Mr. Mom

Problematic Toxic Masculinity Tropes #6

Problematic Toxic Masculinity Tropes #6

Mr. Mom

The 1983 movie Mr. Mom is a comedy whose humor hinges on the particular misogynistic toxic masculinity trope that I have named after it, because it epitomizes the trope so well. 

Basically, the premise of the movie is this: a man is relegated to homemaking when he gets fired from his job, and his wife ends up going to work as a high powered ad exec in order to pick up the income slack. Shenanigans, both in the form of Mr. Mom not being able to cope with housewifery, and Mrs. Mom finding herself in sexist danger at her ‘man’s work.’ All is well, though, at the end, when both find their way back to their gender-norm jobs which they are best and safest at.

Thus is the basic description of the Problematic Toxic Masculinity Trope that personally pisses me off the most. It’s #6, and I call it Mr. Mom. The trope (and it is a trope—it’s everywhere) says: LOL, men can’t parent. Or, even worse: LOL, ‘real’ men aren’t good caretakers. Or, worse still: LOL, “oh, my husband, I have to take care of him just like one of the kids.”

The problematic aspect of Mr. Mom is simple, and also manifold: men in this trope are infantilized and feminized, as well as their masculine nurturing natures discounted if not ignored (as in PTMT #2). The insidious nature of this trope teaches us that Dad is just another kid. We see this (and have seen it for decades) in many pieces of media, especially commercials targeted at (especially stay at home) moms. You’ve seen these ads many times: “Oh, my doofus husband can’t ever get it right… good thing there’s _fill in product name here_… even HE can do it!” Cleaning supply commercials do this so often, and have for years. Their thesis? Dad is incapable of cleaning properly. Which of course means an underlying assertion that a man’s place is not in the home.

Wo/Men’s Work

Think this is a relic of an antiquated 1950s housewife/myth of the nuclear family? Nope. It’s still happening, and both those myths are going strong. Witness the Glad Press-n-Seal ad from the contest they held only a few years ago. In this homemade ad, we’ve got Dad, on his first day alone with his baby, over-using the advertised product because he doesn’t know how the normal stuff works (the whole thing begins with him not finding a lid to fit a baby bottle). You’d think this would be a great opportunity for Glad to be like: Hey! This product is so useful—you can use it for all those difficult tasks, and it makes all those parenting chores cleaner and easier. But nope. Dad in this commercial overdoes it, not because of awesome creative innovation, but because, as a man, he’s incapable of parenting “normally.” You can see this being emphasized when Mom comes home and doesn’t exclaim “wow what an amazing use of this valuable product” but instead quips, “What’s going on here?” to which Dad responds with a sheepish shrug.

The awful lesson we get here is in this reaction: Mom always comes back and head-shakes her hubby’s shenanigans away before taking over and doing it right. He didn’t actually kill the kid (chortle—surprisingly, amirite?) but he is always utterly clueless, and any hacks he comes up with to parent on his own are only weird slapdash solutions he clings to till Mom comes home and does it the way it’s supposed to be done. Because he can’t. He babysits, he doesn’t parent. He’s just another kid for Mom to chuckle at his silly antics, just another mess for her to clean up after.

How about the Amazon Echo ad—the one that begins with Mom going away on a trip, leaving Dad alone with their infant: he is absolutely clueless and needs her constant reminders left behind on the Alexa system in order to function at all (let alone well) as a parent. The condescending “You’re doing great” at the end is just another misogynist (misandrist?) nail in that coffin, and it’s a center of the toxic nature of this trope: men suck at women’s work. And that’s as it should be.

Dads don’t nurture, care, or clean: Dad can grill, but not cook (unless he’s a celebrity chef). If mom is away, the place is a mess; if a dad is masculine, he is distant, or absent—if a man tries to parent, he descends to the level of feminized fool. Or he comes up with strange solutions to homemaking, like in the Glad Press-n-Seal ad, or the many weird hacks protagonist Jack comes up with in Mr. Mom. In other words, a man can’t (and shouldn’t) handle women’s work. If he tries to, he’s suddenly no longer a man.

Remember that specimen we’ve been talking about, called Hegemonic Man? When a hegemonic man attempts fatherhood, it’s a source of comedy: Mr. Mom himself, Ahnold in Kindergarten Cop, the list of movies and TV shows is nearly endless, from Odd Couple to any number of TV sitcoms. The clean guy is comedic in his gaycoded fastidiousness; the manly man funny in his ineptitude with only a roomful of three-year olds.

And this mock ad from SNL banks on this contrasting humor, describing manly household chore equipment. It’s still funny because LOL housework isn’t manly. And the comedy of this satirical ad is in this stereotype/trope that’s quite alive, even today.

