In CBS's Saturday night pantheon, the girl who could turn the world on with her smile has been replaced by a man whose missing teeth may be his most compelling feature.
What is it? Do we need to sew an elastic panel in the waist of their pants? The above is from the Docker Boys' David Carr ("Golden Age for TV? Yes, on Cable," June 9th, New York Times). We hate to break it David Carr (who is younger than Mary Tyler Moore) but calling the actress or the character (Mary Richards) a "girl" is insulting.
So is stroking it over CBS EliteXC Saturday Night Fights and pretending that it's somehow this decade's equivalent to The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Read through the column and the thing you'll most likely be left with is "Middle Aged Male in a Panic."
While that's his own problem to deal with, his 'work' for The Times is a problem for the paper to deal with. It's been one sneering, sexist put-down after another from Carr of late. Or maybe someone missed the 'jocular' attitude on display in Carr's "Slumber Parties Go Digital" (June 2nd). Carr's writing columns for the Business section (they start on the front page of that section) and somehow "The Media Equation" (the headings his columns are grouped under) has translated into, "See my testes?"
In "Slumber Parties Go Digital" (even the headline -- a column on women using the internet -- is insulting), he takes to task Sex In The City (a popular target for a number of sexist pigs) and gets in a ha-ha about a real life woman's shoes. What?
Are we back to the days where a daily paper thinks a man is needed to navigate women (or, as Carr would call them, "girls")? Considering how few women the newspaper publishes and how much time has progressed, that's awfully strange.
Carr's output of late reads like a tired rehash of columns you could have found a century ago. And we've yet to see a female columnist at the paper who is lampooning men. But each week, while allegedly covering "media," Carr's been serving up ha-has on women. They sure are strange, he seems to laugh each week. If Carr truly can't understand women, here's a suggestion: Don't write about them.
Week after week, the chief Docker Boy is portraying women as some strange, crippled creature, not a full bodied person with all the rights and norms that would entail, but these barely thinking creatures who are so amusing as they attempt to be part of the world (would that be part of the "man's world"?). It's insulting and it's gone on long enough that it should have garnered some attention from the paper and been addressed.
But it hasn't.
And the same media that used sexism to take down Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign wants to pretend like maybe it happened, but maybe it didn't. What was done to Hillary wasn't offensive because it was done to Hillary, it was offensive because it reflected very real prejudices held by members of the media (male and female) against women. If you doubt it, just peruse some of Carr's recent work.
He apparently fancies himself a humorist. We don't hear anyone laughing.