6 Backward Ideas Hollywood Still Has About Men

The average height of an American male is 5 feet 9.5 inches tall. (Strangely enough, surveys reveal this is the exact same length of the average American penis.) Tom Cruise is famously 2.5 inches shorter than this average, but we only know that because our own insecurity demands we find a flaw, any flaw, in this 54-year-old man with 2 percent body fat and chiseled features that become only more handsome with age. Yet you'd never know he was a tiny man from watching his movies. For example, Ving Rhames is over 6 feet, but he's shorter than Tom in that picture up there. How? Is he sitting down? Forty yards behind him? Take look at another shot from Mission: Impossible ...

Mark Whalberg is 5'8 and Zac Efron is 5'8. Sylvester Stallone is barely two apples high. And yet every time they're in a movie, they are looking all the normal people in the eyes, filmmakers forcing them to stand on little boxes to hide that they are grotesque, undersized genetic failures.

And god forbid we reveal that the 5'9 Robert Downey Jr. is in fact 3 inches shorter than Chris Evans. We could do this all day!

Question: Do you think this weird prejudice is with filmmakers or audiences? Do you really think we'd refuse to be inspired by a hero who possesses every other positive trait on Earth -- courage, humor, charm, muscles, wealth, confidence, sexuality -- if they can comfortably ride in the back seat of a Civic? It's not like we're expecting the hero to solve every mystery and defeat every bad guy with slam dunks. Although now that we think about it, that sounds like a pretty sweet goddamn movie.

So if you're a short (or even average height!) male watching, then guess what: The only trait that apparently matters is the one you can't do anything about.

In an '80s action movie, diplomacy was a dick-measuring contest with a stick of dynamite, and Jean-Claude Van Damme always won. Heroes weren't paid to be smart; they were paid to strangle mooks and walk silently away from exploding gas stations.

We're obviously so much more sophisticated these days. The good guys in movies can't be musclebound meat sacks anymore -- they have to hold multiple PhDs and have a particular set of skills for every occasion. Ethan Hunt can speak 75 languages while maintaining the sexy abs of Instagram's douchiest bro. Jason Bourne can predict his opponents' every move ten steps in advance. Even the biggest, dumbest superhero, the Hulk, spends most of his movies as one of the planet's leading scientists.

It would be nice to think that the message is "Even nerds can be cool!" But these guys don't win by being nerds. In nearly every case, the real heroism comes in the form of a punch to the throat.

Remember those Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movies, in which Sherlock uses his brilliant mind to beat the shit out of guys in shirtless pit fights? That was weird, right? But at least it shows him fighting as a hobby, to get good at it -- the BBC version also wins every fistfight he's in and can easily out-dive exploding bombs. You also might remember in the new Star Trek movies, wherein Mr. Spock uses his Vulcan logic to form plans like "Hold my beer, I'm going to go fuck that guy up."

Take Tony Stark out of the Iron Man suit, and he can still beat the hell out of a mansion full of henchmen in Iron Man 3. When Transformers 4 needed a nerdy inventor protagonist, it cast this guy:

In fact, if you're in a Hollywood film and you realize you're only brilliant, we have some bad news for you: You're not the hero. In fact, you're probably the obnoxious sidekick nerd. Check to see if you're Simon Pegg or Seth Green. If you're not, we have more bad news: You're probably the villain.

The message is clear, boys: Brains are fine, but only if you use them to invent better punching. And if you use your mind exclusively for non-punching endeavors, you're either ridiculous or evil.

For example, why does Hollywood refuse to accept Superman as simply a morally sound hero who genuinely wants to help people? Struggling to protect those weaker than him is a perfectly legitimate problem. Did they think we couldn't relate to him unless he cried in an ice cave like he's in an Evanescence music video? Did they think he'd look like a "pussy" if he didn't destroy an entire city and snap Zod's neck in front of two children?

Every action movie and show seems to be in an arms race to give their stars the most severe PTSD or the highest number of dead loved ones. It used to be we that showed how grizzled a cop was by how old the Chinese takeout was in his filthy refrigerator. Now it's measured by how many times he flashes back to his family getting tied to chairs and set aflame.

