If you ask me, musicofthenight, this kind of ignorance knows no gender. It's a product of our consumer culture. We grow up not being taught how to do ANYTHING for ourselves anymore. We're just kind of expected to pay to have someone else do it for us.
This is why people go to school and yet are still dumb... because they're not going to school to learn anymore, they're going there to get the grades and get the degree so that they can get a job. In school, we're not taught to love learning anymore, we're taught to get a good score on that test so that the school can get money from the government and so that you can move up to the next grade. It's never about learning anymore, it's always just about "success," which basically means just getting by.
Lots of people have seen this. My mom especially, who is a college professor, cannot believe how unmotivated her undergrads are nowadays. They always want study sheets for tests, they always b**** and whine when they get less than an A even when they very clearly did not know what they were talking about, just because "I'm an A student." So many of them have no interest whatsoever in the material, and their papers are nothing but three pages of BS trying to meet the minimum length requirement. They're just there to get their grades. This generation of college students is just extremely entitled. They believe that the world owes them everything, and that they shouldn't have to work too hard to get it. And although they're technically book-smart, they tend to be practicality-dumb. They know how to do things, but don't understand HOW to do them or WHY they should do them. And it's the same thing with practical life skills, things as basic as cooking and repairing simple little electronic things. We're never taught to cook, because we've been groomed to grow up on fast food and processed meals. We never fix our own things anymore, because now we can just take things into the shop and have someone else fix it for us. There's always someone else to do it for us, so there's no need to learn it ourselves. Same deal with schooling. Again, we don't have to actually learn to think anymore, we just have to learn to get test questions right. And so we've become stupid, and lost our need to actually learn things. At the beginning of the life of these services, they were convenience things, just for those occasions where you needed something fixed quickly and didn't have the time to do it yourself. Where now, we've lost the ability to do things ourselves, and thus the vast majority of people are dependent on these professional services to do everything for them.
It's a product of our culture. Because we don't have to do anything for ourselves anymore, we forget how to. And it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, because we live in a consumer culture where companies actually make more money when we're basically stupid consumers who can't do a damned thing for ourselves. Go figure.
Same thing with the "Stupid Girls" video. It's because of a lifetime of being told what we're supposed to want. So much so that we never stop to think whether those ideals really make any sense or not, we just sort of go with it. And over time, it becomes such an ingrained expectation that people hate themselves because they can't achieve it, despite the overwhelming reality that says that it's an impossible standard. But it works. Because since it's pretty much impossible to do it alone, you become dependent on cosmetics, on surgeries, and your status becomes based on how much you own. It's all bull. And yes, it makes me pretty sick too. And it goes both ways. Both when girls act like valley-girls who are image-obsessed, entitled, and don't know how to do a thing for themselves, as well as men who are total dudebros who can't talk about anything but sports, TV, which "chicks are hot," making sexist jokes about women who aren't pretty enough, and basically reinforcing the ideals of this stupid male-dominated culture that makes women feel so inadequate in the first place. In both cases, no thank you.
And don't worry about "do I even have the right to say this?" YES, of course you do. Everyone has the right to speak up, and any societal standard telling you who does and does not have the right to be heard is equally as stupid as the ones telling us what we are and aren't supposed to like.
/rant over... (I've always been a bit more in the middle, hating both genders' stereotypes, so it really bothers me too.)
