Wanted: male sensuality. Last Seen: Mills & Boon book cover

Today smacking: The loss of the sensual male

I really hope that Justin Timberlake is, in fact, "bringing sexy back", as he claims, and not just teasing us in that velvety rumbling undertone of his. Fact is, there's a great big, vagina-shaped hole to fill in pop music, which is in dire need of some sexual healing from all the lithe-tongued, firm-handed men out there – and JT is a man alone in his mission to do it.

In my second year of university I took a class in writing contemporary to the country in which I studied. My lecturer in the subject was an author with a couple of published novels under his belt and so, I suppose, had some authority on the subject, or could at least warn us away from all the terrible pitfalls of the writing business, thus scaring us off forever and widening the overcrowded profession by a crack so as to forge a little more elbow room for himself (which all the writing lecturers seemed to do; fuckers). He once said something about male sexuality that to this day I can't forget.

Those of us with a twig-and-berry combo and those of us with frilly pink orchids are just altogether different on seemingly every level, and we know this. Thus, it is exceptionally difficult to get inside the mind of the so-called 'opposite' sex in order to write from that point of view. My lecturer – let's call him Philip Whatshisface, since I genuinely can't remember his surname for the life of me – pointed out to us a few of the aspects of the respective genders which we might just miss, in our own research, but which should be considered when writing a character.

One such observation that stuck with me was that we give all the rights to the label 'sexy' to women, and give no such rights to men. We let women be the sensual ones, and we expect little in the sensuality department from men. We portray affection and innate attractiveness and beauty as female traits, leaving most men out – as if it's their birthright to be beaten witless by the ugly stick. Naturally I sat there, my feminist brain catching fire as I mulled over all the ways in which The Patriarchy had brought this about, and worked myself up into a right tizzy in the all of three seconds it took Phil to finish his sentence. But my curiosity was piqued as he went on. It was detrimental, he said, to men more than it was to women. He said there was something of a void where our nation's male sexuality should be.

I was hooked at this point. He was right.

All these words he was bringing out: 'sensuality'; 'sexiness'; 'affection'; they all seemed so, well, female to me – and for the first time I was given pause to see it. To my eyes it was wrong. It was an injustice to our straight men and quite a few gay ones, too. Why should they be conditioned to think that a good sense of sensuality, and familiarity with one's own sexuality was forbidden territory? Why should they be deprived the wonderful feeling of knowing fully the innate sensuality of your own self; using your hands and tongue and teeth and feet and thighs and every part of your body to understand the body of someone else?

Suddenly it was clear to me, too, why sometimes it is so easy to spot a certain type of gay man. It has nothing to do with them trying to act like women, and has everything to do with embracing their raw sexuality, their inner sex kittens (lions?), their unabashed lust – in a way that has usually been reserved for women. There's a certain undeniable freedom we women feel in executing an easy hip swagger, a careful flick of the wrist, a sultry pout. And it seemed our gay men had caught on to it, knowing that they, too, could play. They didn't have to conform to the expectations a straight male has placed on him: to keep his arse puckered, his cards close to his chest, his upper lip as rigid as the cock he thinks is the only representation of his sexuality.

Where was our straight male sensuality, I wondered? We had lost it somewhere, and I, for one, had no idea where to find it. Until now. Justin Timberlake seems to have found it for me.

See, all it takes is one straight man with a falsetto voice and a frame that oozes sex to spontaneously moisten the panties of millions of girls worldwide. And the best part? To do it in the most misogynistic genre of all: R&B. Twenty years we've been listening to rappers waffle on about how many bitches and hos they be playing, and how fun it is to mistreat them (my personal favourite lyric is courtesy of Ludacris: "Move, bitch, get out the way / get out the way, bitch, get out the way." Mmm, eloquent.) and here we have a skinny whiteboy from the Mickey Mouse Club making our hearts all aflutter. How? Well, a cursory look at some of Justin Timberlake's latest lyrics turns up dozens of references to pleasing a woman, doing things how she wants them done, maintaining her desires and, um, using his tongue. A lot.

Halle-fucking-lujah. Finally there's a man out there not so frustrated by the vice grip that restrains his sexuality that he resorts to taking it out on women-in-general through ill-conceived lyrics and film clips consisting of pure tits and arse. Finally there's a man who knows how sexy it is if he can show confidence in exactly how flexible he can be in the sack. Finally there's a man alone who is not afraid to dance a trail of fire across the floor. Finally, this kind of man is popular. And by god, do I hope other men follow suit. The truth is, if they don't follow JT into to the den of awakening sensuality, they're really missing out. Because even if you didn't think you liked the man or his music before, when Justin Timberlake croons at women in his trademark creamy tone, “I'll let you whip me if I misbehave,” we kind of, uh, really want to.

