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Targetmania

Holly

You know, things can get hectic over the holidays. There’s a lot to do, people are out of town, there are holiday parties to go to. You get stomach flu, you throw your back out, and your father starts calling you and talking about how his second marriage is in trouble and your twelve-year-old sister is anxiously cleaning everything in the house. (Oh wait, that last sentence is just me… uh, never mind.)

But there’s still no excuse for this grave oversight: in violation of our Official Blog Charter, we somehow forgot to post several of Sarah Haskins’ “Target: Women” videos, all about the lessons we women can learn from advertising. And movies too! Movies about vampires!

I’m sorry, this will never happen again. More videos after the jump.

OH MY GOD… SANDWICHES ARE FOR BOYS!

Seriously, what was up with that McDonald’s ad? “Whoa, thank god, we don’t have go to Starbucks anymore, where we have to PRETEND that we’re smart and we can’t wear heels or read gossip magazines and all those normal female things!” What? Whose brain did that fall out of?

I really liked the Twilight clip though. For one thing, it shows that even the teenage girls who show up to scream over the vampire boys have not somehow been magically brainwashed into pre-marital celibacy. Phew — according to some views, we might have had a mass conversion of 65% of the girls in the country into Mormons otherwise, right? I still describe Twilight to people as “an icepick cleverly disguised as a book, and designed to penetrate the skulls and frontal lobes of teenage girls in precisely the right spots.” But that’s basically the same definition as “a really good romance novel” anyway, and I also think the Young Ladies of America are quite intelligent enough, by and large, to get that.

11 thoughts on Targetmania

  1. i had not seen the car one… thanx

    I want to be Sarah when i grow up. except i think i am older than her already

    sigh

  2. THANK YOU! I laugh my ass off every time I watch that. About 45 minutes ago I was actually trying to remember what the title of that segment was, and I was about to start randomly googling things, until I saw this post.

  3. Two things, and two things only.

    1: Sarah Haskins seems like she’d be a lot of fun to hang out with.

    2: That wiener at the end of the clips does not seem like he would be fun to hang out with.

  8. oh noooo! the twilight clip doesn’t seem to mention what an abusive, condescending prick Edward seems to be, or exactly how empty-headed Bella is portrayed to be. seriously, it’s scary!

  9. Love it! Besides breaking out into dances and fits of hysterical laughter over a new mop head, I’m always annoyed when commercials show someone doing something selfish (but oh so wacky!) and they’re not called out on it. The Secret deodorant commercial: Why would you hail a cab only to tell the driver you don’t want a cab? Wouldn’t the cab driver tell you to go fuck yourself and give you the finger as he peels out? I don’t want to buy a deodorant that makes me wander around in city traffic (although apparently nobody will honk at me for doing that either).

  10. I wonder how the fundies feel about this. Twilight does preach abstinence (or so I’ve heard) but it makes a demonic creature – a vampire, no less – into a hero. Hmmmmmm

  11. Oh, I think Twilight was bizzarely on some fundamentalist website’s top 10 moral movies of 2008. There was an article over at Shakesville, I think, that pointed out the irony of vampires = good, wizards and witches (i.e. harry potter) = bad.

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