It’s possible. I don’t know, the other ones don’t bother me as much for some reason. Couldn’t tell you why.
I can kind of hazard a guess why…my culture is heavily into gold, and yes, gold is a value judgement in my culture. So it disgusts me already, and I know what DeBeers is up to and the level of their morality.
Well, yeah, actually that does make me feel better. I thought it was because I’m a man, and here it’s just because I’m a parent. ( I can’t help but think, though, that people are looking at me a bit differently when I’m out with the little guy than they do when it’s my wife.)
Hate that one, too. I’m parenting, not babysitting.
One of this days Alice POW! to the moon! [cue laugh track]
Yeah, in 1987 when they were making The Honeymooners.
You’re kidding, right? You think that insinuating men are too incredibly stupid to be able to do something that wouldn’t vex a five year-old child is actually insulting to women because it implies that men have real work to do?
Men are routinely berated in commercials and sit-coms as little more than walking wallets, and are piled on as their children and wives join in the berating of their complete lack of any ability to manage simple tasks like making dinner (Pizza Hut), multiply single digit numbers (T-mobile), set up a new television set without a trip to the emergency room (Best Buy) and in general do anything right other than buy their family new shiny electronics (Sprint/Nextel). While the wives and mothers are portrayed as perfect masters of the home and their careers, men are idiots good only for their paychecks.
Don’t get me started on the commercial that used a rape joke to try to sell SUVs by making fun of a group of men in the woods camping who got scared and had to blaze out of there in their SUV after hearing ‘Dueling Banjos’. Nobody would ever think for even one minute that a joke about women being afraid of being raped would be acceptable in an ad.
As for clothes, I’m glad I get to wear jeans and t-shirts to work. I have less variety than most of the guys here, and they don’t give a damn.
Oh I think they play heavily on the ‘big dumb walking wallet’ stereotype of men, incapable of actually speaking so he has to follow the script the jewelry store writes for him. They also stereotype women as stupid and materialistic creatures who equate shiny lumps of carbon with love.
Kind of like the ad where the guy is running late for some unexplained reason, the wife gets pissy and hangs up on him, and he hits the button to get directions to the nearest florist (On*Star).
Not a debate, but the impression I had with seeing The Monster’s mommy going through family court was that having a private attorney, rather than a PD, seemed to affect both the judge’s willingness to listen to arguments, and how closely the represented party will be held to the written documents.
Once there’s a level playing field (either both represented by private attorneys, or both by PDs) it does seem to revert to being very gender biased.
Conisder this … the majority of women are reluctant to date men who are shorter than they are, or even just an inch or two taller. Women I know justify this as “Darwinism in action,” where they don’t feel protected by a man who seems smaller than they are. They also justify their preferences with statements like “I wear high heels”, “I want to feel protected”, and/or “I’m short myself, and don’t want to be part of a mini-couple.”
Likewise, many men aren’t attracted to women who are larger than they are. However, a man admitting to this will find themselves the subject of far more criticism than a woman saying that she won’t date short men; he’ll be labeled “picky”, “sizeist”, and so on. His female friends will likely tell him that he should look past the weight and “find the real her”.
No, I’m not short. Just sayin …
Good. Now, repeat after me: “Thanks so much for your input! I’ll give your suggestion all the thought it merits.” 
Could be. I’m annoyed with women who assume that the men at the park are either perverts or incompetent; maybe that’s what you’re picking up on. There’s one woman at the park near me who will pick up a child and walk off with it (not far, but to where her own children are playing) when the child has arrived with a solo dad. It’s really obvious she assumes that he won’t know or care to play with his own kid and that she’s doing him (and the kid) a favor by taking over. I fully expect her to get arrested one of these days, but most of the guys are just so bewildered that they don’t do a thing about it.
And, of course, there are a lot of mothers who call their kids off the jungle gym to their side if a man happens to walk by the park and glance at the kids.
Makes me want to give each of them some “advice” right upside the back of her head, let me tell you…
Point to DigitalC, although the violence was never committed. However, come to think of it, sitcoms husbands taking errant wives over their knee and spanking them was a common before-the-end-credits gag, too.
I have always been grateful for this reason that I was of average height. What you say is absolutely true.
