So. It was a good game, no? I mean, the Cards certainly proved that they belonged, and the Steelers proved that they’ve got the tenacity to fight to the end, even when they’re in a pickle of their own doing. But really, the game is over and will soon be forgotten. (Mostly. I definitely won’t forget James Harrison barreling 100 yards and diving into the end zone any time soon.) But there is one thing that’s stuck in my mind all day:
How 'bout all those woman-hating Super Bowl ads?
I wasn’t going to write about this because it just seems so, well, so OBVIOUS, but when I found myself angrily writing about the Super Bowl ads while commenting on a food blog, of all places, I realized that something needs to be said. Which is:
THOSE WERE SOME SERIOUSLY FUCKING WOMAN-HATING SUPER BOWL ADS.
I mean, I kind of expect your run-of-the-mill sexism from ads during the Super Bowl. The Advertising Powers That Be continue to believe that the only people who watch the game are beer-swilling, truck-driving, chest-thumping, boob-loving man-children. No matter what the statistics show about the actual make-up of the football-watching public (let alone the Super Bowl-watching public), we still get millions of dollars of advertising crapola, week in and week out during the season, and year in and year out during the Super Bowl.
Even so, this year was qualitatively worse than usual. This wasn’t just run-of-the-mill sexism. No, this was full-on violent, angry, woman-hating misogyny. You had the Go-Daddy ad with its glorified rape fantasy, which was extra-disappointing in that it featured Danica Patrick, whom I would otherwise admire for breaking gender barriers in her sport. Then there was the Doritos ad, where the guy bites into a Dorito and -- oopsie! -- off fly the clothes of the unsuspecting woman across the street, to her obvious horror. And of course there was the Mr. Potato Head ad -– what was that one for, anyway? tires? -- where Mr. Potato Head knocks the mouth off of his nagging, harpy, stereotype of a wife to shut her up.
But the worst of the bunch, in my opinion, was the Teleflora ad in which an anthropomorphized box of flowers insults its recipient by cruelly calling her fat and ugly, telling her to "go home to your romance novels and your fat, smelly cat," and saying that "no one wants to see you naked." Wow. That is fucking harsh, no matter at whom it’s directed, and regardless of whether it's accurate. But here you have such verbal abuse directed at a woman in the context of one of the year's most-watched television shows, ostensibly to entice people to buy flowers, of all things. As far as I'm concerned, all that ad managed to do was to normalize and condone the verbal abuse of women, which is beyond despicable. What new low can we possibly expect next year? Flowers that give her a black eye and a broken nose?
On a related note, I find all of this fascinating in light of the fact that NBC rejected a PETA ad featuring women getting busy with some fresh produce. Now, I'm not defending PETA here, mind you, because I think their advertising and marketing strategy, including the ad they submitted for the Super Bowl, can be accurately summed up as "save the animals, exploit the women." But it's interesting that the combination of sexism and sex is just too much for NBC to take, but that combining sexism and violence is A-OK.
Lovely. Just lovely.
