There’s something to this. After all, what are the men in these commercials really ignorant of? How to change a toilet roll, how to mop the floor, how to feed the kids. So what’s the answer? Mom takes over and does it right. Small victory?
Thank goodness I watch very little TV - the only sitcom I like these days is Still Standing. Maybe because the parents are from my generation and I find it very funny. Other than that, it’s Food Network or prerecorded TiVo where you can skip the commercials and most of the shows are non sitcom.
In the past, many women bought into the “women are weak and bad at math” bullshit. It certainly wasn’t just men who shovelled that manure. And today, many men buy into the “men are juvenile idiots” role. Just like stereotypes against women can sometimes offer them certain freedoms (e.g., easily able to avoid heavy lifting, mental work with numbers, get away with holding strong opinions without logical justification because that’s just the way they are, etc.), stereotypes about men are often appealing to men because it gives them an excuse to act childish or stupid. (E.g., too stupid to mop the floor correctly or buy the proper brand of whatever; behavior is often excused based on the poor idiot just not knowing any better). The problem is that the freedoms gained are narrow, and the freedoms lost are broad.
I’ve seen a few commericals with interracial couples (Old Navy is running one right now), but they never seem to be “conflict” commericals. It’s always just two people enjoying the product being advertised.
I’m right with you, jali. I don’t like the trend, I don’t like the message it communicates, and I certainly don’t like that a fair number of men have internalized that message and are now living down to what the commercials have shown them they should be. The idea that commercials are conveying is “it’s okay to be dumb, because someone will still make everything all right for you, and that’s how the world is supposed to work.”
Of course, you could just as easily say that for all commercials, but the ways that marketing encourages women to be dumb are definitely different from the ways it encourages men to be dumb, and I don’t think we’re here to castigate marketing in general just at the moment. 
Also, vison and Cat Fight, you have an awfully good point. White males are the easiest to cast as dumb, both because they have a position of privilege that makes them more immune from people taking the idea that they are “really” dumb seriously, and because choosing anyone else without that position of privilege raises all kinds of stereotyping and emotionally charged issues that simply aren’t present for white males, in our culture. That’s both a good thing and a bad thing, for the men in question - they’ve got the power positioning, culturally, to withstand a lot of shit-flinging, because most of it won’t stick. Unfortunately, that seems to mean that a lot of people are going to fling shit, to try and be the one to make it stick, whether it’s accurate or not.
This is pretty much it. Men have the power so men are targets.
As a white man, I’m not much bothered by this.
Why, yes, this is a really very good point.
I wish to register my support of the OP. I’d have to be some kind of stupid, settling-for-less woman to have a husband as useless as the men portrayed on tv (I don’t - I have an excellent partner).
To add another dimension to this topic, boys have been ignored in favour of girls in school for so long now that boys are the ones who are falling in the cracks in our educational systems. Why can’t we ever just find a happy medium - why does the success of one gender always have to be at the cost of the other?
I’ve been in that particular discussion a number of times and have yet to see any proof that boys are “falling in the cracks”. I certainly do not see that boys are being ignored. What I have seen is that girls are doing better, not that boys are doing “worse”. (We am raising my 10 and 13 year old grandsons and are very actively involved in their education, so my knowledge of the present conditions in our schools is not merely theoretical.)
My 13 year old grandson is in Grade 8 at middle school. The school has followed the trend of having separate math and English classes for boys and girls and it is quite a success. In English the boys and girls read different books and write essays on different topics - for the same teachers. Likewise with math.
Girls and boys, it appears, generally learn in different fashions. Until very recently schools were organized completely to suit the “male” style of learning.
It may also be, of course, that girls really are smarter than boys.
On average.
Or it may not be.
Except for Full House!
Same here. The fact that we own… well, pretty much everything really helps take the sting out of watching Swiffer commercials.
If schools are orienting education to suit both boys and girls, that’s fantastic. What I’ve heard is that schools have swung from orienting everything to boys to orienting everything to girls.
As have I. For example, schools have allegedly discouraged teachers from introducting competition while teaching topics (holding a class spelling bee, for example.) There’s plenty of evidence that boys thrive on competition, while girls do not. Whether or not this measure was intended to help girls at the expense of boys, that would be its effect.
I’ve heard this claimed both ways - that boys are ignored, and that girls are ignored - but never seen a great deal of evidence either way. “I’ve heard that schools are swinging things in favour of girls,” is, as I’m sure you realize, not the most convincing of arguments.
The ways schools are run, it would be difficult to see how rampant gender discrimination could even take place over the long haul.
I think that’s part two. When they are marketing to men, they try to compensate for the approach of the other commercials.
How so? Schoolteachers, particularly in lower grades, are predominantly female (and the recent pedophile scares probably won’t help men interested in entering the profession); and I am not aware of any “sensitivity training” they receive that helps them deal with boys in particular. Seems like a perfect setup for widespread discrimination.
:dubious: In a democracy, the power ultimately rests with the majority. In the US, the majority is female, and has been for some time.
You really think female teachers need “sensitivity training” to deal with boys in a non-discriminatory fashion? That seems a bit silly-- do women need sensitivity training to raise their sons too?
In NYS, all teachers have to have a Masters degree in education, and child psychology is covered, so it’s not like they have no training in dealing with all kinds of kids. Also, it’s a false assumption that people favor others of their gender. Growing up, the female members in my Italian extended family definitely favored the boys over the girls, quite directly and openly.
It’s not a given that boys will be discriminated against by female teachers. In fact, it seems that the contrary was true, and now that’s being corrected for, some say over-corrected. I’m not sure if this alleged anti-boy discrimination is happening, though I recall reading or hearing that more women were attending and graduating college these days than men. I’ll look for a cite if you want it but I can’t spend the time on it right now; maybe someone else has it handy or something.
Actually, no. They have the goal of convincing the people who hire them to make advertisements that the ads sell products. Those are the customers of the ad agency, not whomever the ads are directed towards. And business people are just as easily fooled into buying bad products as the rest of us.
If the ad agencies can convince the people who buy ads that such ads work by waving badly done 40 year old research at them ( assuming that that’s what they are doing ), but the advertising actually works badly or not at all, they aren’t going to care. Not as long as the ads keep getting bought.
Last I heard, in America, women had greater financial assets than men.
That’s true as far as it goes. But women don’t vote as a block any more than men do. Politics are seldom about gender: but aren’t you Americans getting a taste of it now?
Women will not necessarily vote for Sen. Clinton, black voters will not necessarily vote for Obama, as I think we all agree.
I sometimes imagine what a difference it could make if women started throwing their weight around and demanding consideration of “women’s issues”, such as employer-provided childcare etc. Why that’s seen as only a “woman’s issue” is beyond me, but according to my b-i-l, it is not only a woman’s issue but stupid, as well. His view, and the prevailing view it seems to be, is that if you’re stupid enough to have kids it’s your problem to find daycare and what the hell does it have to do with an employer? If all the women with children were to leave the workforce, I think their absence would be noticed pretty quick, just the same. There could some massive societal disaster if employers were expected to provide daycare. Perhaps there would be. Perhaps there would be a war, and young men and women would have to die or get maimed. Oh. Wait.
Sorry. A bit irascible today. Maybe my New Year’s resolution oughta be, “be a nicer person”.
I think, myself, that it’s time women seized control. Let us have 5 or 10 thousand years and see how it turns out, eh?