I get that Carolla is just cracking wise, from inside the bubble of his own lame version of post-rockabilly guy-shtick — he is interviewed inside a garage, with what looks like an orange Camaro behind him in the middle distance — and that if you brought up the fact that those old-time “chick jobs” paid 40 to 80 percent less than “guy jobs,” he’d get all irritated with you for being a drag. He’s still an idiot, though, even if he’s an idiot in quotation marks. That’s kind of the problem with “Mansome,” which tries to tackle the enormous subject of contemporary male vanity as an assemblage of whimsical anecdotes, which are often entertaining in themselves but studiously avoid any semblance of intelligent analysis or historical understanding.

It’s pointless to come down too hard on a film like “Mansome,” because like all Spurlock’s work (including “Super Size Me” and “Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?”) it’s driven by a good-hearted frat-boy humor that seems fundamentally sincere. It’s more first-person journal and travelogue than it is cultural archaeology, and as such it’s basically OK. Spurlock gets to interview some of his celebrity pals about their attitudes toward masculinity and grooming: Paul Rudd is slightly ill at ease, Judd Apatow is charming, and Zach Galifianiakis steals the show, of course. (When asked to rate his looks on a scale of 1 to 10, Galifianakis responds confidently that some people find him “a strong 2.”)

Spurlock documents his own decision to shave off his trademark porn-star ‘stache, thereby reducing his 5-year-old son to torrents of tears. (It was definitely a mistake, Morgan.) He meets various kooky characters who have some tangential relationship to his theme, including a California suburbanite named Jack Passion who describes himself as a professional “beardsman,” meaning he travels the world exhibiting his Hagar-the-Horrible facial thatch in competitions. (Anthrax rhythm guitarist Scott Ian responds: “Beard and mustache competitions, for want of a better word, are kind of gay.” I laughed, and I know that’s wrong.) Then there’s the elegantly coiffed and tailored Manhattan clothing buyer who describes himself as the “dictionary definition of a metrosexual,” perhaps making up for his teen years as a Sikh immigrant outcast in middle America. And the entrepreneur who has introduced a lotion-y product called Fresh Balls: The Solution for Men. (Yes, it is what you think it is.)

In fairness, Spurlock is at least half aware that all the jokes and episodes of “Mansome” never add up to anything, except perhaps the conclusion that neither male narcissism nor male grooming is anything new, but that they have been coded in different ways at different times. Masculinity is no less a troubled construction than is femininity, and it’s just as easily whipped about by the tides of commerce and fashion. The aristocratic dandies of the 18th century make Spurlock’s New York Sikh metrosexual look like a shoeless Dust Bowl farmhand, and every Important Man of the 19th century, regardless of background or affiliation — King Leopold II! Karl Marx! The pioneering Ambrose Burnside! — had his own tonsorial signature that required extensive maintenance.

Now, I’m not denying that there’s something specific and contemporary about the version of male narcissism wrought by consumer capitalism, with its tendency to turn things once seen as immutable, such as gender or sexual identity, into fluid and exchangeable commodities with no fixed meaning. (Speaking of Karl Marx, it was he who wrote that, under capitalism, “all fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away … All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”) It was to address that question on a pop-sociological level that the term “metrosexual,” first introduced to America a decade ago in this Salon article by Mark Simpson, was originally invented. (Simpson’s coinage was instantly stolen by marketers, of course, and turned into a pretty-boy Frankenstein monster who was, in turn, burned by the resentful villagers.)

Some of that big-picture stuff comes up almost by accident in “Mansome,” but Spurlock doesn’t even pretend to pay attention. He’s just a guy! He’s confused like the rest of us! He makes his little boy cry and watches pro wrestler Shawn Daivari (a Minnesota native who plays the anti-American “heel” called Sheik Abdul Bashir) shave his back all the way down to his butt crack. He sticks for far too long with an embarrassing framing device in which Jason Bateman and Will Arnett go to a spa and engage in uneasy homoerotic banter. He chops up the movie into irrelevant chapters about beards, mustaches, hair and so on, as if those things were unrelated. When he goes to get his own hair cut, it’s at some pseudo-old-fashioned place in downtown Manhattan where the wood fixtures are way too polished and the barbers are conspicuously overdressed. It’s kind of endearing and kind of asinine.

