Stupid Men & Hot Women: TV

(I recently got push-polled in a good way. I regularly read feministing and they conducted a reader poll. A majority of the questions were about the new Community blogs area, an idea that many sites are now doing to capture the power of user-generated content. I had pretty much ignored this new development, but ended up adding the Community RSS feed to my Reader after the poll. I've been rewarded with at least one really interesting post per day [though, that is out of dozens of kind of 'meh' ones] and that's how I came across this post on a totally other blog. So, now to the meat)

First, it's true, all awesome women I know and love dream of being crotchety old ladies who don't have to conform to any expectations. I hope to do this myself, though sans cats.

And I definitely agree that TV tends to portray competent and responsible women as nags and killjoys, but I've spoken to a lot of men who feel stung by the "King of Queens" paradigm as well. After all, there are only a few kinds of men on sit-coms - shlubby dufuses and hapless pitiable man-whores tend to be the majority. Even the supposed everyman heros, like Ross on Friends or Ted on How I Met Your Mother are pretty annoying and lame. While I guess there may be some lazy idiots sitting around wondering when that hot babe of a wife they are entitled to is going to show up, most smart men I know are just as offended by the gender stereotypes as we are.

Makes you wonder who, exactly, they make these shows for anyway?