Daddy Pig: an unlikely flashpoint in the gender wars

Who would have guessed that a stubbly, bespectacled cartoon pig would open a new front in the ongoing debate about male role models?

Supermodel David Gandy has launched a takedown of Daddy Pig, the father figure in the long-running preschool cartoon series “Peppa Pig”. He criticised the porcine patriarch as a “useless fool” and a poor example of masculinity and fatherhood for young children.

‘Comedy fool’

At the turn of this century, sitcoms and adverts regularly portrayed men as “schlubby incompetents” and the women in their lives as “long-suffering, competent and beautiful”, said Séamas O’Reilly in The Observer . This “sort-of Homer Simpson/‘Men Behaving Badly’ hangover” was “not merely tedious and infantilising for men”, it made it socially acceptable for them to behave like “lazy,