Barney as a character was "offering a different model of sexuality and gender."
Dr. Emily Contois, a media studies professor at the UOT in Oklahoma made the claim about cultural resistance to Barney coming from adult men, per the Daily Wire. The backlash against Barney that went on in the 1990s has been documented, and the professor reflected on the backlash in an episode of the series, "Generation Barney." The podcast is about the history of the purple dinosaur and its reception culturally.
During an episode titled, "Love 2 Hate," host Sabrina Herrera brought Contois on for the conversation. Herrera told the college professor, "Understanding particularly why adult men didn’t like Barney reveals a lot about gender and power in our current society. There were women who didn’t like Barney, but the high-profile hate was really coming from men."
Contois replied, "He offered up a different model for masculinity, even as a purple dinosaur and not a human. This message about love, about nurturing, about looking after others, that these are emotions and also sort of social practices and responsibilities that in our culture are constructed and understood to be sort of feminine and feminizing."
The college professor said that Barney as a character was "pushing back against that, offering a different model of sexuality and gender" and added that some men reacted badly to the show. She then added, "A part of that white masculine sort of set of authorities is also this incredible resistance to homosexuality."
The professor's university profile claims that she is a "public expert on a wide variety of topics" and adds that she has written for the left-wing publication, Jezebel, as well as NBC News. She has research interests in media studies, gender studies, fat studies, and others.
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