“Obama asks moms to return to school”
“…invented by a mom”
" x% of moms agree…"
I’m so sick of these banners popping up all over the internet. Is there anyone out there that thinks “Oh my, it was invented by a mom, so she must be just like me!” when they see these ads? Newsflash: Rocket scientists are moms. The First Lady is a mom. Surgeons, judges, legistators…all these professions contain moms. There is nothing special about being a female that has borne a child.
They say “mom” but they mean “homemaker”, which is offensive for two reasons. One, it belittles SAHDs and men in general. It’s another example of the men-are-stupid-at-homemaking double standard in advertising. Two, it implies that if you’re a mom, you’re uneducated, unimaginative, and unproductive. It implies that you’re just sitting around at home in a bath robe eating bon bons (why is it always bon bons?) just taking up space.
Not even the dancing mortage-takers piss me off this much.
Wait, really? I’ve seen a bunch of pit threads about internet ads and commercials that annoy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one about the mom ads specifically.
You don’t understand. It wasn’t just a mom, it was a mom in my home town. There is no way a sweet, motherly woman, who hangs her mom-hat in the same burg that I do, could be wrong about anything, ever. Or that an advertiser would lie about her. I mean, who would do such a thing? The notion is preposterous.
If a mom from my home town says she got rich by investing in Nigerian phosphate futures, that’s good enough for me. I shall do likewise.
Well the mom from my hometown makes $63/hr working part time from home. That’s a pretty good salary. Why would she even go back to school?
In the ad I see in my hotmail all the time there are two moms running back to school. One of them is quite buxom. Maybe I should post that over in the fetish thread. I can’t be the only one turned on by cartoon gifs.
Goddamit, I wanted to be able to cuss and say really unkind things about this stuff in the Pit.
My most unfavorite of these ads is the inescapable one about the Secret Tooth-Whitening Secret Discovered By A Mom, and which your dentist Doesn’t Want You To Know, because he is Satan.
Yep, I want to scrub my teeth with Chlorox or industrial scouring paste or whatever it is that a Mom somewhere discovered to get my teeth pearly white. Because Moms are so durn smart and dentists (if not actually Satanic) are smarty-pants intellectuals who Don’t Want Us To Know, and probably mostly aren’t Moms.
I think this meme is partly the outgrowth of the spreading virus of Mommie Boards, where all sorts of idiotic parenting advice and other varieties of stupidity are passed around as gospel.
Here’s a terrific website hosted by Army Infantry Mom which plumbs the depths of antivax stupidity, revealing the horrors of monkey pus and feces in our vaccines, and tying in the nefarious activities of Prescott Bush, George Bush, Henry Kissinger and the incarceration camps planned for all of us who do not get our shots like brainwashed little Munchkins.*
There is also an inane push poll on vaccination.
President Obama is encouraging Concerned Mommies to go back to school and get some of that there book learnin’.
I too am a little concerned by the notion that the opinions and values of mums are more important than [del]men and childless women[/del] lesser mortals which seems to be pervading society of late.
Especially since it (IMHO) ties in with the increasing bubble-wrapping and “Cult of the Child”-ness of society, where “Think of the children!” is the wowser rallying cry.
Mums contribute to society in an invaluable way and no-one doubts that. But men and childless women contribute in other invaluable ways and I don’t think we should be encouraging the sidelining of their views just to make the trendy mum brigade feel better about themselves.
They do this because . . . it works. Someone has found that a substantial number of women (but not men) will make purchasing decisions that are based on being (1) too unimaginative to want or adopt anything that someone <exactly like them> did not vouch for/originate; and/or (2) too eager to have their ego stroked with the notion that “single moms” are out discovering most of the latest revolutionary, medical-establishment-defying, technology.
After all, who else looks on the Internet at all times of the day?
Heh, funny thing about that, I usually see those ads at work (where I do most of my daily Straight Dope fix). The ads used to always show up as “Dayton mom” etc. because the company’s HQ is in Dayton, and, I guess, the ISP is based there. About a month ago, it started saying “Springboro mom” (just outside Dayton). Our company has been heralding the fact that they’re in the process of moving their HQ to Atlanta, but I knew that they started making real progress on it when, this week, the ads started saying “Atlanta mom”.
Note that 1) I haven’t changed the computer I’ve viewed it on for 9 years (well, I guess the computer’s been upgraded a few times), and (here’s the kicker), 2) I live and work in a branch office in Canada. (Interestingly, the “mom ads” I think are either replaced with something else or just say “Mom” without a locale when I occassionally read the Dope website - can’t recall which, I’ll do some field work after work and report back in this thread.)
