AskMen has the ten worst male-bashing ads on television from a variety of big names (Pizza Hut, Sony) to companies I’ve never heard of (Megasin, Roomba). I’ll go into a commercial-by-commercial below the fold, but the overall sense I get is… is this the best you got? For all the complaining that a lot of guys do how they have giant target on their backs and so on, you can’t find anything more incendiary than these ads? The only two that were was completely derogatory towards men were either really lame or funny as hell and a lot of them didn’t really match the description gave.
Then again… that’s the way that these things work, isn’t it? Sexism (whether aimed at women or men), racism, and so on is rarely a case anymore of people coming out and saying “These people are stupid, malicious, or otherwise worthy of contempt!” Rather it’s things that we do that we sometimes don’t even realize we’re doing, don’t realize that it might be out of line, or believe that it’s justified for one reason or another.
I remember a sexual harassment seminar recently where we were lectured by lawyers as to what was and was not sexual harassment. It was all kind of frustrating because sexual harassment in the abstract was whatever the women decided that it was. Legally actionable sexual harassment, on the other hand, came down to what could be completely devoid of sexual intent. In a sense, I’m not sure that either could be any other way. After all, in the abstract what is harassment beyond being harassed which is a feeling and subjective from individual to individual. On the legal side of things, how do you prevent sexual harassment without having some sort of line that needs to be crossed? Unfortunately, this sort of ambiguity gives a lot of men the wrong idea that sexual harassment is a myth or something simply used as a bludgeon against men in the office environment.
One of the problems with subtle sexism is that there are always alternate explanations. I have an alternate explanation for every one of the ten anti-male ads except one. Some of them are nudged towards making women feel better about themselves at the expense of their husband and kids, but that’s not the whole gist of it. It also gets more complicated because you can’t ask the question “Would things be different if the genders were reversed” because the genders wouldn’t be reversed. Ads where men are running mental circles around their spouse wouldn’t particularly interest men. Men even prefer ads where they are dopes (Cedric the Entertainer’s beer ads come to mind). On the other hand, the sexual objectification that frequently occurs with women in ads (particularly beer ads) wherein a woman’s value only exists in her ability to please men is considered as unoffensive among men as dopey anti-dad ads are among woman.
Getting all worked up about it seems like an over-reaction, even if there are underlying issues of merit. It makes these issues really difficult to talk about. Any time you try to point to an example there is almost always some other explanation that may be true. It seems exceedingly unlikely that the alternate explanations are always true, but any time you point to something specific it is easily dismissed or it can be shrugged off as an isolated incident because all the other examples are dismissible.
Anyhow, those are the thoughts bumping around in my mind. Below are my takes on the specific ads:
10. Pizza Hut - My wife and I complement one another all the time on our great cooking whenever we order in. Things would get awfully abrasive if I suddenly decided to take offense. Yeah, the ad itself is a bit dismissive of the ability of fathers to cook, but it’s an ad about one guy who ultimately is the family hero. A more offensive ad might be when the All-Knowing Mother has to call Pizza Hut because he burns whatever it was that he was trying to cook.
9. Megasin - The cavewoman is at least as manipulative as the guy is dumb. Who is to say which is worse?
8. AT&T - The blurb says that the guy doesn’t realize that the chips are actual dollars. That’s not really how I see the ad. It seems to me that he’s trying to ineptly put one over on his wife. The ad is humorous and somebody has got to the butt of the joke. Yeah, when this is the case it’s usually the guy that is the butt, but I don’t think that this is an example of their going out of their way to make men look like dopes.
7. Whiskas - This is really too silly to be taken as social commentary. It’s a guy pretending to be a cat.
6. Domino’s - I agree with the AskMen folks that this commercial is lame. And I guess it is going out of its way to make the guy look like a dope.
5. Sony - Here we have an ad that shows a father taking a pro-active role in the life of his kids. The whole point of the ad is that he isn’t a horse’s ass.
4. 1st For Women Insurance Brokers - Okay, this one is pretty sharply anti-male. But it’s also funny as hell.
3. A man gets hurt doing something stupid and kind of funny in an ad about pain ointment? NO WAY! That’s OUTRAGEOUS!
2. Roomba - The same ad in which the husband is a jackass has children that are bigs. Is it really Askmen’s contention that Roomba hates children, too?
1. Dairy Queen - She’s prostituting herself for ice cream. Her own mother is disturbed.
It’s not that the genders could be directly reversed in these ads, it’s that ads which show women in an unfavorable light would provoke a huge outcry. Men have the ability to laugh at themselves. Women, in contrast, cannot laugh at themselves, at least outside women-only company.
