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, childish boors”. Daddy Pig “is, in every sense, a crudely drawn character, one whose flaws are presented for comic effect”, but he’s not at all a “feckless moron”.

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What Gandy seems to have completely missed is that Daddy Pig is a creation in the mould of “a classic, fat, comedy fool like Oliver Hardy or Benny Hill or Falstaff”, said Giles Coren in The Times. “If Daddy Pig did sit-ups all day and made three million a year posing in his Y-fronts, he wouldn’t be funny.”

‘Emotionally present’

Most people believe films, TV programmes and adverts fail to provide good role models for boys, according to a recent Centre for Social Justice poll for its “Lost Boys” study. Male characters are seen either as “pathetic” and useless or “frightening” and “excessively masculine”.

Say what you want about the portrayal of Daddy Pig but I’m sure an “Ozempic-thin, jacked and motivated ‘role model’ version would be just as bad”, said Celia Walden in The Telegraph. The answer seems simple to me: let’s make male characters more “varied and nuanced” and “above all, not politically driven. Because nothing kills a character quite like an agenda – woke or anti-woke.”

Clearly, Gandy “hasn’t watched enough ‘Peppa Pig’”, said Charlotte Cripps in The Independent. Daddy Pig “might be clumsy but, at his core, he’s a good, decent dad”. He is “emotionally present for his kids”, “rarely gets angry”, and, “most importantly, he supports his kids’ dreams”. Let’s be honest: “Peppa Dad is a pig with glasses”. We can’t take him “as seriously as self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate”.