In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Tag: Advertising

Miller Lite Ads Say Teh Wimmenz Are Stupid, Wrong and Boring

I have no idea when this ad was made — though it looks to me that it was created in recent years under an attempt to make it look older — but I do know that it’s not nearly as cute as director Errol Morris apparently thinks it is:

So not only do you have the same boring yet offensive notion that there is no greater punishment for a man than being forced to listen to the horrifically mundane and stupid nattering of women, but you’ve also got the line “there are times when even the most misguided opinion is best left uncorrected” (emphasis from the commercial).

So, I’m sorry, they’re not just saying yet again that a woman will basically castrate a man for daring to disagree with her — they’re actually saying that there is no “disagreement” only right and wrong opinions, and that men always have the right ones and women always have the wrong ones.  Well yeah, strangely enough fellows, us evil uppity women might just take issue with that particular approach.  I imagine that just as many women as men are fine with debate — but being corrected on our misguided opinions?  Surprisingly, we take to that just about as well as men do, too.

See more from this series of ads, which also promote outdated, unhealthy and essentialist views of masculinity, over at Sociological Images.

Sexist Skies

Wow, with Virgin now officially off the list, Southwest having been off for sometime, and American Airlines getting booted years ago for wholly personal reasons, my list of potential airlines seems to be growing shorter by the minute.

As a side note, I love how they put in that half-hearted effort to prove that it’s totally not sexist(!), by tossing in the woman at the end briefly checking out the male pilot.  Right before the pilot specifically moves into a dominating position in front of the flight attendants, while they fawn all over him.  Nice one.

h/t Feministing

Target Women: Chocolate

Oh how I love Sarah Haskins:

(If you have trouble viewing the embedded video, click here.)

See, if as Sarah suggests, that was the Beatles, that would indeed be my personal response. As many of you probably already know. But for them to suggest that I’d diminish my personal, special reserve of Beatles-related excitement and irrationality for a minuscule amount of Oreo Cakesters? Yup, I’m insulted.

Thankfully, Sarah makes me feel much better about it.

Sexist Superbowl Ads

UPDATE: Non-U.S. readers can now view the videos. Apologies for the originals; I had no way of knowing that Hulu.com was so stupid.

Oh yeah, you knew it was coming. I knew it was coming before I sat down to watch the big game. (Though I usually don’t care, the Steelers were playing, and my dad is the world’s biggest fan. We went over for moral support; and thankfully the Steelers not only won, but it was also a pretty good game.)

For the record, I think that my 21-year-old brother and his friends laughed at every one of these commercials. My dad, knowing my political leanings well from many fights, looked nervously my way but also laughed a few times. Which was, you know, awesome. I sat there and grumbled to my thankfully non-laughing husband that each of them was going up on the blog. Which now, they are.

Firestone: “Taters”

Shorter Firestone: Haha, women nag and talk to much! Wouldn’t it be great if they never spoke again?  And isn’t it even better that enough men apparently still think this way for us to be able to profit off of it?  Oh my, we’re so incredibly original.

Read More…Read More…

Because if you put flowers on it and have a matching tote, women will buy it.

So that image to the left, at first glance just looks like some cute (though not my style) little clutch, tote and scarf set, right?  Well, close, but not quite.

Actually, it’s a laptop. A laptop made to look like a clutch purse.  A “digital clutch.”  And yes, it does actually come with the scarf and bag.  Well, if you’re willing to pay $200 extra.

I’m not even offended.  I’m just fucking bemused.

I just bought a laptop, too.  Funny, that while I did want something lightweight, I also wanted something that was easy to read, was relatively inexpensive and worked well.  I didn’t even consider the overall aesthetic value of the laptop and whether I could get away with passing it off as a clutch handbag to my ever jealous female friends.  The ovaries must have been busted that day.

Title yanked from email tip by reader Kristen. Thanks Kristen!

Gendering Comfort

This advertisement for the Chevy Silverado truck isn’t anything particularly new, I’m afraid. It’s supposedly super masculine men like (Hall of Fame football player) Howie Long policing other men’s masculinity and shaming them when they don’t live up to the arbitrary gender ideals. In short, *yawn*.

But for some reason the ad stuck with me, and I don’t think it’s for the reason that Sociological Images states — that the “you’re not masculine enough” discourse is so understood that it didn’t even have to be explicitly spoken, only implied. I think that for the most part, that’s how it generally tends to go anyway.

No, what stuck with me is that they aren’t policing gender based on product color, sexual prowess, grooming (though it comes up), or even fussiness. They are policing masculinity based on comfort.

Surely it’s not the first or the last time this will happen, but it strikes me as particularly absurd. It also strikes me that they’re trying to feminize comfort in order to mock femininity as a means of bolstering their later (implied) claim that something like fuel economy is masculine. After all, being a manly man is traditionally all about using up the largest amount of resources that you personally can, making fuel economy generally seen as “feminine,” and we need to leave those manly man with something to hold onto in order to sell them a car.

But still.  How can not wanting your hands to freeze off — and I live in Western NY, and we know all about freezing here — be a gendered desire? What does it say about us when a concept so frankly gender neutral as comfort is so strongly and negatively feminized?

And how particularly strange when just yesterday I was discussing with some friends on Twitter the phenomenon of expecting Michelle Obama to freeze her ass off for the sake of femininity.

In other words, comfort isn’t only gendered, sad though it may be, it’s gendered according to situation. Depending on that situation, women are often seen to not deserve it if they’re real women; and men are seen to not need or want it if they’re real men.

Don’t Bank on Sperm

This clever commercial for the Oslo Gay Festival spoofs some silly ideas people push about sperm, that sperm is goal-oriented, sentient, and, yes, sacred.

Lisa at Sociological Images has some issues with the commercial, but our disagreement is whether or not this subverts or promotes the narrative of sentient sperm and all the baggage — the pseudo-science that relies on gendered athropomorphization of the active sperm and passive egg, for example, which isn’t true at all — that goes with it.

The good part, as Lisa says, “It also occurred to me that, in that this commercial celebrates the infertile sex act, we’ve come a long way from the Christian ethic against wasting your seed.” Indeed.