Comment by Peter — June 18, 2008 @ 9:54 am
But the feminists who are always going on about how misogynistic “our culture” is (it’s always “our culture,” even when talking about things that are universal) don’t accept alternative explanations when it comes to things they deem misogynistic (which is, to a first-order approximation, everything).
IMO, the value in pointing out stuff like this is not to advance the idea that men are oppressed and reviled, but to rebut the idea that misogyny pervades American culture. As Peter points out, women are a protected class, and ads that played to negative stereotypes about women would not be tolerated.
Comment by Brandon Berg — June 18, 2008 @ 12:59 pm
I saw that ad for the insurance company. Ad aside, I can’t believe you just sit there and tolerate the existance of an insurance company that sexually discriminates against men.
Unfortunately, this sort of ambiguity gives a lot of men the wrong idea that sexual harassment is a myth or something simply used as a bludgeon against men in the office environment.
Sexual-harassment laws are simply a way for women to keep guys like me in our place. (Mr. Right can do whatever he wants. Me, not so much.)
And honestly, your cavalier attitude towards sexual-harassment laws and those commercials makes me think you’re a gigantic sellout.
Apparently, when a guy is successful with women, he sells all other men down the river. Thanks. When a woman sues me simply because I ask her out, it’s because of guys like you being so eager to please your wives that you will allow atrocities like this to happen.
We gave them the right to vote. We make up over 95% of workplace fatalties. For every woman who gets killed in Iraq or Afghanistan, 40 men get killed.
Yet they ridicule us. They also insist that we be the ones to ask them out, then they sue us if we’re not their type.
To me, it’s just absolutely unbelievable that you can’t see how women are stabbing men in the back. I guess love does make men stupid.
Comment by Kirk — June 18, 2008 @ 7:03 pm
it’s that ads which show women in an unfavorable light would provoke a huge outcry.
I’m really not convinced that’s true. It might cause an outcry among staunch feminists the same way that they did As Good As It Gets… but really, who’s paying attention? Are feminists being inconsistent only caring about women that are slighted and not men? Yeah, but point me to an article in AskMen lamenting the objectification of women in beer ads or just about anything. These are two sides of the same coin, in my view.
Women have their problems in commercials, too. They’re frequently depicted as having the primary mission as the steward and hostess of the household and whose primary roll in life is that as a homemaker. They’re depicted as having to clean up the mess of the lazy men that we’re complaining about. Their value is tied most directly to their beauty and their homemaking skills. These are problems that women have in commercials that men do not. They are not problems that keep me up at night, but I don’t agree that women are portrayed in advertisements in ways that are necessarily favorable to them.
ads that played to negative stereotypes about women would not be tolerated.
Again, not convinced that is true. I’ve been watching a television show in which nearly every female character is an atrocious stereotype of some sort or another and most are without any redeeming characteristics at all. If you’d have told me that a sitcom would last more than five season in which the five principal female characters are a wise-ass maid, a psychotic stalker, a narcissistic manipulator without a conscience, a maniplative and neurotic witch, and a would-be actress that is dumb as a load of bricks, I’d have been skeptical. Yet Two and a Half Men has been going strong for five seasons now.
How many times have sitcoms used the plot of women racking up credit card debt because they buy too many shoes or cute dresses or whatever? None of this is to suggest that doofus dads are not a problem… but the notion that it only goes one way is not supported, in my view.
Comment by trumwill — June 18, 2008 @ 9:46 pm
Ad aside, I can’t believe you just sit there and tolerate the existence of an insurance company that sexually discriminates against men.
I’m pretty open-minded as far as gender goes. I don’t have a problem with private clubs that exclude women. This is an area where I am in disagreement with a lot of feminists.
Sexual-harassment laws are simply a way for women to keep guys like me in our place. (Mr. Right can do whatever he wants. Me, not so much.)
First off, insofar as attractive men broadly get to do things that unattractive men don’t, I don’t see why that is so controversial. If a woman chooses to have sex with a man that’s okay and if a man has sex with her without her consent that’s not okay, right. Do you consider that discriminatory?
Second of all, sexual harassment does happen. I’ve seen it happen (though notably in cases where I’ve seen it happen it wasn’t officially reported). Are sexual harassment laws abused? Sure. Do they address a real problem, though? Absolutely.