I haven’t seen that commercial, so I’m only going by your description, but it doesn’t sound degrading to me. Or, at least, it isn’t in the same way that men are portrayed.
The woman in your commerical has screwed up, because she did not use the miracle product. But it’s implied that she should have known better, and that she’ll learn from her mistake and serve fresh-as-a-daisy leftover steak next time. In the ad Slithy Tove referred to, two women are admiring the new window blinds that one of them has. Through the windows we see a man, presumably the husband, trying to light the barbecue, and turning the backyard into a smoldering wasteland within 30 seconds. His incompetence is just beyond the pale (even a caveman can start a fire), it has nothing to do with the product, and it is considered so commonplace that the smart, competent, product-admiring women don’t even notice him. I’d say that’s worse than not using the right plastic bag.
There is one commercial I can think of that shows women in the same way that men are usually shown. Two scientists are discussing the tests they’ve been conducting to measure the effectiveness of a new razor. Two people are running on treadmills, side-by-side; a woman and the freshly shaven man. She looks over at the man and is so overcome by his handsome visage and smooth jaw that she falls on her face.
Hysterical, ain’t it.
I don’t know. “Every Kiss Begins with Kay” is one of the most diabolically brilliant slogans ever. See, it pretty much says “your wife won’t have sex with you unless you supply her with (our) bling” while at the same time it is completely innocuous on its plain face.
FYI, the DeBeers slogan, “A diamond is forever” was written by a female copywriter of the NW Ayers Advertising Agency, Frances Gerety, in 1948.
I’m not sure it’s a rape joke. What happened to the guys in that movie was far more than a rape. It was a harrowing experience for all four men on many levels. What it’s really about is that hillbillies are scary. In fact, it has just become symbolism – Banjo music = scary. It really doesn’t have to have any deeper interpretation than that.
It’s still interesting that certain products are associated with gender. There is no woman in my life to do my dishes. Even when there is, I still do my own dishes. Even if one of us cooks for the other, I still usually end up doing the dishes. In my parents’ house, my father does the dishes. Always.
Why are men never featured in dishsoap commercials (except as clueless husbands, of course)? It would just seem… odd.
For what it may be worth, I’m a guy and whenever I’ve said “she’s too tall for me” or “she’s too fat for me” or “she’s too skinny for me,” nobody has ever called me sizeist or anything. Actually, the female friends I have had have been all too willing to criticize other women for being too fat.
Which is sort of insulting if the majority of ads assume women are doing all the housework and feeding the kids (this is changing in advertising, whether at a faster pace than IRL is debatable). I guess someone’s got to be excited upon getting grass stains out, but it’s a bit overwhelming to watch these back-to-back, with the odd commercial featuring a guy advertising a car.
I demand more shows, movies and commercials with unsexualized, average-looking, even overweight women and hot, brainless men.
Actually, if I recall correctly, there were two families – loser family and winner family. The commercial would have been a lot less offensive to me if it had been the same family, before and after mom bought Miracle Product.
I suppose you are right, if it’s just a gratuitous slap at the husband.
I work as a receptionist with car salesmen as my coworkers; the vast majority hit on me, look at my boobs far too often, or openly proclaim I’m weird for enjoying reading. The others are generally nice, genuinely helpful, and higher up the food chain. They also don’t care about my reaction to their status as parents/non parents. This varies from place to place, so obviously YMMV, but this is the environment I’m in. Garden variety jerks and guys who never matured past high school are what I get to work with until I can get a job related to my classes.
Before I ever even saw the movie, ‘Dueling Banjos’ to me was ingrained with ‘Squeal like a pig’, and after seeing the movie several times, the very first thing into my head at the sound of ‘Dueling Banjos’ is the rape. The rest of the violence follows, but the first thing is ‘cue the city boy getting raped by the inbred hillbilly.’
My mom.
No one else in my family cares, including my grandmother, my father, and my sister. My mom is the neat freak the cleaning commercials are made for.
Car salesmen, particularly used car salesmen, should never be used as a basis for gleaning insight into any sort of human behavior, as you would need actual humans for such observations. 
That and the deodorant commercials. WTF?
And the show was already ancient history 20 years ago. A better show from the 1950s to think about is I Love Lucy. A lot of the “dumb dad” shows are basically that show, with the gender roles reversed.