OK, I'll be the first to bite.

I guess Jim has a point but until I see women packing down in the front row when the Wallabies take on the All Blacks I'll remain somewhat skeptical.

Sure there are any number of men behaving badly, but it seems a lot of women are busy playing catch up. Well, I guess any change in social behaviour starts at the bottom.

Certainly the question of gender roles is in question - refinition leaves a lot of no-mans land (Sorry ...) available for those looking for a new adventure sport. Well, all the other playing fields are taken over by those with new axes to grind who replaced all that masucline stuff with politically correct playground attachments complete with patrol officers, mixed genders naturally, roaming the perimeter. No one is allowed to climb a tree any longer - the insurance bill would bankrupt local councils.

Perhaps I should take up blowing up things - Now, there's a real man's sport.

Simply put... men don't really care about the portrayal.

Think about it... I remember seeing a television advertisement a little while back, when a male model was going through a metal detector at the airport. Two giggling female attendants made him remove items of clothing, piece by piece until he was in his undies.

Quite frankly, I don't know any man who cared. I asked a few guys what they thought, and most simply shrugged. But when I said that if it had been a woman being made to strip, everyone agreed there would have been hell to pay.

There is a very different attitude between the sexes in relation to gender discrimination. Ultimately, many women, when seeing an ad that degrades another woman, will protest. Guys on the other hand don't seem to have that unity. If the guy on TV is painted as a creep, the reaction from plenty of men will be 'so? he may be a creep.'

Personally, I happen to agree with the laid back stance. Okay, so guys are getting the raw end of the potato. But I'm afraid I just can't take media portrayals that seriously. Perhaps I should, but I can't. I tend to think both sexes should take entertainment as simply entertainment, and save their energy for the battles that really matter, like workplace discrimination and so forth.

There are deeper problems.

From Pre-Kindy all of the way through to Year 7 at primary school our children did not encounter a male teacher. That is a problems.

We have met a few young male teachers, the last having a wife and new baby and all have been resigned to the fact that their working life and possible career in the Queensland education system were generally poor and unrewarding - so all were planning to quit for a different career.

There seem to be endemic problems that would cause young men to veer away from teaching, or having completed the training, leave soon after placement.

Is this what we all want?

With you TurnRightThenLeft. Where is the link between how the mass media portray men and the reality of males today? Surely Mr Macnamara hasn't bought into the mass media being a reflection of society? The fact that 60 Minutes and A Current Affair ("International Current Affairs shows I think not...) portray men, in the majority of cases in a negative light should have no bearing on how males view themselves - the theme sells at the moment and these private media outlets would be stupid not to exploit it.

I'm also puzzled by how negative and positive are defined...it is a completely subjective test which makes this content analysis flawed from the start.

The fact that men are portrayed ‘negatively’ in mass media has about as much impact on me and, I imagine, the majority of rational males, as if Guy Sebastian maintained his no sex before marriage stance. We live by are own values and goals and to be influenced by the images and themes of men portrayed by advertisers, celebrities and mass media, is surely a sign of weakness.

How true this article is! I was at a public seminar at the ANU this week on the Aceh tsunami where the middle-aged female presenter explained how the women in Aceh do all the hard work while the men sit around in coffee shops all day. She then suggested it would be better the other way around. But added that if this were the case, the crops would fail....

Now admittedly Acehnese society is completely different from Western society on gender roles. But the statement says something about the denigration of men in our society. It was just accepted as fact and rubbed in the complete negativity of men's role in society and men in general. If the statement was made denigrating the role of women, it would never have been accepted in a public forum - even in Indonesia.

"I hate this nursery ryhme dad" my son said to me, when my daughter was reading "what are little boys made of.."

"Social work literature is biased against heterosexual males, leading to "unfair and untrue" stereotypes about men and hampering social workers' ability to counsel men, an Alabama professor has concluded after reviewing articles in two social work journals from the last decade.

Out of hundreds of articles, book reviews and published ads, only "a fraction — about 25" — were about men, Jordan I. Kosberg wrote in an article titled "Heterosexual Males: A Group Forgotten by the Profession of Social Work.""

I hear groups of women constantly portraying men in a negative fashion, in fact it seems to be a favourite sport amongst them.

Peter Forde in Perils of the unconscious mind quotes an example;

"ABC Radio presenter Tricia Duffield was having an on-air conversation with colleague Steve Austin. They were discussing this year’s Brisbane Ekka.

Said Steve (more or less), “It was wonderful to see so many fathers at the show with their kids, having a great time as a family unit.”

Responded Tricia instantly, “Yeah, trying to be heroes.”

I mean instantly. Not a moment’s hesitation.

Trying to be heroes? Actually, many men spend much of their time trying to be ‘Mr. Nice Guy’ to women in general and their wives or partners in particular. This is no ‘wild theory’—a psychiatrist has written a book about it. "