Women can get away with certain things that men cannot. We still see women slapping men on television all the time. It's depicted as sexy, justifiable and/or funny. We assume that Paddoboy is being condescending or flirtatious because he's a man.
There is always some mystery about what to say when an argument appears to be predicated on alternative history not evident in the record. Consider this:
Why is this form of violence "depicted as sexy, justifiable and/or funny"?
There is a marketplace story I sometimes recall°, about a movie scene two pudgy cops in towels talking about sex toys and inadequate wives. One reason for mentioning it is simply that the subject came up, but what makes it stand out is the history. Over twenty-five years later, a masculinist celebrity scholar dug himself a hole with the idea of
enforced monogamy, and what he walked himself back to in a subsequent post blogged on his home domain, was not a rule of law thing, but customary shaming of women against anything else. It is one thing to see men complaining about men getting their way, and waxing nostalgic would be one thing, but as a larger phenomenon, it's not just psychologically distressed masculinists requiring an inchoate ahistorical alternative by which women have always been in charge. And, honestly, I've yet to find the peer-reviewed historical paper on subsumption as a feminist conspiracy to enslave men, so, if anyone happens to know where it is, that would be a great example for trying to understand how this weird, alternative cuckstory works. But in my lifetime, the range of conservative family values in American Christianist society included to marrying well as a good woman's duty; indeed, that's part of what brings men to happy hour lamentations, or locker room talk, about everything wrong with their wives. My lifetime also includes men bitterly complaining about golddiggers, and the thing about that was the sight of pathetic men complaining about men getting their way. The celeb scholar appealing to enforced monogamy is not unaware of such history, having also lived through it.
Historical niche consideration: It is actually observable that political cooperation between conservative Christians and so-called fiscal conservatives created particular capitalistic outcomes frustrating conservative Christian values; about
a year ago↱, I observed:
• Think back. There's an old song called "Lorelei", by Styx, and it's about unmarried cohabitation. Living with an unmarried heterosexual partner was controversial in the day, but that one-bedroom apartment requiring thirty-eight and a quarter per hour, these days, is much more likely to be shared by two people. There's a joke about Republicans, in there, if you think about it.
That seemingly trivial scrap is not irrelevant. It's one thing if James Brown tells us, "It's a man's man's man's world, but it wouldn't be nothin' without a woman or a girl", does it mean the same thing as when Etta or Johnette remind? Because, as Maurice Chevalier once explained, thank heaven for little girls, because without them, what would little boys do. And I could go on with music; and if I recall there actually is a recording of "Lorelei" that includes the obvious masturbation joke, it can seem nearly an abysmal descent over the course of a decade. Pop music generally tumbled into and through a countercultural pretense of repressed romance of doing it, and doing everything, down in a dark place no one knows, which sounds like begging for anal, but such is the market of hearthrob-vampires in love, when beauty had her way, with her hooks in your face.
Some of my favorite music from the Eighties just slays me, today. Don't get me started, for instance, on Tommy Shaw's solo albums from the period, because the literary analysis is a neurotic disaster including an answering-machine message song about drunkenly harassing a woman, the tale of the young girl who dutifully hides in her little girl world; and this really weirdly predatory bit in which he tries to treat some totem of a mean, snotty, self-aware heartbreaker of a privileged woman as some manner of pretended equal, and it comes off as just menacing. And this was before the rise of the enlightened caveman; in his way, this was actually grasping after enlightenment and equality, yet remaining utterly trapped in masculine myth.
And if it's hard to justify the period when we objectified woman, raising them as idols, as we sought their equal station within within our own myth and interest, the point is not to plead our failure to have learned how to think that part through, but, instead, remind that the historical narrative by which the hedonism of the Eighties were sexually liberating for women remains controversial in the outlooks of some influential dependents of tradition. That is to say, the narrative we see looking at the most apparent pop culture iterations and influences of the time range, for women, into the unhealthy and even downright dangerous°°. The actual historical narrative describing woman's sexually liberating benefit is, even today, often disdained as some manner of radicalism.
The comparative radicalism of that feminist historical narrative tells us something about the standards of comparison. The bad joke about men becoming feminists because they think it means they'll get laid more by liberated women isn't thin air. When the Christianist censors panicked about Madonna, society did not respond by attending a feminist critique, but, rather, raising masculine expectation of gettin' some. That is, actual historical narrative, which coincides with a a generally feminist-intersectional narrative, describing female benefit of sexual liberation within a hedonistic pop culture trend in the 1980s and into the '90s, is only radical compared to certain masculine needs within the traditionalist framework.
These days, we see similar traditionalist needs in frontline transphobic arguments, and while, sure, there is much to say about that, the underlying point is that traditional structures and standards of marketplace measurement have long treated women poorly and sought their disempowerment. Your proposition—
"Women can get away with certain things that men cannot. We still see women slapping men on television all the time. It's depicted as sexy, justifiable and/or funny."
—occurs within that framework. That is to say, as a general question, the depiction of sexy, funny, or as you include, justifiable, still occurs within that masculine-sympathetic framework. Whether and how a given act of violence is justifiable is a narrative question, and that remains true even within smaller spheres of influence where the intersectional narrative might from time to time prevail.
As a question of female privilege, getting away with things men cannot, the basic measurement and comparison is pretty apparent: Compared to men, according to a man's need in a man's world according to a man's expectations per a man's definitions.
The mystery about these alternative historical experiences is that we don't really know what they are. We only get small glimpses according to narrative priorities of masculine complaint.
Nor is all that separate from the question of whether
"we assume that Paddoboy is being condescending or flirtatious because he’s a man". We can, of course, suggest there is more to it than assuming, but toward your expression of the circumstance part of the affirmative is that of course we do because that is the station assigned by the customary scheme within which he stakes his own conduct and standard of assessment.
It's as if your four-sentence post does not recognize history, yet everything about it comes around to masculine influence and interest.
Again, are making the point, and multivalently, this time.
____________________
Notes:
° 1↗, 2↗, 3↗, 4↗; the summary juxtaposition for 5↗:
It's why I do the Candy-Belushi bit, which is about the lightest touch I can give it. Two doughy cops wrapped in towels, glistening in a warm, moist locker room, discussing sex toys because the married one is distressed by his wife's lack of sexual passion and performance.
The more common version is a couple tired men at "happy hour", commiserating over how their wives are cold-fish nags raising the kids wrong.
°° It's not like the market ever really stopped. I remember a Canadian band that had a hit song about being an adult, and it was very easy to sympathize with the masculine angst, but these years later, those albums can be agonizing experiences.
