God damn it! That ALWAYS happens whenever I see a magic flying faerie hottie that I want to butt fuck.
grumble, grumble, grumble…
Remember to use protection. An endless Celtic knot amulet should do it.
Same here.
I mean, except I’m a bi chick not a straight guy.
She’s also like 9 inches tall. I don’t know the age of consent for faeries, but I still don’t think she’ll be getting much ass sex from anybody on this board.
As soon as he said “silly faery,” I took it as yet another fag joke advertisers use to market to guys who don’t want to be fags.
I’ve spent my whole life politely smiling when people share their favorite fag jokes. Probably much the same way a lot of women politely smile when they hear yet another blond joke or boob joke.
I’m not really offended. It mostly just gets an :rolleyes: “Oh, how original.” Guys, you didn’t even get the outfit right, but I still know exactly what the joke was.
And again, we’re back to my point. To quote a very old SNL skit, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. At what point do we admit that we’re getting upset over something that just isn’t there? I’ve called it “looking for something to be offended by” in this thread, but that’s perhaps a little harsh. Gay folks have had a long history of being persecuted, which makes them (rightfully) sensitive to what people mean when they say something, but at some point it has to stop. Does Dodge have a history of homophobia? Does the ad agency? If not, why are you (royal you) so convinced that this ad is a negative portrayal of gays? From this thread it seems that most people did not see the subtext that some people are claiming is obvious. Overreaction? I think so.
Except that Commercial Closet isn’t “outraged” by the ad. It did a review of the ad and gave it a neative rating. Characterizing that as “outrage” makes as little sense as saying that Roger Ebert is “outraged” every time he pans a movie.
To correctly quote the old SNL sketch, “Sometimes a banana is just a banana, Anna.”
I just want to say that I thought he was saying “Silly ferret” for about a month.
And I can see it preppy or gay, but I can’t see it being a big deal.
At last I can be grateful for having a tiny winkie!
My personal experience with the ad:
I saw it once, and immediately got “preppy.” Then I did a mental double take (mild, not alarmed) and pondered “oh, did they actually mean gay?” This was for the same reasons Otto mentioned, especially the language used “silly fairy.”
Is this deliberately ambiguous on the part of the company and the ad agency? Yes, because we’re talking about it! I doubt we would be talking about it so much if it was a heterosexual biker couple that was turned into a Biff & Buffy couple. I think people vastly overestimate the impact of “I would never buy that product because I’m so offended.” They don’t care that a few people are offended enough to boycott the brand, they’re thrilled that a lot of people are repeating the brand name. When it comes down to brass tacks, I think very few people buy or refuse to buy a car simply because of a commercial. However, keeping the brand name at the front of your (you being the average car buyer) mind is a net gain for the company.
The creepy Burger King is another example of this – they know the King is creepy and off-putting, the commercials refer to this. But when is the last time you have heard so many people reference the Burger King in casual conversation? The difference is that the Burger King doesn’t have a real world reference (thank god), while the Dodge commercial is treading into some real world issues – is that particular stereotype of gay people positive, negative, or neutral? Is it negative simply by virtue of the fact that it is a stereotype in the first place? Is there added negative impact because the stereotype is of a group who continue to be marginalized, as opposed to a stereotype of lumberjacks, who AFAIK don’t experience much lumberjack-bashing? All debatable issues, but I see no debate at all about the deliberate ambiguous image being in the commercial in the first place.
Oh, there are plenty of guys with tiny penises (penes?) on this board. Just look at some of the SUV threads…
d&r------>
I thought he was turned into a Yuppie.
Add me to the thought she turned the tough guy into a total yuppie segment of the population.
Breaking news! A company changes an advertisement because some portion of its target market felt insulted by it! Conservatives immediately outraged and deeply, deeply offended!
At what point do we admit that what we saw isn’t the only possible interpretation, and that it’s very reasonable to think they meant to convey something that just happened to slip by us?
Sorry, but yeah, I’m gay, and it was immediately obvious to me that the commercial was featuring a guy being turned queer by a fairy. I suppose it could all be some massive coincidence - the word “fairy”, the implication that the car is too manly and rugged to be altered by the fairy, the pretty unmistakable subtext to the dude’s new outfit, the fay-sounding “Ooh!” he utters. But probably not.