“Mansome” is now playing in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., San Francisco, Seattle and Austin, Texas, with more cities to follow.

Who understands this better than professional dominatrixes? With so many speculating this week on Roiphe’s article, I decided to hand the microphone over to women with a unique perspective on the dynamics in power and play.

Several said that Roiphe is actually on to something when she talks about submission as an escape from life’s stresses — only, this reasonable point is overwritten by her wrongheaded focus on women and the impact of feminism. Roiphe wonders whether there is “something exhausting about the relentless responsibility of a contemporary woman’s life … all that strength and independence and desire and going out into the world,” and suggests “that, for some, the more theatrical fantasies of sexual surrender offer a release, a vacation, an escape from the dreariness and hard work of equality.” What about the exhausting, relentless responsibility of contemporary people’s lives?

Many men who turn to submissive fantasies do so for precisely the sort of vacation from responsibility that Roiphe suggests women are seeking. Olivia Severine, a transsexual dominatrix living in San Francisco, says most of her clients were “very high-powered” men weighed down by responsibility. “They came to see me as a brief escape when no one was looking at them for direction or leadership,” she says. “The time with me is when they were told what to do, what to feel and how to act … and all the weight of their careers, families, lives, is lifted from them for a cherished few hours.”

Mistress Shae Flanigan, a Los Angeles dominatrix, says her clients are “CEOs, high-ranking managers, lawyers and wonderfully brilliant men from all over the business spectrum.” What they have in common is “that they come to me to create an environment where they don’t need to think,” she says. “Where they can trust me to keep them safe while I weave together an enticing, thrilling, euphoric and painful world where it is literally impossible to think.”

It isn’t that these guys wish they had less real-world power — it’s just, power is stressful, and submission provides a release. “BDSM is a hell of a lot more affordable of a vacation than the Bahamas, I promise you,” says Flanigan.

Melissa Febos, author of “Whip Smart,” a book about her time as a pro-domme, tells me, “As someone who spent nearly four years catering to the submissive fantasies of men, and who eventually had to acknowledge her own submissive fantasies, I can say with some certainty that I think all people experience anxiety about power,” she says. “Aren’t our objects of eroticization often the things we feel unreconciled about?”

Most of Febos’ clients “experienced an imbalance of power in their lives,” she says. For some it was “extreme disempowerment,” like child abuse, racism or poverty; for others, it was “an overwhelming burden of power,” related to everything from wealth to politics. (“During the Republican convention, business at the dungeon boomed,” she says.) All of that is to say that “eroticization stemming from anxiety is not gender-specific,” Febos explains — nor is it specific to the relative power one has in the real world.

“Everyone, regardless of career choice or level of importance, is saddled with the burden of making important decisions about their own lives and the lives of the people around them,” Domina Nyx of New York City points out.

While Natasha Strange, who has worked as a domme for almost 20 years, has had plenty of “men who are powerful and want to give up control for a bit,” she’s also had tons of “musicians, cab drivers, pharmacy reps, teachers and your basic blue-collar workers who are just kinky and want to feel desired for an hour or three.” Interestingly enough, she says, “The very first female client I had was a housewife and a mother of two.”

As Febos suggested, these desires can arise from disempowerment. While New York-based Maya Midnight has some high-powered clients — after all, they are the ones most capable of regularly paying for her services — she says, “I get far more clients who experience loss of power in their day-to-day lives and have fetishized it.”

