Contributors

Monday, April 01, 2013

Hallelujah!

I was very heartened to see this recent piece in the Atlantic about how our culture has finally shifted away from the "bumbling dad" stereotype. In many ways, we had become like the sex kittens and brain dead secretaries of the 1960s and 1970s.

I remember the old days, when the only media dad was a bumbling dad, flummoxed by diapers, mystified by breakfast cereals, as incompetent at managing a household as his wife was hyper-efficient. In sitcoms, and in the commercials that aired during sitcoms, Dad was comic relief; everyone knew that power in the home (economic power, especially) resided with Mom.

I have been lamenting this for years. It's such a stereotype, not simply of dads, but of all men that feeds the malaise that is the Michael Jordan Generation.

Now, though, it seems like things have changed.

Now, however, the marketers have realized their error, and dads—involved, caring, competent dads like me—are coming to the foreground. We see them with their daughters in car commercials, and with their daughters in other car commercials, and sometimes they even use Google! And not just to, you know, Google stuff. At last, we fathers have been recognized as an important demographic deserving of the attention of America's most creative capitalists.

The car commercial that comes to my mind is the one where the dad is telling his daughter, who is shown at age 6 or so, not to text while she drives. Suddenly, she is no longer 6 but 16. That's how dads really are...like Cliff Huxtable....not Benny Hill.

I really hope things stay this way. Men are not baboons who exist only to eat, watch sports and sleep on the couch while the wife does everything that requires competence.

3 comments:

Juris Imprudent said...

Can't say that I agree with everything David Stockman says here, but overall this is an excellent and thought-provoking piece. Read the whole thing, and discuss...

As the federal government and its central-bank sidekick, the Fed, have groped for one goal after another — smoothing out the business cycle, minimizing inflation and unemployment at the same time, rolling out a giant social insurance blanket, promoting homeownership, subsidizing medical care, propping up old industries (agriculture, automobiles) and fostering new ones (“clean” energy, biotechnology) and, above all, bailing out Wall Street — they have now succumbed to overload, overreach and outside capture by powerful interests. The modern Keynesian state is broke, paralyzed and mired in empty ritual incantations about stimulating “demand,” even as it fosters a mutant crony capitalism that periodically lavishes the top 1 percent with speculative windfalls.

Juris Imprudent said...

Two more links that are painfully worthwhile...

Stockton bankruptcy is ugly and only going to get uglier. The city did in fact win permission to enter bankruptcy.

Some people don't know what insurance is and unfortunately they seem to be in charge of important stuff in the govt.

Nope, going to be three not two... Sameulson is always worthwhile.

Juris Imprudent said...

Forgot about this one where apparently Team Obama believes they just need to market the insurance mandate better.

There is a good insight in there - nearly half of the uninsured are "young & healthy" and don't really need health insurance. But the health insurance scheme wants their money.

So M, there is plenty of good discussion to be had. I bet you'd rather post a stupid cartoon or boring snark about Republicans.