My husband has taken to calling it that, as in “I’m in the woman food aisle, what flavor do you like again?”

You’re totally right about SP. I remember having conversations about why The 40-Year Old Virgin rubbed me the wrong way: although the dudes who engage in all the gay-bashing-jokes and woman-hating bullshit are clearly meant to be understood as backwards and screwed up compared to Steve Carrell’s character, Apatow had a field day (and made a LOT of money) airing all those fag-and-bitch jokes, and worse, people get to laugh, and then go out and feel good and progressive because they identified with the larger “message” of the piece.

That gender programming is recognized to some degree as silly and laughable is good, but I see these commercials, and I don’t know if we can call this progress, or not.

I always think of South Park when I do this rant. They purport to have these moral stories, like how gay people are a-ok, but they spend the whole episode making fun of gay people because it makes people laugh.

I find the Pepsi commercial to be really unfortunate. It IS funny! And I hate to be a party crumb about it, but the funny has the horrible aftertaste of sexism and boy’s club humor. Seems like whenever men make fun of themselves, they still end up in this little club where they couldn’t be happier.

Anyway, my point is yes I think they are trying to have it both ways, which is why this commercial and many others have such confusing and competing messages.

Unpossible, I must admit: I am part of the problem. I have bought Men’s Pocky for my Dude, because we both like to snigger at it. I wonder if it’s made of death cookies and granite chunks, along with all that manly dark chocolate?

Fun fact: TAB was introduced when Coke didn’t want to use its brand name on a diet beverage. So they made TAB, marketed it to women, and later on said “duh!” and proceeded to introduce Diet Coke and spend a fortune marketing it as the unisex (manly?) low-calorie coke brand beverage.