Thirdly, even as sexual harassment laws are abused, they’re not being abused as a way to target undesirable men. It’s more likely to be abused by a woman that is about to be or already has been fired as a way to threaten the company and create leverage.
Yet they ridicule us. They also insist that we be the ones to ask them out, then they sue us if we’re not their type.
I hear this complaint quite a bit, but every sexual harassment seminar I have ever, ever been to has explicitly said that it’s okay for a man to ask a woman out in the office place, so long as he accepts “No” as an answer if that’s what she gives. Further, I’ve seen a lot of guys ask girls out in the workplace. Sometimes the answer is yes and sometimes it is no. I’ve not once seen anyone sued over it. I’ve seen cases where a guy was chicken to ask her out so he leared, engaged in inappropriate physical contact, and made inappropriate jokes in flirtation… no lawsuits. The vast majority of the time women don’t have any reason to launch a lawsuit unless he’s making her work time virtually unbearable. There isn’t much incentive for them to step forward if they can avoid it. They gain little, become unapproachable by men that they might actually want to date, and become known as trouble-seekers within the company.
To me, it’s just absolutely unbelievable that you can’t see how women are stabbing men in the back.
Women stab men in the back all the time. I also believe that men give an approximately equivalent amount of good as they get. There are a lot of issues that are somewhat zero sum where there has to be a tug-of-war. I get a little agitated when one side tries to declare the moral high ground and proclaims the other side as having no valid points worthy of respect and consideration. It’s very frequent that feminists do this and I don’t like it when they do. But I don’t like it when men do it, either.
Comment by trumwill — June 18, 2008 @ 10:12 pm
But the feminists who are always going on about how misogynistic “our culture” is (it’s always “our culture,” even when talking about things that are universal) don’t accept alternative explanations when it comes to things they deem misogynistic (which is, to a first-order approximation, everything).
Sometimes they should accept alternative explanations. Sometimes these alternative explanations are legitimate. Sometimes - maybe often - they’re legitimate but are still part of the problem. I have alternative explanations for all of these advertisements, and yet at the same time I do agree that there is a problem with the way that men are very frequently depicted on advertisements. There are alternative explanations for a whole lot of things that feminists bring up… but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some valid complaints in there.
Surely there is some merit to discussing the frequent portrayal of men as clueless boobs beyond a club with which to whap feminists, isn’t it? Men are disadvantaged by American culture in a whole lot of ways. Even if we grant this to be true, it does not therefore follow that men are not privileged in other ways and that women aren’t disadvantaged as well.
I reject the hypothesis that society is one big game the purpose of which is to disadvantage women. Unfortunately, treating every claim of women being disadvantaged as support for that hypothesis that must be shot down, it makes communication difficult with members of the opposite sex who don’t even share the more extreme assumptions of some of its members.
One of the subjects that has been on my mind (courtesy Half Sigma) has been child support law and the belief of some that any attempt to allow people to avoid having to pay child support (even if the child is not demonstrably his or even is demonstrably not his) is an effort for the cause of allowing all men to avoid paying child support. That attitude makes it difficult to address very real concerns and makes an enemy out of anyone that wants these concerns (about false paternity, etc).
Similarly, it seems to me that sometimes we need to separate the arguments from the most extreme people making the arguments.
Comment by trumwill — June 19, 2008 @ 12:47 am
I hear this complaint quite a bit, but every sexual harassment seminar I have ever, ever been to has explicitly said that it’s okay for a man to ask a woman out in the office place, so long as he accepts “No” as an answer if that’s what she gives.
I’ve heard that at those seminars too. I can only wonder where they get that from. From what I’ve read, sexual harassment is defined by the “victim” and only after the fact. Therefore it can be anything, or nothing.
Perhaps management puts out these seminars just to keep men and women working together?
Comment by Kirk — June 19, 2008 @ 3:24 am
Just because a woman alleges that she has been harassed does not mean that what has happened is actionable.
The most recent seminar was actually taught by sexual harassment lawyers. I assume that they know what the law does and does not cover. If they say that the simply asking out of a woman is not sexual harassment, I don’t have a whole lot of reason to disbelieve them. Though I hear complaints that men can be fired for sexual harassment for simply for asking a girl out (and not engaging in additional inappropriate behavior), I don’t know of cases where it’s actually happened.
Comment by trumwill — June 19, 2008 @ 9:10 am
Anyway, T-man, sorry I got so pissed off before. I don’t know why, but sometimes things just get under my skin.
So, sorry.
Comment by Kirk — June 19, 2008 @ 4:06 pm