Why Florida Man?

When I first posted my Florida series prompt list last week, a lot of people seemed to get a kick out of me including “Florida Man” as one of the daily challenges. 

I had an international follower wondering what that meant, but the chorus of “LOLs” and laughing emojis indicated a shared understanding by the majority. In case you are unaware, the Florida Man trope commonly refers to a rowdy individual making news for doing something particularly dumb, brazen and often dangerous in the state of Florida.

You’ve seen the headlines: “Florida Man Charged with Assault with a Deadly Weapon After Throwing Alligator Through Drive-Thru Window” pretty much sums it up. A disproportionate-seeming number of rascal incidents appear to occur in Florida, as the ubiquity of the term would indicate.

But of course, every state has folks who do outlandish things, and it turns out there is at least one good reason that men from the Sunshine State have been singled out for their reputation: Florida’s Sunshine Law.

This open records policy for government business means that journalists have quicker access, relative to other states, to arrest records and photos that make for viral hits. Mix in a large population, warm weather and some confirmation bias and you have the recipe for the Florida Man phenomenon. 

As silly as it is, I wanted to include this in the prompt list to point out a sneaky way that classism is imposed on our psyches. The prevalence of wild stories in this area suggests that the state has a culture of dumb criminal behavior that is uniquely its own, a narrative that falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. In reality, quick media access has given Florida an exploitative edge to make lower class people the butt of a joke.

It’s hard not to laugh at some of the preposterous headlines that the Florida Man genre has produced. (Some stories, like any reckless activity between a human and an alligator, feel particularly on brand in Florida, after all.) But a peek under the surface of the punchline reveals a collective willingness to perpetuate a classist narrative that people with less economic means are inferior. 

That concept, unfortunately, is certainly not unique to Florida at all.