I wrote this a few years ago, so excuse the dated references here and there.


Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?
During the recent Celebrity Big Brother International Incident, Dirk Benedict contended that his armed-vigilante kids’ show The A-Team was the last truly masculine TV series, featuring Real Men unashamedly indulging in Real Man activities like building things and blowing other things up, without need of female approval. ‘And women loved to see that’ he reckoned.

Benedict also recently said of Battlestar Galactica ‘you can't have a character like Starbuck today -- a cigar-smoking, drinking, womanizing lovable scoundrel. The feminist movement got rid of those guys.’ In the new series of Battlestar Galactica, Starbuck is female.

And why not? Women have been improbably kicking butt on the small screen since Emma Peel and if that makes the little poppets feel empowered where’s the harm? It’s not like The A-Team was grittily realistic in the first place.

Feminist Plot

But as BBC’s ‘Life On Mars’ and ‘Beefcake – A Very British Sex Symbol’ both illustrate, the TV tough guy is a rare beast today, and the charming rogue all but extinct. So is Benedict just a bitter old has-been cranky that the playing field is now even, or could he possibly be a bitter old has-been who’s onto something? Where have all the cowboys gone? Has a feminist plot to banish everything fearlessly macho from our screens brainwashed a generation of boys into becoming subservient, spineless *****-men? And whatever happened to the other guy out of Battlestar Galactica?

Certainly the TV screens of yesteryear were awash with enough testosterone to kill a horse. The Professionals, The Sweeney, The Knight Rider The Magnum, their lives a rich tapestry of solving mysteries, destroying property, having moustaches, women, being the unknown stuntman that made Eastwood look so fine, and women. It was an age of innocence and amiable violence.

But this glorious Machotopia was doomed. Women were not best pleased with how they were being treated on TV, or anywhere else much, and invented Girl Power (or feminism as it was then known). Now some might say that as television was invented by a man, women should go make their own viewing device. Instead, out of a mix of guilt, fair-play, and hope for a little peace and quiet, men agreed to try this ‘New Man’ idea that was going around.

Satan

As the Patriarchy was a-crumbling, the homoeroticism of The Professionals and its kind were laid bare by The Bull****ters, Ben Elton hectored men to be more sensitive and proud of their ‘fartyness’ and comics who dared suggest that women might not be made of sugar and spice, like Sam Kinnison or Jerry Sadowitz, were shamed as misogynists.

Cheers forced unreconstructed alpha male Sam to deal with the independent and liberated Diane, and later his intellectual and sensitive rival Fraser. The battle seemed unwinnable all round. After years written as a happy bachelor, new-fangled political correctness meant Sam eventually learned his womanizing was a mental illness. Diane fared no better and ended up an unfulfilled Hollywood hack. Fraser got his own show.

Borderline Retarded

Friends’ Ross and Chandler reflected 90’s man as mostly confused and emasculated, and Ross even had a symbolically lesbian ex-wife. Only the borderline-retarded Joey was allowed to be confident with women.

Meanwhile in the real world, many women were suffering buyer’s remorse. Somehow the old-fashioned Real Man (or even the ‘Bad Boy’) seemed more exciting and challenging than the eager-to-please new model. To quote George from Seinfeld ‘"She thinks I'm a nice guy. Women always think I'm nice. But women don't want nice. Why is nice bad? What kind of a sick society are we living in when nice is bad?"

See also South Park when Satan is torn between Nice Guy Chris and Bad Boy Saddam Hussein. Like Satan, the modern woman just can’t decide what she wants. Unlike Satan, the modern woman has invested decades of effort nagging men to shape up, and she’s not about to throw it all down the drain because of one weeny-little unforeseen problemette. Consequently, she has decided not to disseminate her findings with modern man, who can figure it out on his own if he’s so bloody clever.


Mockney geezer-wagon

The Loaded-reading ‘New Lad’ defied female authority by acting like a naughty boy, but attempts to ride the post-Lock, Stock mockney geezer-wagon into the nation’s living room with an execrable tv adaptation, alongside reheated versions of The Professionals and Minder, failed to ignite much interest. At least you could get away with calling women ‘birds’ again, providing as it was a bit ironic or you were working-class and hadn’t noticed feminism much anyway.

Today, the fate of the man unable to define himself outside of the creaking feminist model is clearest between programmes. It’s here that women punish and humiliate the weak and pathetic Un-Men, bumbling simpletons laughed at by mother and child alike, of use only to parrot what She Who Wears The Trousers has already decided about the household finances and bringing joy only when he falls down the stairs or impales himself on a rake.

The archetype of this beaten generation of men is the lanky blond guy from My Family, whose BT ads chronicle a bleak life of humiliation, fear and best man speeches that inexplicably turn ugly, like Kafka with some stuff about wireless internet access thrown in.

Cathartic Mass Orgy

Two current ads buck the trend though. In the Coke Zero ad a mob of confident young chaps rail against sugary pop, jobs, and controlling womenfolk in a cathartic mass orgy of maleness (women presumably banned from the streets in this cola-based fantasy world).Meanwhile Burger King’s anti-‘chick-food’ (m)anthem, is even more proud and atavistic. Are men, through the medium of junk-food commercials, reclaiming masculinity from the false dichotomy of Nice Guy/Bad Boy? And will the media arm of the TwoRonniesian Matriarx allow this to happen?

For a clue, lets go back to Celebrity BB. During the national shame-fest over Shetty’s persecution, there was one issue that went unexamined in the media - that as in previous series it was the females that proved incapable of playing nice for two minutes without reverting to playground bitchiness and bullying. Where were the Real Men then, unafraid to metaphorically put the spoiled brat that is Modern Woman over their collective knee and give her an allegorical spanking? As the unemployed Face-Man might say, the feminist movement got rid of those guys.