A crisis of masculinity - give me a break
The survey by British parenting site Netmums does make for interesting reading, with 93% of parents agreeing that the portrayal of dads in the media does not accurately reflect their contribution within their families, while almost half of those questioned said books, advertisements and programmes such as The Simpsons could make children believe dads are “useless”.
Frankly, I’m not sure what to make of it. Every other weekend there is an article regarding the apparently never-ending ‘crisis of masculinity’, alongside debate over absent fathers and the shortage of male role models.
The part about the media portrayal of dads is pretty hard to counter: Homer Simpson began as a bumbling parent with a short fuse but a good heart — he’s now a grotesque caricature of himself (yes, I know he’s a cartoon character) who should probably be arrested; Peter Griffin in Family Guy — drunken slob; soap opera fathers (bar Alf Stewart in Home and Away) — routinely flawed in myriad ways. Just yesterday, in a piece in The Atlantic on the children’s film Epic, Hugo Schwyzer asked why movies in this genre have tended to follow the trope of the “feisty kid and bumbling dad”, adding: “It’s only very recently that they’ve become benign fools — fools who are mocked by the world but saved by a daughter’s love.”
The list goes on. Mad Men’s Don Draper, the current TV alpha male, is an absentee dad and a full-time philanderer. Then again, it was the Sixties.
Even Peppa Pig’s father, Daddy Pig, is named as someone who could corrode a child’s positive image of their father. At this point I’m prompted to ask: Have the survey respondents ever watched the porcine patriarch in action?
Yes, he’s fat, and a bit of a know-it-all. There is his inability to read a map, although this is actually out of step with his job as a number-crunching physicist (or engineer, I can’t quite tell). But he is an excellent musician, a talented dancer, and a diver of Olympic standard, so it’s hardly all bad.
Plus, he regularly reads Peppa and George a bedtime story and allows them to use his tummy as a trampoline.
My two-year-old daughter laughs uproariously at my clumsiness, so much so that two of her favourite words are ‘fumble’ and ‘clumso’.
Will she grow up thinking I’m a buffoon because of my occasional pratfalls? Or because Daddy Pig likes eating too much cake? Hopefully neither.
It’s Father’s Day on Sunday, lads — let’s give ourselves a break.
