Does Hollywood Celebrate Beta Males?

Is Hollywood to blame for the amount of men that wander the world clueless about how to interact with women, project their masculinity, and just generally succeed in life?

This Newsweek article explores the trend in today’s Hollywood where that unemployed, slacker, nice guy, beta male prevails out, and in the end, wins the girl.

Do we have Judd Apatow to blame for this? Or did it start sooner?

If you think about it, it kind of makes sense. If you watch movies from the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s, the heroes tended to be suave debonair alpha males like Humphrey Bogart, Frank Sinatra, and Marlon Brando. These were men that epitomized masculinity, alpha, and a take charge attitude.

Cajun wrote a post awhile back about old school pick up from the likes of Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. You’ll notice that the style back then is vastly different than the style of pickup you see in movies today.

Slowly I believe it started evolving towards celebrating the more beta lead characters. In the 70’s guys like Woody Allen were all the sudden scoring the hot chicks in films.

Then came the 80’s where I believe Hollywood completely turned its back on the alpha male in favor of their beta counterparts.

Thanks to movies like Revenge of the Nerds, Can’t Buy Me Love, and Say Anything, an entire generation grew up believing that, in the end, the nerd gets the girl.

And now we’ve got Judd Apatow having us believe that Seth Rogen’s character in Knocked Up is going to score a chick like Kathryn Heigl. Or the boys from Superbad are going to get with a couple of the high school hotties? Or that Jon Heder is going to score any ass? C’mon!

Even on television, the “nice guys” like Jim from The Office, are getting all the girls.

Is it any wonder guys have no clue how to handle women?