That about sums it up. Via that_james @ Flickr
Superbowl Sunday is as much–if not more–about the flashy, expensive ads as it is the outcome of the game. A lot of the lead-up hubbub was about the Tebow “Abortions Murder Football Heros!” ad, but if one were an alien who landed in the US yesterday afternoon in time for the game, one might have learned the following messages about gender:
- Women and Doritos are of equal value, to be coveted by some men (skeevy would-be boyfriends) and protected by others (aw, cute little boys!), who are their rightful owners.
- Women aspire to be shirt-stripping spokes-objects for web-hosting sites. (This from the only commercial I saw that had women speaking to each other and/or no men at all.)
- Men spend a lot of time walking around without their pants on. This is gross and yet HI-larious. Women who appear without pants are HOT. The less often women wear pants, the better things are.
- Little people are male, and funny-looking. Let us laugh at them!
- Good Women attain their status by birthing (white) ball-throwing male children.
- Life with a woman is an endless parade of emasculating indignities that men endure mostly in silence. This heroism is possible thanks to the dick-hardening properties of a car with a big motor or a portable sports-watching device. This is the hill men will rightfully die upon.
Men talk a lot more. Men do more things. Men are the people whose talking and doing matters.
In other words: welcome to The Patriarchy. Now go get me a beer (bitch).
Aww, I was writing during the kerfuffle blow-up. Guess I’ll go grow up now.
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Oh Natipatt, I’d forgotten about the childbirth movie preview! Maybe the movie will be awesome, but the preview made it look like childbirth is the grossest, most horrible thing in existence, and if people actually knew what it looked like, they would never procreate. It reminded me of that Rabbi that says men shouldn’t be present for their wives’ childbirths, because then they won’t want sex anymore.
Making childbirth seem like something incredibly disgusting and degrading is definitely a way of othering women.
@mischiefmanager
Agreed on the ponies. I found that commercial with the horse and the bull who used to run together more adorable than I probably should have.
@SarahMC: That comment from Jez made my day.
@Bella: Right on.
@Misscalculate: My friends and I had a moment during that Clydesdale commercial where we were going “Wait! Is that INTERSPECIES LOVE? Shocking!” Then we realized the cow was male, and we were all “Wait! Is that INTERSPECIES GAY LOVE? Shocking!” Ultimately, though, we concluded that it was just interspecies bromance.
I agree with everything here, except it may be fair to say that it’s actually half the story. In addition to being perpetrating misogyny, men in these ads are generally portrayed as infantile idiots. The Super Bowl ads could perhaps most truthfully be characterized as simply anti-human.
@Evolving:
Of course. Advertising directed at women is incredibly insulting toward women, but advertising directed toward men insults EVERYONE.
i must admit to having been equally disgusted and confused by most of the ads you mention. i do take one quick exception to what you said about women without their pants. the one ad with everyone in their underwear in the office actually depicted regular-looking, non-model women in their regular cotton undies. not that this wasn’t hot, mind you.
We missed a lot of the commercials because we kept having to pause the game (usually to take care of our son) and then DH would fast forward to catch up. The few that we did see included the bridgestone one where the “hot wife” is thrown out of the car. My husband’s response, “that is f**ked up” (we also saw the dodge one and had a similar WTF moment). I’m sure some of these commercials were a hit with some guys but I think a lot of them were so offensive that they did more harm than good to the brand even among men (I’m assuming women were pretty uniformly offended).
Sarah MC – I love your post. But we deserve respect just because. We deserve respect just like anyone else does. Somehow men have come to expect all these things that we do for them, and now that the 21st century has rolled around and we’re finally asking them to do for themselves we are complete bitches. Ridiculous….What we should do is less. They can take care of their damn selves.
I am SUPER late to the party here, but I wanted to add one thing about the general trend of men portrayed as idiots in advertising:
I completely agree that the patriarchy hurts men too. And that if I were a man, I would not want to be portrayed as a massive idiot in the general media. However, I also think it’s true that there are men out there who use this portrayal to their advantage.
Take for example the commercials featured in Sarah Haskin’s Target Women: Doofy Husbands (http://current.com/items/90569059_sarah-haskins-in-target-women-doofy-husbands.htm). In these ads, men are too incompetent to do housework/chores. They have no basic life skills. But ultimately, the fault in the ad still lies with the women. After all, they should have KNOWN that their husbands were too stupid to do anything. The man might be dumb, but the woman is DUMBER for letting him do anything in the first place. (Note in particular the ad Haskins addresses about killing weeds. The woman begins the ad by saying “maybe it’s my fault…”.) And this trope is just as true in real life. There are men who will lay the responsibility for all decisions on wives/girlfriends/mothers so that there is someone to blame when the work doesn’t get done.
The same holds true for the Dodge Charger ad. Flackette was right when she pointed out that a lot of those “chores” don’t have anything to do with women. But if a man can make it SEEM as though his wife/girlfriend is the witch who forces him to get to work on time, that’s one less challenge of adulthood he has to accept responsibility for. He’s already established that it’s his wife’s job, so when he doesn’t show up on time one day, it isn’t really his fault. She just wasn’t enough of a nag to get him there.
My point, made shorter, is this: when you have privilege, the ability to be doofy (and blame someone else for said doofiness) is just another facet of that privilege.
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