Roiphe’s suggestion that women’s submission fantasies are indicative of an underlying longing for the way things used to be, pre-feminism, seems particularly questionable when compared to “race play,” which Mistress Justine Cross describes in an email as “capitalizing on themes of racism in mainstream society, i.e., degrading a submissive using racial slurs, and redeploying those themes for sexual pleasure.” It seems patently absurd to suggest that an African-American man who eroticizes racism has a deep-seated desire for the days before the civil-rights movement. Should it be different when it comes to a woman longing to play-act a “sexist” fantasy?

Often enough, the “roots,” as Midnight calls it, of submissive desires can seem rather random: “One client saw a movie when he was a teenager where a woman kicked a man in the balls and has been into ball-busting ever since,” she says. “As a child, I got told off for hitting a man in the crotch with my stuffed penguin and now I love hurting balls. Go figure.” Sometimes these desires emerge at a young age (dominatrix Cybill Troy tells me, “I have personal slaves as well as clients who showed signs of their interests as young as toddlers … a 3-year-old with a tendency to crawl into cupboards who grows up to love being caged and contained both physically and mentally, for example”); other times they only surface well into adulthood.

Some believe that S/M fantasies are like dreams in that they can be difficult to fully make sense of: “I believe that they come from creative and imaginative minds that may mix the powers of everyday rituals and roles into a more complicated and interesting puzzle than the usual vanilla missionary routine,” says Yin Q., a dominatrix turned BDSM educator.

Of course, actually visiting a dom or dominatrix is much different from reading a page-turner about an S/M relationship. “Fifty Shades of Grey” tells us what many women want to read about, but it doesn’t tell us what these women are actually doing in the bedroom. Lady Cyn Aptic of Los Angeles points out, “In many cases people’s eyes are bigger than their stomachs and they prefer the fantasy to reality.”

That fantasy has become much more mainstream as the sartorial trappings of BDSM have been adopted by some of pop music’s biggest female stars, with Rihanna and Lady Gaga devoting songs to “S&M” and liking it “rough” (as I wrote about in a piece last year headlined, “Is kink the new girl-on-girl kiss?”). “I think there’s been a trend toward making the naughty more mainstream; it’s just a modern version of the bodice ripper,” says Olivia Vexx of “Fifty Shades of Grey.” “[It's acceptable now for] a soccer mom to go buy a bodice and a whip.” Strange says, “When I started as a domme, it was near impossible to find thigh-high boots” — but now she says, “I can go to pretty much any suburban mall.” Maybe we’re finding more evidence at this cultural moment of women entertaining submission fantasies simply because it’s more acceptable.

But even in the worst-case, end-of-times scenario that Roiphe is right and “Fifty Shades of Grey” is so popular because of women’s current anxieties about equality (such as it is), that doesn’t mean that it’s “evidence of unhappiness, or an invalidation of feminism,” says Febos. In fact, she suggests that it’s “just the opposite” — it might actually be a sign of progress that millions of women are so hungrily pursuing sexual fantasies independent of men.

Contrary to Roiphe’s belief, there are plenty of feminists who are neither “perplexed,” as she puts it, by submissive desires nor find it contradictory to their politics. Febos, who considers herself a feminist and also has submissive fantasies, says, “I still live in a culture that floods my consciousness with instructions to be a passive, sexual object; that my only power rests in my sexuality as defined by men’s desire,” she says. “Mightn’t this create some anxiety in my own psyche? I think so. Have I eroticized those messages in order to locate them somewhere that won’t impede my progress as an empowered, independent woman in the rest of my life? Maybe so. But so what?”

Just in time for the holidays, the Danish brand rolled out a pink-themed line of Lego Friends last December, featuring curvaceous, pretty girls who play in pastel-themed, gently constructed cafes, beauty shops, puppy houses and their own little stages. That’s the life of a girl for you  – looking pretty, “decorating your house” and eating cupcakes.

