Then there was "Sex in the City", a show that occurred in prime time and men were falling all over themselves telling women how awful the show was. (A show that was created by a man.) There were some elements of it based on how women behave but the whole 'Mr Big' thing was nonsense. Women may have a man they are interested in for awhile but they tend to move on pretty quickly when things don't work out. Of course not every woman will, but I am generalizing. Anyway, the show was directed at women and men just couldn't handle there being a show about women for women. Despite how many hours of TV is devoted pretty much exclusively to men, think sports - and how many channels are devoted to sports - and how many kinds of sports are there? Yes some women like sports because often the men they like like sports.
Women seldom complain about how much male TV is directed at men, whether it is action movies or general prime TV, women just are expected to enjoy the primary culture, mass media TV and they do so mainly without question. This is similar to other cultures, cable channels devoted to Asian, hispanic, and black american culture. These shows seldom make it onto white western male channels.
We already know if a woman to be considered a love interest she must be younger than 30, typically, and fit the usual physical requirements. Older women seldom qualify as the male fantasy love interest - because face it guys, the media is selling you the fantasy that the hero is a cypher for you and this is the dream girl you are going to get when you defeat the bad guys.
And for the most part, the media has destroyed what passes for female culture. Indeed it destroys subcultures - but we also knew that as we've seen native cultures destroyed in the wake of western culture.
But another more insidious aspect to the primary culture, as we know, demonizes outsiders, blacks, LGBTQ+, native Americans, and women.
If you see an article talking about Donald Trumps crazy supporters, the article will almost always have a picture of a woman on it, for example. The media loves crazy women, think about how crazy Michelle Bachmann's eyes were in the previous primaries. Or women are just labelled as crazy in general. When in reality women aren't necessarily crazy they are angry when men don't want them to be. And women go along with this because they think the media is acting on their behalf and is being representational but it is not.
And if women aren't being portrayed as being crazy, they are portrayed as completely facile. I still have no idea why that Kardashian woman is famous or the media's previous obsession with everything about Paris Hilton, and then they become no one.
But even more insidious is the need for more women to go to prison because the prison industrial complex must be fed and women are very much under represented in the prison system so women have been deliberately painted as more evil by the media so we won't flinch when we find out more and more women are being sent to jail and given harsher sentences. The best vehicle for painting women as evil are murder channels (which is what I call them) and they typically have women telling you how bad the women are. One such show is Deadly Women on Investigation Discovery. I quite like how completely over the top this show is and it often has me laughing. It has to draw on female murderers from several continents and from the past 100 years or so to be able to get the quotient of female murderers to make it's slim season.
On one episode they talk about a daughter who's boyfriend killed her mother and the daughter was painted as the truly evil one because 'she stepped over the corpse of her mother'. A police detective came on saying how he doesn't know how anyone could do anything so heinous as stepping over the corpse of their mother - I can only imagine the cop had lived an extremely sheltered life - the boyfriend who actually did the killing was less evil than the girl who 'stepped over' the corpse? I guess the cop missed Hitler and the holocaust and I don't know how many serial murderers...
Then there was this woman who complained about having her NYE ruined by someone having a heart attack. Why this is even covered I have no idea - although it is sad anyone would feel this way about another person dying, it is hardly news worthy especially when you consider Gary Southern (who?) who is a guy who poisoned the WV water supply with chemicals used in fracking. Or the lawyers who play legal football over Fukushima or over the death of a Walmart employee or the people governors of red states who let people die waiting for transplants because it cost too much or the CEOs of health insurance corporations who let people die by denying coverage for health care or...
The media has been eroding any power women have by telling us how evil women are and this has worked in the best interests of republicans because now when anyone says something outlandish about Hillary Clinton everyone, even left leaning voters, believe it's true.
Because mature, intelligent women who we should take seriously do not exist on TV.
Of course the media is really on the side of corporations, as we all saw with all those jokes about McDonalds being sued by a little old lady for spilling coffee on herself. Everyone was laughing about outrageous lawsuits. And if you were laughing about it, then you too were duped by the media because they are definitely on the side of corporations, and who owns corporations - men, rich white men and who runs those corporations - white men.
Why would women be seen as problematic for white men in corporations? Because women are often thought of as more ethical in business. This may be why there was such a propaganda campaign against Clinton in 2008, no one likes rocking the status quo. And we are used to the sweet little lies men running for office tell us. (Do people really think Sanders stands a chance in hell of getting his agenda met without massive corporate backlash? Meanwhile I rather suspect Clinton will not promise anything she doesn't think she could actually get delivered. Can you imagine the haranguing she'd get if she fails to deliver?)
Note that Walmart waged a war against paying a fine for letting its employ die and spent way more trying to avoid paying the fine than the fine - it did lose. Also Gary Southern faces up to 3 years (yes only 3 years) in jail and I bet its a minimum security jail or an ankle bracelet at home. But the media doesn't tell you these things, it's forgotten so we'll forget - but remember the insanity surrounding Casey Anthony - blown completely out of proportion to the awful things rich white men get away with. Yes I think children dying is terrible, but think about how much media outrage there is about W and Cheney now.