When dads became bumbling idiots

Today smacking: the Bumbling Idiot Dad archetype

At risk of turning into the old lady sitting in the rocking chair on the front porch, polishing her shotgun and whistling through the gap where that front tooth should be, muttering, “Back in my day, we used to walk to school uphill both ways, even with a broken leg and tuberculosis, and we were grateful for it!” I must express that I feel there’s a gaping hole where our fathers used to be.

I blame this stupid archetype that came along around fifteen years ago: the Bumbling Idiot Dad. This archetype has single-handedly managed to reduce a generation of fathers to the status of the gum stuck to the bottom of the world’s shoe, and it’s so wrong and destructive that it makes me want to scoop out my eyes with a rusty teaspoon for sheer despair.

It began with Homer Simpson, the lovable but unfathomably stupid foil to the upright responsibility of beleaguered wife Marge. Now, since I grew up on a diet of The Simpsons I can hardly bash it with a clear conscience – and besides, that chip the Fox Network put in my brain will shock my neurones into a catatonic stupor, and I hardly want to be more mind-numbingly boring than I already am. But my horror remains that the character of Homer Simpson inspired a league of Bumbling Idiot Dad characters in our comedy sphere, and it’s ruining our appreciation of the actual father role.

You know the type of character the Bumbling Idiot Dad (BID) is. His head is almost permanently in the clouds, and he often conjures inspired but ultimately stupid schemes in order to achieve his ends, which are always selfish and childish. His wife is tempered and patient and supports him no end, though clearly he doesn’t deserve it since he is partially retarded and frequently on the brink of destroying everything the family holds dear. He gives ill-conceived advice to his 2.3 children, sending them on exploits derived of bad decisions. And all the while we laugh, and we laugh, and we laugh – until we choke on our Doritos and realise our arses are plastered to the couch for the rest of eternity.

The shame is that Homer Simpson was pure comedic perfection, but lesser producers, scriptwriters and networks evidently saw the cash cow that The Simpsons quickly became, and since then we’ve been battered from all sides by an army of poorly-rendered, frustratingly stupid characters all trying to imitate the classic BID. But they completely fail to be even remotely funny or clever. (I’m looking at you, Family Guy: you and your shameless Homer and Marge Simpson rip-off characters. And I’m looking at you, Everybody Loves Raymond: you and your complete mockery of the family unit, and your devaluation of really serious relationship issues, you utter waste of space and air time.)

We are turning fatherhood into a running joke.

I feel sorry for dads in all this, because the BID archetype is just small part of a larger deterioration in our culture of the value of the father role. Fathers these days are too often immediately second-class to mothers just by virtue of their being male. Mothers are given custody of their children often quite unquestioningly in custody disputes. Women are taking the final say in reproduction and how and when the family will expand or not. Don’t misread me: it is essential that women take over the microphone when it comes to what they do with their own bodies. But I cannot see how it is fair that, once there are children in the picture, a supposedly equal parenting relationship will intrinsically give the father’s opinions less voice than the mother’s.
(There’s an expansion of this idea over at Violent Acres, if you’re interested.)

I have raved on about how important I think good parenting is. It’s also important to value what both parents essentially are within the family unit, which is, in a nutshell, really crucial and valuable. It’s destructive and foolish to perpetuate a stereotype that so greatly devalues everything that a father is, can be, and should be. Can you imagine if there was an emerging stereotype in our media of the Bumbling Idiot Mother? Oh, how the feminists would crow!

Speaking of which; there are some who will say it is the rise of feminism which has in large part helped to push this deadbeat dad character in to our entertainment in an effort to Put Down the Man, or whatever it is people seem to think Those Feminists are doing these days. But since true feminism is about equality across genders, and not pushing one gender down for the purpose of advancing the other(s), we can’t say it’s all the feminists’ faults. Sorry, angry mob, you’ll have to douse those torches and put down the pitchforks for now.

I’m blaming, in half part, the laziness of our entertainment vehicles for this. How hard is it to come up with a new and interesting set of characters for a new programme, instead of re-hashing the same old stupid stereotypes time after time? It’s not that hard at all, but the thing is, the TV networks don’t have to. It is we who so gleefully lap up this ridiculous premise that it’s funny to laugh at incompetent parenting. This is where I place the rest of the blame. It’s our stupid faults for tuning in to see how Ray Barone will stick his foot in his mouth this week, thereby turning wife Debra into a screeching harridan, or how Peter Griffin’s latest hair-brained scheme will put his family’s life and income in danger while Lois Griffin sits patiently by.

I really wish we wouldn’t watch this crap when there are so many better-sketched characters out there; characters which are grounded in originality and don’t reek of influences much better than themselves. By supporting and believing this crap, we’re helping to destroy everything that a father should aspire to and be proud to be, and we should be really worried.