From the get-go, the Lego Friends were met with a not-so-friendly response. The International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals called the line  “devoid of imagination,” and said it would “promote overt forms of sexism.” US News offered “5 Reasons Not to Buy Your Daughter Pink Legos.”  In Time, Ruth Davis Konigsburg bemoaned that “With its emphasis on physical appearance and limited career choices — [is it] really any different from that of Disney’s princesses?” She continued, noting how the Friends sets require the barest of construction, “LEGO Friends doesn’t give girls the same sense of mastery and accomplishment that it gives boys.”

So it’s a hopeful sign that on Friday, members of SPARK (Sexualization Protest Action Resistance Knowledge) are sitting down for a meeting with Lego executives. The goal, as SPARK optimistically explains, is that “We want [Lego] to commit to dramatically increasing the female characters in their non-Friends lines. (The current numbers are pretty dismal.) We want them to consider female representation when choosing pre-existing material to adapt into new toys. And we want them to improve the Friends line.”

It’s a bold hope, especially when Lego reports that Friends line is “off to a very strong start” just the way it is. But it would be wise for a company founded nearly 50 years ago with the imperative to create toys for “girls and for boys” to remember that goal doesn’t mean “girl toys and boy toys.”  We don’t need to ostracize our sons and daughters to the divergent wildernesses of ninja land and beauty parlors.

For George R.R. Martin, the novelist who created this world in his “Song of Ice and Fire” series, the medium is the message. The things that make the story so daunting and so off-putting to some — its sheer massiveness and its huge cast of characters — are part of what makes it so thrilling to me, as a woman who likes to see other women on-screen. It’s not just that the women in “Game” are strong — and the primary females are, in both figurative and literal senses — but that there are so goddamn many of them, each one fighting to exercise power over the world and her own life. They’re far from a sisterhood (one of the main themes of the show is that trusting others is a rube’s game) but as a collective, they make an unavoidably huge impression.

Fantasy stories, like all genre narratives, are built on archetypes, and “Game of Thrones” seems to leave no trope of feminine power unexplored. There are mothers, like the noblewomen Catelyn Stark and Cersei Baratheon, who are driven by their fierce, lioness-like love for their children. There are a wide variety of warrior princesses and any number of women who use their sexuality to get ahead. There are at least two witchy women (mysticism being a kind of power reliably granted to female and minority characters): Mirri Maz Duur, the Lhazareen who uses “blood magic” to destroy her people’s conquerors, and Melisandre, the priestess who brings a fiery new religion to Westeros and becomes the force behind a fearsome army in the process. These women don’t always win the games they’re playing — they get slapped down as brutally and as often as the male characters do — but they sure know how to fight, week after week.

In a way, “Game of Thrones” reminds me of that other big Sunday night drama: “Mad Men.” In both of these large, multi-character shows, the women are constantly defining themselves against, and through, rigid societal constraints. The stakes are higher in “Game of Thrones”: Many of the major female characters have been or are poised to be traded in marriage, like human chess pieces, among the Great Houses of Westeros, and sexual violence is an ever-present threat. But both shows feature a number of very different women, who we’re invited to read against one another and whose primary relationships are nearly always with men — a condition that’s shaped partly by the setting and partly by the writers’ narrative choices. And on both shows, everyone knows it’s each woman for herself.

In “Game of Thrones,” we’re treated to myriad strategies for how to make it in a man’s world. In Season 1, viewers met Daenerys Targaryen, a teenage girl who was given by her slimy older brother to a burly barbarian warlord, and who has since gone from a passive, victimized child to an awkward but passionate and often forceful ruler. (Add another trope to the mix: the I-found-strength-from-my-trauma woman.)

Both slimy brother and burly husband are gone by the time Season 2 begins, as is the son who, it was prophesied, would grow up to be “the stallion that mounts the world.” (He arrived stillborn and deformed at the end of last season.) Even with the world’s only living dragons at her side, it seems likely that Daenerys will, again and again, have to prove herself worthy of ruling. “They don’t like the idea of a woman leading a khalasar,” her male advisor tells her in Episode 2 of this season, after a rival tribe sends her the decapitated head of one of her riders. Whatever you think about the casting of Emilia Clarke, the lovely Brit who plays Daenerys (personally, I vacillate), it’s fun to watch her learn how to access the queenly yawp inside her.

