Pandering to the Jock Demo

Martha Bayles laments the uncritical and accepted development of the taboo bashing, gross-out films of the Farrelly Brothers and Ben Stiller et al:

"this mentality can be summed up simply: Young men have no minds, souls, or characters worth bothering about; they care about nothing, respect nothing, and aspire to nothing. They are pure appetite and aggression, just waiting to be pandered to for money. So may the best panderer win."

I can partly agree with Bayles, in that for every Tropic Thunder or Kingpin there is ten or twelve Harold and Kumars or American Pie sequels: straight to DVD efforts, moulded by commitee and drained of any and all sophistication and wit until only the vomit, seminal fluid and mysoginism remains.

I think a far more apt target for Bayles' scorn is the advertising companies of America and Canada; in whose minds the male population really do have no minds, souls or characters, are simply animals of appetite and aggression, who buy beer so that they can fuck equally void, bland young things and who need to be tricked into buying toiletries by shaping them into manly truck wheels and calling them 'tools'.