I don’t think this is funny. Does anybody here think it’s funny?
One thing is certain. That woman does not enjoy sex with this creature posing as a man.
My husband is at the exact opposite end of the spectrum from whatever this form of masculinity is.
Yes. It is funny.
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I despise helpless, self-infantilizing men. It’s a cultural thing. We had all the strong, enterprising men killed of by totalitarianism and wars, and what was left was like the guy in the tweet. I don’t have a sense of humor on the subject because I grew up surrounded by this and yikes.
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“despise helpless, self-infantilizing men”
I think you’re misreading it a bit because of your background.
A very old model of males and females in the US (from the time when most women did not having paid work outside the house) was that men might be super competent outside the home but they leave domestic details for their wives who demonstrate their competence by keeping everything running smoothly and backing up their husbands when they’re fuzzy on the details.
There’s a scene in the movie Philadelphia where a very competent lawyer is shown fumbling details about his wife’s labor (up to the point where she changes the film in his camera between contractions). Same idea – division of spheres of competence.
The problem in the USSR was that there was no place for most men to display any competence, probably largely because it was dominated by russians whose culture doesn’t have much if any place for non-coercive honest competence.
It’s true, I’m hung up on this because it was everywhere around me when I was growing up. I get hives just thinking about it.
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There actually are wives that go to doctor with their husbands? Wow, I must live in a different Universe then…
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Oh, I don’t find it funny either. It’s just cringey.
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How is it possible to feel desire for this kind of manhood if you are not into little boys?
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Yes, the guy in the cartoon has mostly the problem of being little-boy dependent. But there is another species of male who are strong-willed/stubborn, and very anti-authoritarian about the medical system, which they only grudgingly see as about helping them and more generally see as about trying to control them way beyond necessity. These are the guys who, if they find themselves inpatients, get pals to sneak in fast food. So for this other batch of recalcitrant guys, the medical system does try to collaborate with wives, who might enforce restrictions the male patient is ready to blow off.
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I do not see how a wife being an enforcer in this situation is a good thing for their relationship. If my husband chooses not to go to doctor or have his condition treated, it is his choice. If it is something serious that impacts the family, I would probably point out his responsibility to take care of himself, but in the end, he is an adult man who can and should make his own choices.
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It’s very exotic to me that I’d know the name of my husband’s doctor or which tests he has due. What’s next, I’m going to remind him to brush his teeth and change his socks? And then we somehow manage to forget all that and pretend that he’s the male head of the household?
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My parents have an arrangement like that. Not like the cartoon, but like… Dad has a pretty intense dislike of the medical profession (not without reason), but also a frequent need for emergency repairs. Problematic relationship with motor vehicles as well as doctors: not recommended. Mom always stays at the hospital with him to keep him from getting arrested for assault, make sure he doesn’t pull all his IVs out and try to leave while coming out of anesthesia (he’s attempted it), BUT also to protect him from the doctors while he’s doped up.
We’ve had problems before, where they see on his chart that lo, some time in the distant past, he was on X and Z medications, and OMG you can’t *not* be on those right? And they try to put him back on those meds even though they’ve got nothing to do with his current problem, are highly addictive, and he tells them very profanely that he would rather die than ever be on those meds again. There was one episode when I was a kid where *mom* almost got into fisticuffs with the doctor over it, and called in our church pastor to help intimidate them into compliance with the family’s wishes. Because The Patient is Always Stupid.
The problem is that the meds in question will kill you if you detox too fast. No doc would agree to help him (officially. Unofficially, one told him what to do, but couldn’t take responsibility for it, so nothing in his charts) get off the meds, so his records can’t, for whatever reason, be updated to say “nope, not on these meds anymore”. And then every time he goes to a hospital some idiot refuses to listen to him, and tries to re-instate the meds. Some wacky Kafka scenario. So since his records can never be updated, he needs a bodyguard in the hospital.
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Completely lame.
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Not funny, stupid
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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