What really kills me about that scene from She-Hulk
Yesterday I posted this clip from She-Hulk:
Pray for me as I make it through this pic.twitter.com/REJaur21vZ
— E (@ElijahSchaffer) August 19, 2022
Today, I saw this person defending it.
The scene where Jen explains how she’s able to control her anger was easily my favorite moment of this episode. As a man it’s something I didn’t think about.
Also makes me appreciate how this show was was written & directed by women. #SheHulk pic.twitter.com/OO5uOhslVL
— Matt Ramos (@therealsupes) August 18, 2022
What really gets to me is just how tone deaf this is to what reality is actually like.
Modern society and pop culture doesn’t acknowledge just how in control Western men are of their anger or the state of provocation there is for men.
Look around the world outside of Western culture nations and see just how much violence there is. Honor killings, rape, murder, settling scores, it’s rampant. Look at cultures were families feud with lethal force over minor insults. Where men throw acid in people’s faces over slights to their honor.
That doesn’t exist in mainstream Western society. And where it does exist in Western nations, it does on the fringes in subcultures bereft of Western values.
If Western men were as not in control of their anger as they were, parking lot attendants and coworkers who microwave fish in the break room would have a 100% fatality rate.
Western dignity culture is the most peaceful society every evolved, and we sound celebtate that. The people who wrote that line live in a world where they assume the natural state of man is a peaceful eden and not nasty, brutish, and short.
These sort of speech is the zenith of unacknowledged privilege.
She’s a lawyer who goes to work in the safety and comfort of a metropolitan city.
She doesn’t have to worry about freezing in winter or starving because there is a drought. She lives in comfort because hard men built the city, farm the fields, drill for oil, mine for coal, and make a comfortable life doing paperwork possible.
But society never acknowledges the effort of those men or thanks them for what they did.
It’s always “men are trash” from people who can keep the temperature in their home at their desired level by turning a knob, turning on a light by the flip of a switch, and get clean water out of a tap, made possible by jobs that are 90% percent men.
As for the relationship between the sexes, I’m sorry that some rando on the street cat called She-Hulk. That sucks.
But pop culture never acknowledges the state of what it’s like for men.
In a move or TV show, the guy who says “I don’t date fatties” is ALWAYS the asshole. It was an actual arc in Sex and the City where a girl says (paraphrasing) “he’s a great guy, I love him, but his dick is too small so I broke up with him.” And her friends were all “you go girl, know what makes you happy.”
The first half of Big Bang Theory was a bunch if scientists and engineers with successful careers in academia and research being constantly told they were unworthy of love because they were short and nerdy.
Pop culture accepts the harsh abuse of men at the hands of women that cuts to a man’s core and stri0s him if his dignity.
We’re coming up on 40 years of sitcoms where hubby/dad is an absolute, bumbling, incapable moron.
This degeneration of men in the pop culture is an extension of the degeneration of men in broader society.
I read an article about how the economy gone has from manufacturing and production to HR and people management. HR and management salaries are higher than technical, both individually and overall. Companies spend more on make work bullshit than people who actually do stuff.
Those make work soft jobs are more frequently jobs for women or beta males. The traditionally manly men are being made obsolete. What’s worse is the make work jobs are an impediment to actual work, e.g. making guys drilling for oil go through DE&I training.
We’ve actually taken the male energy that once built this country and stuck it on the back burner and called it obsolete, and then we wonder why men have such a problem when they have no outlet for their energy.
100 years ago: “You’re gonna build the NYC skyline out of iron, throwing red hot rivets at each other, 1000 feet up, with no safety gear.”
60 years ago: “You’re going to build the arsenal of democracy, the highest quality of life the middle-class has ever seen, and hold communism at bay.”
Today: “You’re gonna watch this PowerPoint by some obese feminist about how toxic you are, then have HR and Compliance micromanage your shit to death.”
It is no wonder why the two leading causes of death for men under 50 is overdose and suicide. Men are failing out of society that for decades has told them they are worthless, an economy that has made them obsolete, and a pop culture that insults them constantly.
But She-Hulk is the master at controlling her anger, because, as a high dollar attorney, when she asks her car service to stop at the bodega, between driving her from her corner office to her luxury condo, some guy tells her she’d look nicer if she smiled, because she’s an oppressed woman.