Saturday, April 05, 2008
What about your mom, though?
I've seen a lot of sites posting this new "Your mom wasn't your dad's first." ad from Canadian Club whiskey, and it's given me an obvious pause each time. I was going to post it, but when I researched (research =
www.canadianclub.com) I found that they've got 3 such faux-nostalgia ads running now. I'd only seen one of them, and while the 2nd is a fishing buddies theme, the third, "groupies" ad went even more perfectly with the point I was going to make. So I cropped out the header and stuck it in here too.
Maybe it's just me, but my first reaction when I saw this instantly iconic ad was, "Well no, but your mom wasn't your dad's first either, even though she probably told him otherwise." To that obvious, though stereotype-puncturing truth, the second ad lets us add, "Your mom was probably a groupie. But probably not one of your dad's groupies."
This is nothing personal against anyone's mom, but apparently (and not just in male-skewing whiskey ads) there still persists a nearly universal cultural fantasy that women go to their wedding nights as virgins. I can imagine that myth in the minds of people whose parents got married in the 1940s or 1950s, but in ads harkening back to the 60s? Don't the 20 and 30 something males they're targeting these at know about hippies? That most young adults in the 60s had
WAY more sex than 20 somethings are today? Recreational drugs? Free love? No AIDS? You do the math.
Even allowing for basic historical ignorance, the myth that dad was a player and mom was a virgin is laughable, since it's both untrue and impossible; clearly those women the "whiskey dads" were partying with wound up settling down and marrying someone else and booting out their 2.5 kids, but it's culturally acceptable to pretend that your future dad got around and had fun, while your future mom... I don't know... sat home and knitted?
This all ties into the basic male fear of female sexuality, a concept that's deeply intertwined with class and race issues. Women are either sluts or moms, and if they're both they're low class, like the women failing paternity tests on the Maury Show. A book I just finished (review to come) about the male customers of strip clubs made this point explicitly. The men had much higher opinions of the women they saw in higher class clubs, even if the same dancers worked both types of clubs. The high class dancers were unattainable and perfect, while the ones in the dive clubs were whores and drug addicts, even though the clubs had the exact same "no touching" rules and the same price per dance -- rules mandated and strictly enforced thanks to intrusive city ordinances.
Consciously or otherwise, men seek promiscuity in women for hook ups, and dread it in potential wives. So men want party girls since they're obtainable, but at the same time men want nice girls who are virginal, or nearly so, available when they (the men) are ready to settle down. After all, if she's a virgin anything you do sexually will be new and pleasing to her, and she won't leave you if you can't satisfy her. If you're lucky, she won't even know you're not satisfying her.
These cultural themes combine to create an interesting cognitive dissonance that's quite neatly expressed, in unspoken fashion, in these whiskey ads.
Labels: advertising, gender issues
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Fast Food Come to Life
Useful page with a collection of
side by side comparative photos of marketing images of fast food vs. the item served in the stores.
Honestly, the actual fast food doesn't far too poorly, compared to the idealized advertised versions. Considering the time and preparation and artifice (Vaseline on the burgers to make them shine) that goes into advertising imagery, the fact that the the thing you get in 3 minutes for $2 is even edible is a triumph of foolproof, factory-style food preparation.
The only really revolting thing on the page is the oozing sludge of semen/swiss cheese atop the Wendy's Chicken Club, but that's more about my lack of interest in consuming a simulacrum of a partially-molten slab of male ejaculate, atop a piece of pressed, shaped, breaded, deep-fried chicken. That sandwich actually looks quite a bit like the idealized ad version, one blessed with extra "cheese".
Labels: advertising, fast food
Friday, April 27, 2007
Your Free Credit Rating!
If your browser had a junk mail filter that worked on blog posts, this one would be toast, huh? Disengenuous title aside, I just got my credit card bill for the month, and as I stuck in the check and prepared to seal the envelope, I did my usual cursing and muttering about the junk mail insert. Every month, I get ads for the cheapest fucking crap along with my credit card bill. Garbage! Seriously, I'm insulted that they send me ads for this stuff. This month it was some kind of customized stamp; like you can put Cancelled! with a box border around it, and then thunk the stamp down on old checks, or whatever. And it's not even a good stamp; there's no mother of pearl handle, or filagreed inlaid base or anything. It's a brightly-colored piece of plastic; it looks like something a nine year old would pay a quarter for from a machine at the front of the dollar store.
