>On Apr 13, 2011, at 4:22 PM, John Wesley wrote:
>
> > ...but there's a "surplus" population of unattached males, a factor
> regarded as
> > undesireable for whatever reason...
>
>Because they're crude & icky?
I was trying to figure out what was meant by this surplus population of unattached males seen as "undesirable". What makes them undesirable? I assumed that the problem was that they were un- or underemployed because the economy is, ostensibly, favoring work traditionally done by women and/or low-wage service work, while all the good, formerly male-dominated jobs (e.g., unionized factory work, etc.) are in decline, deskilled, shipped overseas, whatever.
Who are the crude & icky? The dudes featured in Judd Apatow flicks?
Dwayne and I discussed this last year. I get the sense that the effort in Apatow flicks is to resurrect the crude and icky male in the service of neo-liberalism:
At 05:30 PM 1/8/2010, Dwayne Monroe wrote:
>Just as H'wood's feminism -- represented in pop culture artifacts as
>the slovenly, clueless guy vs. the relentlessly organized, robotically
>perfect woman -- is one example of the feminism of fools.
shag wrote: I'm not so sure it's feminism as an old cultural trope that has been increasingly exploited:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bringing_Up_Father>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bringing_Up_Father
Which naturally (!) brings us to Judd Apatow's work which subverts pop-culture feminism and puts men back on top in the same way as the colonialist fantasy running throughout Avatar: <http://io9.com/5422666/when-will-white-people-stop-making-movies-like-avatar>http://io9.com/5422666/when-will-white-people-stop-making-movies-like-avatar
In Apatow's case, there's the slovenly clueless guy and the perfect woman who, like Sully, is missing something - alienated, lonely, loveless. She is redeemed by the fuck up. Against her "better," class striving judgment, she ends up hooking up with the guy in one way or another. He civilizes and humanizes her in the same way. She "goes native" and loosens up a bit, learns to let go, learns to lower her standards to find the right guy there all along: the fuck up.
The fantasy here is that it's the poor fuck up white guy who was, like the Native Americans in Dances With Wolves, actually oppressed: barred from perfect beautiful women because of their fuckup ways.
As you say, it's an anti-capitalism, anti-striving uppermiddle class culture of fools. shag
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)