The second and third episodes of this season bring us two warrior women who are both familiar to anyone who’s read Martin’s epics: Yara Greyjoy (known as Asha Greyjoy in the books) and Brienne of Tarth, who add a new female trope to “Game of Thrones” while deepening the show’s engagement with questions of female strength and of male-female dynamics.

Yara is one of two surviving children of Balon Greyjoy, a minor lord whose rebellion for independence was brutally put down by King Robert nine years before the action of the show. In this Sunday’s episode, [mild spoiler alert] Yara’s younger brother Theon returns to their homeland — a bleak, salt-stained outpost known as the Iron Islands — after having spent more than half of his life as a ward of Ned Stark, the king’s closest supporter, in the relatively glamorous northern kingdom of Winterfell. (If you’ve watched Season 1, the comparison should give you as sense of just how grim the Iron Islands really are.) Theon expects to receive a hero’s welcome when he arrives. In Winterfell, he was a boy without a father and thus, without rank; on the Iron Islands, Theon will finally be a son and heir.

“They say hard places breed hard men,” Theon says, with a boy’s overweening pride, to a ship-girl just before he screws her. “And hard men rule the world.” (No one said “Game of Thrones” was especially subtle in its deployment of penis humor.)

But instead, Theon finds that while he’s been gone, his cocky sister has become the hard young man of the Iron Islands. Yara doesn’t just sexually one-up her swaggering little brother (in a scene that plays like an outtake from a particularly filthy Shakespeare comedy); she usurps his place at his father’s side. Yara has commanded men and killed them; unlike Theon, she would never wear jewels she hadn’t “paid the iron price” for — i.e., liberated from fresh corpses she’s made. When the Iron Islands eventually head to war, Balon tells a sputtering, incredulous Theon that Yara will command a fleet of 30 ships. Theon will get one. Its name? The Sea Bitch. “We thought she’d be perfect for you,” his sister smirks. The Yara/Theon scenes play a bit like a fantasy version of a high-school sports drama, with the football field swapped out for a battlefield. “But … but … you can’t let her play, coach, she’s a GIRL!” (Theon actually yells something like this at his father, as Balon and Yara make fun of his sissy clothes.)

Brienne of Tarth, on the other hand, couldn’t muster a smirk if her life depended on it. The martial maid, a major character whom we meet in Episode 3, cuts a striking figure on-screen: stolid, lumbering, able to bring down one of the finest knights in the realm with a charging body tackle. As played by the 6-foot-4 Gwendoline Christie, Brienne comes off as a little priggish, a little too invested in the postures and poses of knighthood, as if trying to compensate for both her ungainly body and the fact that she’s a woman.

Whereas most of the women in “Game of Thrones” orbit around their lovers or the men in their families, Brienne has eyes only for her gay, or at least bisexual, king, Renly Baratheon. “You fought bravely today, Lady Brienne,” says a positively shrimpy-looking Catelyn Stark after witnessing the aforementioned throwdown. “I fought for my king,” Brienne says stiffly. “Soon I’ll fight for him on the battlefield. Die for him, if I must.”

Behind the proud, out-thrust chin, you can sense the romantic zeal that drives Brienne. In her eyes, dying for her king would be a fitting consummation to their relationship. The women’s brief exchange ends with a terse correction from the newly minted member of Renly’s personal guard: “If it please you, ‘Brienne’ is enough. I’m no lady.” Christie delivers the last line, which could have been a clunker, in a way that’s satisfyingly difficult to parse; I can’t tell if she’s ashamed to say that out loud or disgusted that she has to bring up her sex at all.

Brienne would be an arresting character no matter what story she appeared in. But it’s the fact that she’s just one of a multitude of rich, sharply drawn female characters that makes her — and the show — so compelling.

