Ah, Hollywood.

For decades now, the city out west has been trying to define pop culture and change society. Hollywood and it’s products have a larger effect on people than we realize, especially in defining changing roles in the world between the sexes. Hollywood has always been a catalyst for change, but with more and more people watching more and more Netflix, movies, etc, you start to see patterns develop on how Hollywood and the liberal culture that drives it want men and women to behave.

And as a younger man, I fell for it hook, line and sinker. With such a far reaching entity such as this, it’s bound to affect many people with it’s misleading stereotypes as well as it’s fairy tale endings that always seem to work out for everyone involved at just the right time.

When I was terminally single in my 20’s, I always watched a ton of movies and shows that were showing the plight of the single man and how if he just did that one nice thing, a gorgeous woman would drop out of the sky for him, and he would live happily every after.

The sell for TV shows like Friends, movies with Hugh Grant, etc., was that no matter how emasculated a man was, his quirky, funny, and wholeheartedly feminine self would always get the girl in the end, because that’s how it always works, right?

Many of the producers of such shows were either women trying to project what they thought men should be like, or weak willed men who truly believed, as many millions of men before and after them have been raised to believe, that men were supposed to be nice. Niceness, in all of it’s unfettered, unmotivated glory, would get the girl in the end.

I’ve spoken at length on the nice guy phenomenon and how I was just like all those other guys, truly believing that the Hollywood way was the only way, as this was all you ever saw on TV in my time (90’s). Ross Gellar was going to get Rachel. Everyone roots for the underdog. The problem is, like you see in many sports these days, the underdogs don’t win very often because they aren’t the quality of the winners. But where did all of this perpetual bad dating information resonate from?

The “Just Be Yourself” crowd and most of the other feminized sects of TV came from feminism and it’s influences creeping into TV and movies. The real start of this intrusion was in the 90’s, right about the time the male tough guy hero was at his peak and as the ought of the 21st century came around, gone were the tough guys and out of the blue appeared the guys who were quirky, socially awkward, video game nerds who weren’t particularly masculine, but still commanded the female attention because this was how it was supposed to be.

I was a nerd, still am to a certain extent. I had two friends in school and they had no friends. I played Dungeons & Dragons, Magic the Gathering, video games of all shape and size in the 90’s. Generation X, my generation, was the generation that was going to re-define men in to a more pleasing, less conflicted feminism induced shape. And as I was that in spades, I decided to take the Hollywood version of the “Homo Novos” and apply it to my life, with disastrous consequences.

I literally went out into the dating pool with the “poor me” syndrome that permeates modern men and their single lives. Never did I try to learn a new skill, work on improving my life, or even get my whole career in shape. I focused on looking for women and trying to look as pathetic and needy as I could. Because that was what I was shown would work. Any woman I had any remote interest in, I would decide to be as nice as I could and my misery was the focus of my life. These miserable guys? On TV they would always be in a scene where they’re at the grocery store with sad music playing, pining for their “one”. And their “one” would feel sorry for them and come running. This is how it was!

Was I weak? Hell yes I was. But it wasn’t like the single man narrative was changing outside of the glowing electric box. Everyone in my world believed the same things I did. My friends, family, co-workers, every damn man I knew believed the same things I did. The ones that didn’t? The ones that never watched the crap. They were too busy winning football games, fighting the enemy on foreign shores, and cutting down trees into firewood.

As I no longer watch much TV or movies, I have been peeking in recently to see what Hollywood continues to try and sell men, and quite frankly, it hasn’t changed at all and if anything, this behavior has gotten much more ingrained into the male psyche.

The story’s the same. Man pines for any woman in his life, flash to him carrying a basket in the grocery store, sad music. It keeps replaying like a bad film with no audience, but the narrative has to continue to be pushed.

A man’s goal is not a woman, but watch any movie or TV show, and you see a man working towards that goal. The two dimensional place holder guys who are just there to prop up the “strong female lead” play the same role in every last movie they’re in. Men are secondary, females lead. Not at all how life was intended, but muh feminism.

I think of the movie “Rocky” and how all the narratives need to fall the way that one does. His woman was an afterthought in that movie. The goal was to win. The goal was to get better. The goal was to train.

The ultimate goal for any man should be what’s in his best interest. Whether it’s taking down terrorists to save the world, fighting an opponent in the ring, or finding out who the hell he is and loving that person, regardless, the whole fairy tale that Hollywood indeed gift wraps in a crap sandwich every month is a WOMAN’S fairy tale.

Every story that floats down the crapper water coming out of Los Angeles every week is a female’s wet dream. Men have no place in it except as breeding stock or arm candy. And it’s not as if women have had a chance to have better ideas, they just chose not to use them and instead pined for the days when they could be the “men” in the story.

And here, they now have it, and like clockwork, the feminization of media continues, but it’s not what women expected.

Nope, instead of getting billions of dollars for a new remake of the female version of Die Hard, they are getting shit canned by the American public, a group tired of listening to the tired wails coming from the place that used to be a magical town that defined masculinity in actors such as Cary Grant, Sean Connery, and John Wayne, and femininity in actresses like Katherine Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, and Grace Kelly.

Instead, it’s the narrative that drives Hollywood now. And as we saw earlier this year with “Joker”, Hollywood hates men, but men still sell, and sell very well, and will continue to sell. Production companies aren’t selling a product as much as they are trying to push a way of life, but unlike in the decades before, this way of life is turning off a majority of the American public.

The bottom line of this and every other story that’s come out of that town is what makes money will ultimately win over. Why a flick with a strong male lead is a dying breed is a feminist wet dream, but the strong male lead will continue to be successful.

And men aren’t going anywhere.

Get Away From the Box

So, that begs the question, what can we do?

Well, my biggest issue that I had to overcome was to recognize the crap and get the garbage out of my life. The narrative can’t be disseminated if it’s not being watched.

So turn the damn thing off.

The best part about my life is that I’m not shaped by the events on an electronic screen. And I appreciate that my views are no longer influenced by a device that has no interest in my life, only my money and my time.

When you start to realize that none of the FICTION that is produced in those studios have any relevance in your life, you’ll look forward to making your own movie, under your own direction, about the triumph that your life truly is.

I really wish that I would’ve discovered this sooner in my life, because my ignorance got the best of me and my real beliefs that this was how the world really was drove me into my marriage and my fake life until 4 years ago.

Unplugging isn’t just about taking responsibility for your life, it’s truly about unplugging from all devices that give you a false sense of what’s really going on out there. It really is the Matrix, because it’s developed by people with an agenda that really don’t care about you or your problems, but want to spread a belief or behavior that they wholeheartedly endorse.

Taking responsibility for your life begins with accepting what is real and what isn’t. And a narrative parroted on TV isn’t real life.

It never was.