I know the Super Bowl is supposed to get your blood boiling, but I didn’t feel the burn on Sunday because of the game. Instead, it was because many of the much-discussed commercials shared an incredible, did-they-really-just-say-that hatred for women.
When did it become okay again to say these kinds of things?
Women watch football. Women drive Dodge cars, and women use Bridgestone tires. Women (including this writer) buy Motorola smartphones. Women probably want to watch TV (sports, even!) on the go with FloTV.
And yet ads for all of these products – plus spots for GoDaddy.com, Dockers, and others – projected a clear message to their ostensibly male viewers (because, as we all know, only men watch the Super Bowl). To marketers, women are a bother and a nuisance. At best, they are objects of voyeuristic attention (see: Megan Fox, Danica Patrick). At worst, they are a pressing threat to the sacred institution of manhood, an oppressor to man’s ability to express himself.
The most troubling theme of the day led to multiple ads where men weighed girlfriends or wives against inanimate objects – and the objects won. In the Bridgestone Tires ad, a man is held up by a menacing gang who ask, “Your tires or your life.” Of course, the hero mishears “life” for “wife,” and this choice is easy: a woman (clad in a skintight leather top) is shoved out of the car – into the clutches of the gang – and then man drives off.
The Dodge ad – embedded above – features disquieting close-ups of men and a voiceover by Dexter’s Michael C. Hall that names all of the horrible, unbearable things that men are forced to do for their significant others. The hard-boiled, barely-concealed rage in the actors’ eyes are unmistakable and truly disturbing. Good thing they can at least drive their Dodge Chargers at an unsafe speed, in order to escape those oppressive women.
It’s difficult to imagine that marketers thought that the best way to sell non-gender-specific products (cars, gadgets, tires, domain names) was by excluding an entire gender. More strangely, this play on traditional gender tensions was not hidden under a jokey (yet still not okay) “Take my wife, please!” mentality. This was bare woman-hate, as if men aren’t valid as men if they enjoy spending time with their girlfriends.
It’s 2010. Women watch football. Men like women. It’s a topsy-turvy world, but broadcasting this hateful a message to over 100 million people is never right.
