It’s not that women dislike emotional men; they dislike needy, desperate men. It’s pretty much the same with guys, but I’m never really needy around them, anyways.
As for not being able to date your friends: that comes from a lack of skill. Lots of people wind up dating their friends. You just have to get them (or wait for them) to think about you romantically before you spring your feelings on them. If your feelings are too out of whack with theirs, they will totally resist. Also, “you’re like a brother to me” is often as much a copout as “let’s just be friends”.
As for the OP: it’s just that there are people who would complain if a female were shown, claiming the ad was misogynistic. Not enough people get mad about misandry, and the fact that men are still considered the default is probably part of the reason for that. (Heck, Firefox doesn’t even know the word misandry, which I think says a lot.)
I think StarvingButStrong’s got it. Cast a female as the main character in an ad, even a PSA, and the assumption is that it’s aimed at women. Not so for a male. (Or ads with both sexes.)
Anyway, can I trade a few of these drunk driving ads for the car insurance commercial with the lunatic woman? I swear it plays 10 times an hour.
Not US-Nationwide, but a 2004 Massachusetts study concluded that in Massachusetts, men were searched and cited more often than women during traffic stops. PDF
I think that if there is any truth to it, that it might cast a small shadow over the 4:1 drunk driving figure. Maybe not though since it was not the intended focus of the study, and they note that they had not had sufficient reporting in certain districts compared to other states.
A side note: It seems more acceptable to society (American) to portray straight white men as idiots, drunks and cowards. Straight white men are an easy target, especially when picking on them will not get you labeled a chauvinist or a racist. I’ve heard that majority groups can not be the target of racism or sexism from some soft science types. I don’t know if I agree with this, but it seems that there is literature to support this notion.
I’ve posted this before, but for those annoyed by husbands being portrayed as doofuses in advertising, here’s Sarah Haskins’ take (don’t worry, even though she’s a woman she’s actually very funny). Of course, the ads fall under the umbrella of those that target women the others being yogurt, wedding shows, etc. All worth a look.
I saw the stat up top that says women are more likely to kill someone in a DUI accident, but I am going to guess that DUI arrests are primarily male. I do a little more barhopping than I care to admit to, but for the most part, most barflies are male.
I also notice that many of these commercials seem to be during sports events or sports talk radio, could it be that this ad campaign is aimed towards men?
Finally, a TV scene of a female being handcuffed and put in the back of a squad car by big mean policemen might evoke sympathy, whereas its less easy to feel sorry for a drunken male buffoon.
I was simply pointing out how old it is. Women have never cared much about the welfare of men. The idea that women are all compassionate and empathetic and really really care about people more than men is a modern ideologically driven claim, and nothing more.
Now THERE’S a standard bit of rhetoric. Imply that men are treated unfairly in any way, and you have a “persecution complex”.
I haven’t found an objective cite yet; I did find a feminist article complaining about males crying longer.
I didn’t say a thing about either being OK, or not OK for that matter. Although as far as double standards go, the police are notoriously easyon women when it comes to crime, including drunk driving. So I wouldn’t trust any claims that men drive drunk more.
And I note you don’t actually come up with an argument against my position. And that while you find it so wrong as to be “awe inspiring” to say that women don’t care much about men, you agree with Rubystreak who claims that men don’t care about men.
This actually sounds like an excellent DUI “think of teh children!” commercial. OK here’s the scene; it’s two cars, completely obliterated, EMTs, police and bodies covered with sheets. There’s a black bar at the bottom of the screen showing this in white letters:
1 out of every 6 DUI fatalities involve a woman under the influence of alcohol.
Most of these women had a child under 14 in the car.
Drunk driving affects everyone.
OK sure so it’s not completely accurate, but when is advertising ever completely accurate?
You are talking the utterest bullshit here, and this is why everyone thinks you’re a crackpot. Women have never cared much about the welfare of men. Yeah. Sorry you feel that way. But that’s just your own mental illness talking. You don’t see that what I said, which is that men don’t care much about the welfare of men, is just as unsupported as yours, but yours of course is a FACT and mine is bigoted and sexist. Double standard? Yes indeed. If you were capable of a nuanced view, you’d see that society devalues both men and women in different ways, but men are not the victims and women the victors. If that’s what you’ve gotten out of your life experiences, then you have some serious problems. But then, we knew that.
I’m not speaking in general. I’m talking about you specifically. YOU have a persecution complex, not all men who complain about unfairness. Just you, baby.
I’m shocked, SHOCKED that you would have no objective cites for your claims, just some blog.
What you’re saying here is that I shouldn’t bother with cites because you wouldn’t believe them anyway.
Now go watch some brain-dead sitcoms with fat, stupid male leads who make you feel inferior. At least they have hot wives. It’s so unfair. But the shows need audiences so they can stay on the air; I surely don’t watch them.
And when that demeaning commercial comes on–keep your hands off the remote!
I’ll tell you, a few years ago I got my hands on some videotapes on which my mom had taped soap operas from around 1986…they were an absolute mind-blower to watch, in terms of the commercials on them. The commercials back then were so vastly different, and one such way is that so many of them depict ridiculously clumsy housewives. There’s always some woman opening a cabinet and having pots and pans fall all over her, or spilling some cleaner and slipping on it and falling on her ass, or something. They would never have that stuff happening to a woman now in commercials, though it could still happen to a guy.
Indeed it’s all Girrrrl Powerrrr these days. It’s men that are Klutzes, helpless if it weren’t for clear thinking, pro-active women that dart around the place .
Well, this is no more nuts than things I have read feminists saying about men, but it shocks me to see you post it, because, contrary to what a lot of posters may post about you, I don’t think you are crazy at all; I think you are usually dead right.
Maybe you just were posting that to make some kind of point, but you don’t actually believe it literally? I don’t know. I know it’s crazy, though.
• Some feminists were more emphatic than sociobiologists that such diffs exist; they just emphasized the desirability of what they considered to be innately female characteristics
• We have never seen males and females except in context; and thus even where we are pretty sure diffs do exist, we can’t say for sure how they manifest except in combination with a sexually dimorphic social world. Arguing how much of observed behavioral diffs are due to innate biology and how much due to socialization is a bit like arguing how much of the area of a square is due to its length and how much due to its width.
• I can’t think of a single published theorist who ever said that women should act like men and vice versa. At the closest, some opined that women should act more like men and men more like women, not so as to “trade places” emotionally or behaviorally but to reclaim aspects of their personality and consciousness that have been suppressed by polarized sex role expectations.
• The central and most emphatic claim of feminist theory on sex diffs has to do with unequal expectations: NOT the assertion that no statistically significant diffs might exist between the population of males and the population of females but that with regards to any individual person a fair and equal society does not maintain two separate set of behavior rules, allowing or praising one conduct when exhibited by one sex while ignoring or condemning that same conduct when exhibited by the other sex. WHY? Because at a minimum, it restricts the range of experiences and opportunities available to individuals (males and females alike) for no defensible good reason; and more politically it is part of the mechanism by which patriarchal structures that specifically disempower females has been maintained. It is a “separate but equal” statute.