Every month is the same too. It's always relentlessly cheap, sub-Wal-Mart quality plastic junk. Five karat cubic zirconium tennis bracelets and collectible plates and no-name cartoon figurines and other stuff like you see advertised on the inside pages of that Parade magazine they stick in the Sunday paper. Every month I'm offended by the offer, and worst of all, there's a perforated order form attached to the back of the envelope, which I have to carefully tear off before I can seal my check and payment receipt and mail the bill back. Several times I've ripped it and torn the back of the envelope, necessitating some invisible tape repair before I can send them money.
I could understand this if I had one of those debit credit cards where you can only spend the money you've got in an account, or some other cheap ass, Tijuana National Bank bullshit. But I'm using a platinum MasterCard from a major financial institution with a credit limit far higher than I'll ever need or be able to afford. On the other hand, I've had the card for over a decade, I'm set with no annual fee for life, and I always pay it off my balance that month and never give them any interest, so I guess they've got to try to gouge me somehow.
They could at least custom tailor my ads a bit. I'm so not in the demographic for the cutesy crap they send out. If they had cool, practical, classy stuff like oh... replica samurai swords, or porn star trading cards (do
not eat the gum) I might give them some of my money.
Labels: advertising
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Dumb, but amusing.
The title describes the best possible outcome for a US beer commercial, and though I hate to admit it, I've got to give a stamp of approval to
the new Miller Lite "Man Law" spots, that appear to make up at least 1/3 of the commercials played during NBA playoff games. The ads feature 6 or 8 semi-famous guys sitting around a large, square wooden table in a huge warehouse, debating various "unwritten" social rules. How long you've got to wait before dating a buddy's ex, if a beer taken to a party can be reclaimed if no one opens it, etc.
The premise is that there's some sort of secretive, Knights Templar council of men who determine the laws for these sorts of things, and they've even got an aged record keeper who nods in approval as he officially records them in an appropriate-sized ancient tome. Sports metaphors pervade the spots, of course. They mention the "tuck rule" and "down by contact" and other phrases that are without meaning if you don't share a sports fan's lexicon, and if they have to check video for an example of a rule violation, they look up at a four-sided replay screen, like those dangling from the ceiling in every US sports arena.
There's even
a cute website with clips of the commercials, bios of the men at the table (which is what I went surfing to find), hundreds of additional man laws (displayed in faux sports ticker fashion), and a way for visitors to vote on pending laws as well as submit their own.
Needless to say, these ads are not without their detractors, as I discovered when my first web search (I wasn't even sure which beer did the commercials, despite having viewed them dozens of times.) led me to
this blog entry. A sample:
In the marketing world, beer is synonymous with machismo and heteronormative sex. In the world of beer-swilling Manly Men, women and beer are consumables, and in all of the new Miller Lite ads, all Man Laws pertain to ownership of either beer, women, or both. The first ad cast the hypothetical ex-girlfriend as the ex-property of the best friend, even though the writers granted said girlfriend agency by letting her be the dumper. The second ad concerned the rules pertaining to beer possession and loss. The third ad of "You poke it, you own it" fame is obviously an allusion to both the ownership of beer and of women.
... The bottom line is that patriarchal culture has men buying and and selling women like slaves wherever they can get away with it. In most parts of the world this is really happening; female trafficking is a big dirty secret that much of the world doesn't want to acknowledge or talk about. Somewhere in the world right now some owned woman is being poked against her will without a condom. She will likely die of AIDS.
Similarly-disgusted female sentiments can be found
here, and
here. The "you poke it you own it" law seems to be the one that's really setting them off, since it's got some historical connection that I'm sure at least .001% of the TV viewers will grasp.
Of course, the beer company didn’t invent the phrase. In his influential 1789 treatise on private property, De droites du doigt (literally, "The Rights of the Finger") French philosopher and monarchist Joseph de Maistre declared "You poke it; you may kill it, or give it to your bootblack." Miller Lite, in an effort to strike a chord with its super-intellectual audience of civic-minded philosophy buffs, is clearly paying homage to one of the great authoritarian conservatives of the French Revolution.
I'm generally sympathetic to their sentiments, but um... are you guys (women) out of your mind? Spending this much intellectual effort critiquing the not-very-catchy catch phrase from a beer commercial? I can get behind using a dumb beer commerical as the starting point in a women's rights essay/blog entry, or at least an essay on men being humorously stupid (which is pretty much what all Miller and Bud commericals are about, being as their beer isn't good enough to compete on taste) but there's clearly some baggage being unloaded on a bunch of fairly innocent and clever commercials. "Poke it and own it" or not, these Man Laws commercials wouldn't even crack the top 50 most sexist beer commercials I've seen this decade. Overreactions to minor foolishness like this is what gives real assholes like Rush Limbaugh grist for their "feminazi" mills.
Labels: advertising, feminism
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