Two and a Half Hegemonic Masculinities

Which brings me to Two and a Half Men. Remember this show? It spanned from 2003 to 2015—more than a decade of an immensely popular, widely watched sitcom. The premise of this show’s comedy lies in the contrast between two brothers: the manly man (played by Charlie Sheen) is a womanizing, hedonistic ass. He’s a terrible influence on the boy child and a bad parent. The good dad (the boy’s biological father, and a divorcé, played by John Cryer) is a namby-pamby, gaycoded wimp. It’s not subtle at all—the one closest to hegemonic masculinity (he in fact falls into the Bond, James Bond trope) is a terrible person and sucks at every interaction with the kid. The good dad is a weak, pussy-whipped divorcé who doesn’t make enough money on his own to live in his own place, and is even coded gay with his feminized behavior and body language. The show’s writers aren’t beating around the bush. There’s a more sinister underlying message here, too: that the dad who ends up saddled with care of his son is not nearly as much of a man as is his philandering, womanizing brother who has no idea if he’s a father or not and couldn’t care less if he were. 

Look at the body language here, and how it’s communicating different levels of manhood. 

Parenting (especially the nurturing type) undermines hypermasculinity and that’s where the comedy of the Mr. Mom trope comes from—a dad’s (hegemonic) masculinity is compromised and so his struggle against his own femininity is funny. That, or, his failure to accomplish ‘women’s work’ is in itself funny: hegemonic masculinity don’t jive with girl stuff, so the man fails at it. But then he’s supposed to be bad at it—he’s a man.

The antithesis of Mr. Mom is the idealized father who’s mostly or completely absent, if not dead (see Road Warrior, Star Wars, countless fantasy and folklore based stories, etc.)—this is the only type of father that fits with hegemonic masculinity: not a dad, but an aloof father who isn’t there. If he’s present, especially if he’s nurturing, he’s feminized; rendered soft and clownish, his masculinity undone.

Father Knows Nothing

There’s a counterpart to this Problematic Toxic Masculinity trope and it comes from my earlier series, the Problematic Badass Female tropes. It’s the flip side of the same sexist coin: Mother Knows Best. Mother Knows Best tells us that women who don’t nurture are monsters, and Mr. Mom tells us that men who do are bumbling clowns.  

“How does [the Mother Knows Best trope] do its damage? By propagating, through ‘strong’ female characters, the tired stereotype that women must all be nurturers (also that men are not). That no matter how powerful a woman may be in the world, her role as a woman will always be at home with the children.” 

In other words, PBFT #5 and PTMT #6 are propagating a very similar, equally damaging concept: a woman who doesn’t parent, and a man who does, are neither one a real woman or real man.  

Of course, this week’s trope (and the PBFT that is its direct counterpart) is all about one nefarious, systemically ingrained factor, and that’s misogyny. 

What is women’s work, and why can’t men do it? Men are still being raised to think women are in their lives to take care of them—even their romantic partners are largely mothering. Girls are still taught this, too, and trained as they grow up from girls into women to be caretakers to the men around them, or at any rate to not expect anything from men in the way of sharing domesticity. This is systemic misogyny at its deepest. The infantilization of men is directly connected to the indoctrination of women’s work. In other words, women stay home and care; men leave home to provide.

Domestic Bliss

In reality, of course, the domestic and the career burdens are shared across the board. Many men are excellent, caring, nurturing dads as well as remaining masculine as ever. Caring fathers aren’t babysitting their children, they’re parenting. The terrible messages the Mr. Mom trope sends to young people of all genders is that (as is the case with all the PTMTs) appearing at all feminine is bad; that doing caring and nurturing things is girl stuff and therefore bad; that cleaning house and parenting (not just fathering) is sissy stuff… all these messages are false and terrible to teach not only boys but girls and people of all genders. Everybody pitches in to maintain a household. Everybody provides, everybody cares & nurtures, everybody cleans. There’s no such thing as ‘women’s work.’

The moral lesson of the comedic fable that is the movie Mr. Mom is that men & women have interesting and strange ways of doing the other gender’s work, but ultimately everyone’s better off if they just stick with their gendered norm. At the end of the movie, the wife gets sexually harassed in her masculine job, and almost indeed gets assaulted. Mr. Mom himself barely gets the hang of homemaking in his own weird way but still doesn’t exactly succeed. (I mean, I would bet that the housewife circle all appreciate the poker nights he started, but you get what I mean). By the end of the movie man and wife both go back to their binary-gendered norm and we as viewers are meant to feel that all is well again. This isn’t only in older movies, either—at the end of those two earnest commercials I mentioned above, Mom comes home and we can all breathe easier because the woman is back, to do her woman’s work and make everything right again.

It’s not that simple, nor should it be. 

I was thinking about what might be exceptions or antidotes to this trope—one that sticks most in my mind is Lone Wolf & Cub, if you can even count that. The Mandalorian is in this same vein, I think. Help me by thinking of more, as a conclusion to this discussion.