The TV Showdown: Who Controls the Remote?

by Leslie Bennetts

(Page 5 of 7) Rescue Me.”When they stop fighting, he changes the channel,” his wife reports with a sigh. Gender-based stereotypes are odious, of course,but come on, you can’t tell me there are a lot of women out there watching two war movies simultaneously so they can switch back and forth for maximum carnage.Which brings us back to the biggest problem of all. Even when Mulheren is watching Animal Planet, his wife can’t stand doing it with him. “He controls the remote, and he likes to flip around,” says Butterbaugh, an actress. “He can watch four or five things at once, and it doesn’t seem to bother him when he misses something, but it really bugs me. So if I want to watch something uninterrupted, I watch alone.”

Mulheren’s explanation is simple. “Men get bored,” he says. “Women want to know what’s on television. Men want to know what else is on television.”

So what is it with men and the remote? The sociological literature is full of academic treatises on the subject (my favorite being the one that traced men’s insistence on controlling the remote back to their ancestors wielding maces in the Middle Ages). References to phallic symbols, men’s social anxiety, and the male need to dominate abound, as do quasi-Darwinian speculations about men’s reluctance to commit, whether to a program or a woman, a line of thought that would sound all too familiar to Carrie Bradshaw.

“Television is a medium of instant gratification,” my husband explains. “If you go back to the classic paradigm of the male as hunter, a man with the remote is hunting for thrills, and there is no reason to stay with anything that’s not thrilling you.” He flashes me a wicked grin. “Just as there’s no reason to stay with a woman who’s not thrilling you.”

Women find their own ways of fighting back, of course. “I’ve been known to hide the remote,” admits Jill Robertson, a communications manager who lives in