I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this notion that anything we can possibly rationalize away is suddenly kosher, and anyone who takes offense to it is part of the “offenderati” or the “PC police” or whatever the right-wing term du jour is to describe people who actually take offense at things that are offensive. What’s next, Weirddave? “Hey, maybe those guys in white are just avant garde landscape architects, and that burning cross is conceptual art! Those wacky artists! Ha ha!” Yeah, if you work your ol’ right-wing rationalizing muscles really, really hard, you can claim that the commercial didn’t say what it did. I don’t even doubt that it slipped by you; frankly, these sorts of jokes are so common that they probably don’t even register to a lot of straight people. But maybe, just maybe, Weirddave, you should consider whether your perspective is really “correct” and everyone else’s wrong.
I wasn’t deeply offended. But I felt pretty much the same way a lot of the other gay posters in the thread did: :rolleyes: Ooh, look. A gay joke. How funny. How clever. Most of us weren’t terribly upset, probably because, frankly, we’re used to being the butts of jokes, and this one isn’t nearly as bad as a lot of what straight people seem to find funny. But calling us names if we have the temerity to find a gay joke offensive? Not cool, dude. Jokes like that are something people use - and have used for a long time - to keep us in our place. I’m not surprised if people got upset and complained. In fact, more power to 'em.
Oh, and delphica: Very astute observations.
WTF? Right wing? Conservative?
I feel the same as Weirddave and I’m liberal to the point of almost being socialist. The word “republican” makes me queasy. Conservatives make me break out in hives. Maybe you could try not assigning random political labels to people because they don’t get offended at everything they see? Good freakin’ lord.
And no, I’m not straight, I’m bisexual. I’m very anti-homophobia and get very pissed off at things aimed against non-straight people. HOWEVER. I think that while it is possible to interpret this ad in that way, it’s a bit of a stretch, and is nowhere near blatant enough for me to feel comfortable saying that it was “the intentional meaning”.
Let’s see if we can get Weirddave to step out of his Bush-voting-booth long enough to comment. :rolleyes: Yo elephant man… Mr. Conservative! WEIRDDAAAAVE!!!
Well, I’m fairly conservative and side with Excalibre as far as
I don’t really agree with him that it’s the right wing conservatives getting bent over the ad. Maybe he meant conservatives were outraged because the line was pulled from the ad. When I saw it, I thought, “Wow, that’s gonna hit a nerve” and the very next time I saw it, the “silly little fairy” line was gone. I reasoned (maybe right, maybe wrong) that the gay community were the one’s who took it to task.
And FWIW, I’m not outraged that the line was pulled. I’m not really outraged over the ad one way or the other. I think, if it really is a slight on the gay community, it was in pretty poor taste for a major company like Daimler-Chrysler to stoop to using gay innuendo in an ad. The gay community is making headway, even in adverse times (it seems to me, I might be singing a different tune if I were gay), to represent them as whimpering little sissies doesn’t get any of my respect.
Now if I’m wrong, so be it. A lot of people seem to think it was a preppy, not a “fairy”. At least a couple of gays seem to think it was a “fairy”, and if it’s enough to bother them, then that at least should be enough of a reason to consider their POV.
Fine. You might not be conservative, but you’re clearly one of Weirddave’s fellow offenderati, outraged (outraged!) that Dodge pulled an ad that was offensive to part of their audience. That sort of thing is admittedly not a conservative view, actually - the idea that corporations have some responsibility to convey certain messages even if it hurts the bottom line - but it is mostly conservatives who get their undies in a bundle every time they can find an instance of a corporation caving in to “political correctness” and deciding that it’s best not to offend parts of their customer base with ads like this one.
Uh, don’t assign crap to me. You don’t know what I think. I’m not offended by any of this shit. Really don’t care either way. All I’ve said was that A) it seemed to me that the fairy turned the guy into a preppie/fratboy stereotype, B) I didn’t think the gay interpretation was blantant enough for me to say it was obviously intentional, and C) it was retarded to say that Weirddave was a right wing conservative for having his opinion. Please tell me where in ANY of that I’ve said I was offended by ANY of this.
I couldn’t care less if they changed the ad, and I’m not offended that they changed it. I also couldn’t care less about the original ad, as I didn’t feel it was offensive.
So keep your “clearly” bullshit away from me because you’re pulling it directly from where shit comes from–out of your ass.
I’m not outraged that they changed it, I think it’s stupid. I think it’s stupid for some members of the gay community to project an anti-gay bias onto the commercial without a clearly gay archetype in the scene, I think it was stupid of them to protest, and I think Dodge was stupid to change the commercial. Stupid, stupid, stupid all around.