Bill Maher Blames the Rise of the Manosphere on ‘The Simpsons’ and Will Ferrell
Despite the fact that he has no children of his own (if you don’t count the children he drunkenly lectured on his podcast), Bill Maher sure has a lot to say about fatherhood.
Last June, Maher used Father’s Day as a springboard to complain that overly sensitive dads are the cause of America’s teen mental health epidemic — and not, you know, a global pandemic and increased economic insecurity. Although he did draw the line at suggesting that the “trad dads” he longs for should resume giving kids the belt.
Similarly, on the most recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, the host’s “New Rules” segment ended with a prolonged rant about the cultural emasculation of the modern father, who Maher argued are the “last demographic group that TV, ads and movies can still depict as clueless, useless dipshits.”
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According to Maher, the origin of this problem is the 1987 comedy Three Men and a Baby, in which “three grown men can’t manage to keep a baby alive.”
Okay, we’re the first to admit that Three Men and a Baby is a ridiculous movie predicated on the idea that dudes don’t understand how diapers work. But it doesn’t really gel with Maher’s thesis because none of the three men are dads at first, they’re carefree, heroin-trafficking bachelors. And they do keep the baby alive, hence why the sequel is called Three Men and a Little Lady and not Three Men Doing 25 to Life.
Maher noted that after this movie, we got a flood of TV comedies about incompetent dads, including Home Improvement, Married… with Children, Everybody Loves Raymond and The Simpsons. Although, to be fair, Homer Simpson did display bravery and decisiveness when protecting his children from the Boogeyman.
Maher proceeded to ask, “When will men stop making me throw up in my mouth with the way they pander so nakedly?” before playing clips of male celebrities suggesting that women are “better” than men. In one piece of footage, Will Ferrell proposed, “Isn’t it just time for women to run the planet?”
Maher blasted Ferrell, pointing out that female leaders like Cleopatra and Catherine the Great were as “violent” and “hard-ass” as men. Although Maher neglected to mention that the clip of Ferrell was from an event honoring Kerry Washington, and his statement was just to tee-up a joke about how the Scandal star should run for president.
In Maher's brain, all of this is “why teenage boys flock to jerks like Andrew Tate” because young men are only given a choice between “performative pussyhood or the manosphere.” Then, weirdly, after criticizing men’s rights influencers, Maher turned into one?
He bragged that the world wouldn’t be the same “without a few little things that men did contribute,” listing things like “the internet” and “movies” — despite the fact that the internet as we know it wouldn’t exist without the contributions of women and a female director was the first person to come up with the idea of making a “movie” as we know it, and not just filming real-life shit for the novelty of it.
This entire segment was way dumber than anything Homer Simpson ever did, by the way.
