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Friday, April 13, 2007
Rebecca Hagelin :: Townhall.com Columnist
Imus, Males and the "PC" Discrimination
by Rebecca Hagelin
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Are Barack Obama's friends -- like Bill Ayers -- legitimate political issues?

Don Imus could have saved himself a lot of trouble.

Instead of insulting the superstar black women's basketball players at Rutgers University, he should have told his listeners that white males are idiots who do nothing but drink beer, ogle women and scratch themselves. That way, rather than hearing himself rightly denounced for his rude, discriminatory remarks, he would have heard … nothing.

Seriously, is there any group you can attack with more impunity than males --particularly white males?

Here's how I put it during a recent appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor":

"Our boys are being abused by the media in a different way ... All you have to do is turn on the TV for 30 minutes and tell me how men and dads are portrayed -- as ignorant and stupid and lazy. The white, Anglo-Saxon male, the young teenage guy, is probably the most discriminated against kid on the face of the earth right now."

Although my comments on the subject were brief, this simple observation about how badly today's males are treated garnered a huge reaction. E-mail poured in. Viewer after viewer thanked me for defending just about the only group it's "PC" to diss. (Another frequent target: conservative Christians.)

A typical reaction from one father was this: "Thank you for your courage. It touches my heart to hear someone speak on our behalf."

I obviously touched a raw nerve. Viewers felt strongly enough to leave their TV sets, log on to their computers and search for my e-mail address to share their feelings.

A college student wrote: "You are absolutely right that men are being portrayed as idiots on TV. It's sad in my college (which is largely female-dominated) how poor of a rap men get. Granted, some men deserve what they get, and I have nothing against women, but for young men like me who are trying to uphold the values of chivalry, it can be very degrading."

Another viewer, a self-described "fed-up father of three boys," said he was "delighted to hear someone echo my longstanding observation that fathers these days are almost universally ridiculed by the media. It's been years since I've seen a humorous TV commercial where the joke is on the woman, for example."

How can this be? For one thing, there's a lot of money to be made from portraying males so contemptuously. One of the best videos I've ever seen, the Merchants of Cool (produced by PBS) carefully documents why the modern media robs young males of their dignity. As I note in my book, Home Invasion, the marketing industry, led by MTV, deliberately cultivates a grotesque male image known as a "mook" -- their definition of modern teen boys:

"They are wilder and bolder and ruder and cruder than the average teen boy, but they are designed to keep our sons hyper and addicted to watching the aberrant behavior so that ever more ads can be pushed their way. They are the obnoxious pro wrestlers, the death-defying stars of the Jackass TV show, and the guys on MTV's Spring Break specials belching and dancing crazily with scantily clad women they met ten minutes earlier."

Sadly, the tentacles of radical feminist thought are poisoning the image of groups of males in different ways. If you watch a few commercials or sit-coms, you'll see that dads are sloppy dolts who are always the last to know anything. Where's the outrage? If you listen to the often foul and violent rap and hip-hop music of today, you'll hear that young black and Hispanic men are hate-filled, selfish bigots who degrade women for fun. Where's the outrage? If you're a father-to-be, your preborn baby can be legally killed without your knowledge, much less your consent. For crying out loud, where is the outrage? Continued...

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About The Author

Rebecca Hagelin, a vice president of The Heritage Foundation is the author of Home Invasion: Protecting Your Family in a Culture that's Gone Stark Raving Mad and runs the Web site HomeInvasion.org.

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Subject: Don't watch TV
I have read many of these posts and I have to say
that I don't know what many of them are talking
about. What little I have seen on TV is not complimentary to anyone as far as I can tell.

This Imus thing seems to be immensely popular on
Town Hall. And apparently the general consensus
is that he is a liberal - or at least the liberals loved him. Again, I have never seen him. I don't know.

But what I do know is that he was dumped. I'm
not pretending that it was not a mainly self-
serving move. Whichever channel hired him did
not want to lose advertisers and so they gave him
the boot. To my dying day I will not be able to
figure out why Rush Limbaugh still manages to
survive. He has been twenty plus+ years of
negativity, to put it politely, and he is still
there. I can only hope that this is finally
the beginning of the end for him.

I could say the same thing about Ann Coulter. But she is such a lightweight, I am not sure that
her presence on the scene makes much difference.

Didn't we have
Didn't we have this same discussion several decades ago? About June Cleaver doing the ironing in pearls and high heels, Sanford & Son, etc. etc?

As I recall, when movies/TV reined in all the trivializing, stereotypic roles they were using for blacks, Mexicans, women of all races, we ended up with better programming.

What a concept: improve quality by dropping the BS. I wonder if it'd work again?
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