It's not like this is making these characters more relatable to young males. ("See, he has problems just like you!") After all, it's not like they are heroic despite their tortured psychology, or that it's something to overcome. The psychological damage is the source of their power -- John Wick is a boring retired dude until a pair of tragedies utterly destroy his life, at which point he expresses his grief through numerous therapeutic sessions of gun-fu. Mad Max's defining character trait is that he never smiles, jokes, or shares anything about himself -- telling a comrade his name is treated as a shocking breakthrough.

At every turn, the message is the same: You're not a true, sexy badass unless you're a tortured shell of a man.

Cinderella's dream husband? He doesn't have a name. Beast from Beauty And The Beast? Aside from that mean nickname, he has no actual name. Snow White's prince? Maybe he's a Trevor? Could be a Graham or a Tony. We'll never know, because the writers didn't think the character was worth naming. These movies give names to the horses and the mice, but not the princes.

The main characters are supposed to spend the rest of their lives with these guys, and the only thing we know about them is that they're single, heterosexual, and not child molesters. Except wait -- we don't know any of that. The only thing we know about Disney princes is that they fall in love easily and have no problem putting their mouths on sleeping strangers. Finding a girl in the woods and licking her awake isn't a great contribution to a relationship.

The point is that when it comes to royal romances, a princess brings dynamic character and a sense of adventure. A prince is handsome and has nothing better to do. We suppose the rebuttal is that these are fantasies for little girls and not boys, but that doesn't make it any better. What's the message for them? "Some day you'll meet a walking mannequin who will be perfect for you for one reason: He's a prince."

The unspoken implication is that these victims deserve it. Really? Is that what we're going with -- that our civilized society has built a justice system in which one of the punishments for selling weed or stealing a car is the possibility of being violated? Even if Congress codified that into the law, even if we decided that rape is a suitable punishment for tax evasion, it would still be super weird to joke about it. And if the victim is himself a rapist, so what? You're trivializing the very thing he's guilty of.

This is, in fact, part of a larger trend ...

It's pretty fun, right? Now imagine it was a warehouse full of women. Everything else is the same. They're still armed, still up to no good, but every time Batman crushes one of their collar bones, it's a woman's voice screaming out in pain. Turn up the sound on that clip -- imagine every painful grunt is a female voice. Imagine if the heads Batman smashed into the floor had ponytails and eye shadow.

We're not even sure that sequence makes it into the theater -- somebody at the studio would get Zack Snyder some counseling as soon as they saw the script. It's not because women would be no physical match for Batman; nobody is a match for Batman. He is tearing through those guys like a rat terrier loose in a hamster cage. The fact is, that kind of violence toward women would hit you in the gut. When it's dudes, it's either awesome or hilarious.

You can do this with any action movie. Imagine watching Return Of The Jedi, only every time a Stormtrooper head is bashed in by an Ewok, you hear a female scream. It would be chilling -- the cops would kick in George Lucas' door and assume he has a crowd of female corpses in his freezer. It'd be equally weird if he had, say, given the battle droids in the prequels Jennifer Tilly's voice. And remember in The Two Towers when Legolas and Gimli are whimsically counting out their kills? Can you picture that being the same kind of fun if those were female orcs?

In fact, find any movie in which a human death is treated as slapstick, make the victims female, and you are left with a video suitable only for a serial killer's crawlspace. Indiana Jones once comically shot three Nazis with a single bullet.

If you can't watch the clip, there's a little comedy music cue that plays as their bodies slump aside. Imagine all three are women; at the very least, it becomes deeply uncomfortable. ("Uh, was Spielberg going through a rough divorce when they made this?")

And no, we're obviously not demanding Hollywood show more women getting butchered to make it equal. We're not demanding they show us fewer dead dudes. We're just saying that we've definitely been conditioned to react a certain way to on-screen brutality, and the difference between dread and hilarity is usually whether or not the victim has a penis.

That's weird, right?

Guy Bigel is a professional flute player, and he uploads fun arrangements to his YouTube channel. Check out his stuff here. Jordan Breeding has a blog, a Twitter, and wishes Hollywood would portray him as a super nerd with biceps the size of basketballs.

For more horrible ways Hollywood influences us, check out 6 Obnoxious Assumptions Hollywood Makes About Women and 6 Insane Stereotypes That Movies Can't Seem to Get Over.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out How Hollywood Has Made You Dumber, and other videos you won't see on the site!

Follow us on Facebook, and we'll follow you everywhere.