Is It Okay to Like Something That Is Sexist But Only Kind of Because It's a Joke?

One thing that made me sad while watching Miss Representation was the inclusion of a few clips from Wedding Crashers in its montages of sexist depictions of women in movies. Why? I liked the movie, and having to see it as part of a problem that harms everyone in our society made me feel less good about that. However, this is not going to be a blog about the faults and virtues of Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson: this is about BroScience.

BroScienceLife is a youtube channel dedicated mostly to humorously giving advice on gym-related things for men. If you like crude male humor and lots of gun sound effects or want to understand this post, I recommend you watch some of the videos. They're all basically the same, and I find almost all of them funny. However, none of them are helping to fight harmful gender stereotypes in society.

In keeping with the timeless tradition, everything BroScience determines to be bad is also womanly, as nothing could be worse than to be less of a masculine man, and virtue and muscle building are synonymous. Just as the media tells men that women are pretty objects, BroScience tells men how to become objects that appeal to other objects. However, it's all satirical--kind of.

While BroScience videos may give advice to gym-goers, their actual purpose is to be funny. While some of the tips may be useful (as a non gym-goer I have no idea) the majority are ridiculous, or at least not advice the vast majority of people would ever take. Still, the channel never acknowledges that it is a joke and its creator presents himself as a stereotypical gym bro--I think in the end it does support the problematic confines media pushes men and women into.

The normal reaction when something you like, such as BroScienceLife or Wedding Crashers, shows itself to be somehow not good on a societal level is to display enlightened false consciousness--the "I know it's bad but I still like it" approach. This attitude is all over the place, and I think it is part of the reason that the way the media treats gender roles is still so bad. When lots of things that are funny, entertaining, interesting, etc are also sexist, we tend to emphasize the positive qualities, and thus there is no pressure to change because as long as you can make 'em laugh you'll be fine. This phenomenon is a very hard one to break; telling people to not watch things they would enjoy does not generally go over well.

Is BroScienceLife a major contributor to the problems in our society? I can pretty confidently say no. Is it doing a little bit of harm? Harder to say, but I would lean towards yes. Those questions tend to not be too hard to answer, but the third--do I still want to watch it?--and how we go about answering it is the key. I don't want to have to not watch things I like because they're sexist even though I know I probably should, and that attitude is part of what allows the problems discussed in Miss Representation to persist. Curse it all.