless against that portion of men who do not adhere to social norms–e.g. the sociopaths we call criminals.

    Gosh, why is it that places that denigrate traditional manhood like big cities have such problems with crime? Total mystery, I tell you.

  15. Bikebubba, Andrew Doyle says that the number of male convicts who have been found guilty of sexual assault are highly more likely to claim that they are really women & so should be sent to a women’s prison. This means that either they are lying or that transexuals are frequently people who sexually assault women.

  16. BTW, stage separation is usually done with explosive bolts, because explosive bolts are an extremely reliable technology. The forensic report on today’s Starship failure would make for an interesting read. If they used explosive bolts the problem must be a failure of the system designed to fire the explosive bolts or mechanical binding. I am guessing the former.
    FYI, I have a BS Space Studies. Never looked especially at SpaceX, my special area of study was the history of Eastern European aerospace.

  17. UMMP; you could say any number of things due to that, eh? Start with the fact that rapists are the least manly of all men, and then what a lot of us have contemplated; maybe the taxpayer ought to provide bottom surgery for convicted rapists, especially those who want to go into womens’ prisons. Ideally without anesthesia and administered by the loved ones of the victims.

    Seriously to the point, I saw a bit about how “trans” men seem to be about six times as likely as other men to commit rape (British data). I’m guessing that’s really mostly about wanting to be protected from brutal male prisons and possibly wanting to play “The Dating Game” in the ladies’ prisons. I’m guessing that you’ll find “trans identifiers” overrepresented in other felonies as well.

  18. I’ve read that there is a game where a biological male prisoner, assigned to a female prison, works a deal with a biological female for her to become pregnant and have a child. The female then sues the state for allowing this to happen. This is literally called the “million dollar baby” scam by inmates.

  19. Walking away from his Berkeley horse while his ER nurse daughter moaned in extacy, and dripping sweat, rAT squeaked: “This rocket is a prototype, and the booster has never flown before (let alone with Starship on top!) so this attempt was highly likely to fail”

    Oh really? And how the fuck would you know, rAT?

    Where did you get your PhD in Engineering and Rocket science?

    Tia rAT!

  20. BTW, rAT.

    AIUMMP can speak authoritatively on this subject, because he once gave me a tour of his former place of work….A WORLD FUCKING CLASS OBSERVATORY.

    Where do you work, rAT?

  21. UMMP, I’m guessing that prisons aren’t exactly keen on figuring out what percentage of their “trans” inmates are playing “The Dating Game”, and when “Million Dollar Baby” schemes come up, I’m guessing they don’t run DNA tests to figure out who the father is and punish him, do they?

    Thanks for the link as well. High rates of both rape and murder among “trans” inmates–gosh, who wouldn’t want to be in the next cell over and spend time with them during recreation hours? Idiocy.

  22. BB, I think that homosexuality, transexuality, and other things that used to be called sexual disfunctions are markers for mental disorders. This is all population level stuff, so it doesn’t mean that every homosexual has a disordered mind, at least no more disordered than anyone else.
    This is the same way we should view heterosexual sexual disfunction. Addiction to porn, seeking sex outside of marriage, etc., is disfunctional.
    My POV is Aristotelian & Christian. Things have a natural purpose. We are all sinners and nearly all of us deviate from that purpose. We are all broken. There is a huge difference between celebrating that brokeness and regretting it.

  23. I think this is on topic.
    I am a book lover. I especially like textbooks. Why? Because when you want to learn something, get a frikkin’ textbook.
    I have noticed that there is a huge difference, in almost every academic field, between text books published 1968 and earlier and textbooks published 1969 & later. For example, if you look at a geology textbook pre 1969. the science is dead on, but the book is written from the POV that an important part of geology is resource extraction. After 1969 geology textbooks leaned heavily into environmentalism. So did physics textbooks. So did biology textbooks.
    My point is that science doesn’t change that fast. You know what changes that fast? Popular culture. Compare television programs, pop music,films, etc., from 1965 and 1970 and you can see how fast the culture changed.
    science,when it is used as a narrative, is not about the natural world, it is about pop culture.

  24. Amen on old textbooks. My kids are all keen on the newest and greatest from the interwebs, but there is something comforting about holding a book that was printed a century or more ago and being able to say “the progressives won’t be able to mess around with this as long as it’s in my hands.”

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