“Game of Thrones” persuasively demonstrates why some of us are always yammering on about the need for increased representation of women (and minorities) on television: Through the relatively simple process of upping the numbers, the burden on any individual woman magically lightens. No single character in “Game of Thrones” has to be the show’s final word on womanhood, and that’s a freeing prospect. I can find Melisandre a dinner-theater-esque take on the sorceress archetype; you can find Daenerys an appalling victim of untreated Stockholm syndrome. But it’s OK. With the women of “Game of Thrones,” you don’t have to put all your dragon eggs in one basket.

Much like J.C. Penney’s recent “Too Pretty to Do Homework” shirts or, more revoltingly, Topman’s  line of rape apologist wear, the revelation that somewhere, men’s trousers are telling them to pawn off their dirty laundry on the nearest set of ovaries was not met with universal amusement. On Monday, Barnett tweeted a photo of the tag, saying she was “so shocked at this label in my boyfriend’s new trousers.”

She wasn’t the only shocked one. As the image was retweeted across the world, it was declared “horrible” and a “disgrace” by disgusted consumers. But even more horrible were the other commenters — the ones who blithely pleaded that they were “not sure what the issue is here” or told her to get back to doing the wash.

As Barnett then elaborated in her column, “If the comment had been remotely funny – I would have been the first to laugh and shrug it off … But it was the lack of any implied humour and the horrible surprise of such an incongruous message hidden away inside some trousers, that left me just plain stunned.” There’s nothing like trying to explain why a joke isn’t funny to make it even less funny, but here’s the thing – a sneaky little jibe, one that implies that every man has a woman and every woman does his laundry, isn’t a joke. It’s just a flat, dumb and, yes I’m going to say because I guess I’m just a humorless feminist, sexist comment. It’s a put-down. One that smacks of entitlement and disdain. One that says, “The man who wears these pants really wears the pants.” Which is a pretty bold boast for a cheap pair of ugly chinos, if you ask me.

Barnett said her beau purchased the pants from the discount men’s clothing store Madhouse last month. The company has since issued the statement that “The chinos in question are manufactured by a jeans brand that we stock but the care instructions on this product were not proofed by our buyers,” adding that “the wording was not instigated or ordered by Madhouse. The wording is clearly meant as a joke but now it has been pointed out to us it is something we will need to be more careful about in the future.”

In the greater scheme of things, someone’s lame idea of a funny pants label is not on par with trying to wrest away our reproductive rights or calling us whores. But if you want to know why it matters, look no further than the comments to Barnett’s own story (or, I’ll wager, in about 10 minutes, on this one). The crass “Oh, shut up.” The blowjob jokes. The surprise that the writer is neither an “idiotic teenaged girl” nor “horse-faced schoolmarm.” The exasperated “For God’s sake, grow up” and “Calm down, dear.” And the accusations, again and again, of that notoriously humorless feminism.

See, this is what we deal with. Every time women point out stereotypes and insults, when we say that we aren’t entertained by the status quo, when we call BS when it rears its head, we are inevitably met with even more and bigger of the same. We’re greeted with a hearty “Get a sense of humor” or a dismissive “What’s the big deal, sweetie?” We’re maligned and mocked, told to keep quiet and “pick your battles.” But the small battles count too. They count because every time we let them slide, we grant tacit approval to a culture of hostility. We say that a real man doesn’t respect women, and a real woman keeps her mouth shut. We tell our daughters to be quiet and pleasing and our co-workers to not make waves. We tell the bullies that they’re winning.

With a simple, disgusted tweet, Barnett said to hell with all that. She distinguished between making a joke and being a jerk. She reminded us that if you think that you can’t point out subtler forms of sexism and keep your eyes on the big battles at the same time, perhaps you’re the one who’s just not that adept at multitasking. And she proved that something as tiny as the tag in a pair of pants can speak volumes.