Accismus

When it comes to ads for women’s products, just in general, this is how I picture the creative team’s meeting:

“Okay. We need this spot to appeal to women. Does anyone have any theories about what women might do?”

“Uh, sit around and talk to each other?”

“Shop?”

“Date men?”

“Okay, great ideas, everyone. I, too, think women must do these sorts of things. Does anyone have any clue as to what women might talk about when they are together?”

“I think they mostly must talk about the fact that they’re women.”

“And that they wear women’s clothes, and use women’s products!”

“And men.”

“Great! Yes, I also assume that women mostly discuss the fact that they are women. I know that if I were a woman, I would never get over the shock of it, and would talk about it all the damn time. Let’s make this ad be women sitting around talking about that they’re women, and so they are able to wear women’s things and also sleep with men.”

Because that’s the only possible explanation I can think of for women’s ads:

“You’re women, girls! You like feminine things for women! Like these razors! Which are pink, and are not razors for men! Let’s see what these women have to say:

‘It’s great! It’s a razor for women! And I am a woman! Awesome!’

Yep, these are women’s razors, ladies. And you, as women, deserve them. Don’t let your boyfriend steal your pink razor, because this razor is for you! And will give you smooth legs. For him.”

One ad in this category is the Yoplait ad in which two young women at a wedding discuss how good the yogurt is. I have a theory about how this ad was written. Here’s the ad in its original form:

“This yogurt is like cute best man good.”

“No, it’s like pretty dress good.”

“No, it’s like spike heels good.”

“No, it’s like catching the bouquet good.”

Then, someone at the meeting said, “oh, but we’re trying to cater to today’s young independent women. You know, they’re not really into getting married, and would probably discuss something other than that.”

And so they rewrote the ad as follows:

“This yogurt is like cute best man good.”

“No, it’s like burning this dress good.”

“No, it’s like getting these shoes off good.”

“No, it’s like not catching the bouquet good.”

Done!

There is one ad out there right now that goes in entirely the opposite direction. It’s a brief ad for a pregnancy test, and the focus is entirely on the pregnancy test wand looming out of a chrome-background, with slanted lighting and a symphonic build-up in the score, and a (male!) voiceover says something like, “Introducing…the most effective pregnancy yadda-yah in blah.” The pregnancy test could just as easily be a screwdriver or a Mach-III razor, or a cell phone. The ad is really jarring when you realize that it is, in fact, a pregnancy test, because everything about it is so completely unfeminine. And for that, I love it.

[Incidentally, I have so, so many ideas for utterly inappropriate, yet freaking awesome birth control advertisements, and I really wish that someone would hire me to make them, because all current ads for birth control just could not be more terrible (Yaz). Like, the ad would feature women being really disgusted and annoyed by screaming babies on the subway, or having to hold their friend's baby, or whatever, and the birth control box is pictured, and it has a picture of a baby with an X over it, and the tagline could be, "Make sure it never happens to you."]

To be fair, lately there have been more and more ads for men’s products that are chiefly about men being men and not women, but in addition, these ads mostly include the assumption that men would not use women’s products, because women are freaking retarded and no guy in his right mind would touch anything a stupid woman might like. The most obvious example of this is that (admittedly very old) Burger King ad, where a throng of men stride around in the street, doing manly things like throwing a truck off a bridge, ripping their underwear right out of their pants, and singing about how they wouldn’t settle for “chick food.” I was actually unaware that there even was sex-specific “women’s food.” I’ve just been eating non-gender-specific food all this time. I hope I don’t die.

And now, here’s this Centrum vitamin ad, in which a voiceover says something like, “If you’re a man over 50, do you think you should be taking the same multivitamin as a woman takes?”

“I don’t think so!” replies a graying fellow on a golf course, before thwacking a ball in self-satisfaction. I have not heard many 50+ men speak of women in general with such knee-jerk distaste, that reaction being more common in boys of twelve. Presumably, the man is a confirmed bachelor and is golfing at a men’s only club, which features a big sign on the front gate reading, ‘No Girlz Alowed!’

[Since writing this, I've seen the companion ad, in which an older woman is asked if she thinks she should be taking the same multivitamin as a man. "Do I have a choice?" she replies, nervously chewing her lip.]

I don’t understand why advertisements for gender-specific products think the only way to appeal to possible consumers is by denigrating whatever sex the product is not for, but let’s just assume for the sake of argument, that that’s the only way it’s done. Fine. But it’s one thing to appeal to men by running down women if you only want men to buy your product. If I’m alienated by an ad, I just think, ‘well, they’re not advertising to me. They don’t want my money, so I won’t spend it on them.’ I feel this way about Twix, which has just thrown up a ton of ads in which eating Twix saves some cheating guy from being busted by his girlfriend, and other things about how men are scamps and need Twix’s help to hide this from their significant others. “Need a moment (to think up a good lie)? Twix! The adultery-masker!” I assume that Twix has done its market research and has determined that men are their most important consumers, and that they can afford to lose the business of whatever women are buying Twix. Beer companies have always assumed that they could sacrifice any money women might be spending on beer, and their advertisements entirely appeal to men (again, almost exclusively by objectifying and degrading women, because how else could you possibly appeal to a man other than by running down women, right?). Or perhaps they gauged (in my case, correctly) that beer is so important to women that they’ll buy it anyway, no matter how offensive to them the advertising is.

But what really gets me is when a company runs some ads insulting women, and other ads catering to them. Burger King used to run an ad all about their grilled chicken sandwich and so forth, and how some woman wanted to go there on a date for that. I don’t really remember; I just recall the ad was aimed at “chicks.” And now they’ve got this ad where a giant, anthropomorphic chicken sandwich is a sort of Lothario, seducing all the women in an unfortunate anthropomorphic burger’s life, including his preteen daughter. The ad is clearly aimed at men, but it’s about how women like chicken (because one thing that fast food companies all seem to believe wholeheartedly is that chicken is for women and beef is for men, just as pink is for girls and blue is for boys). Does Burger King really think that women are so stupid that they won’t notice that the same company that’s begging for their business in certain spots is insulting them in others (or doing both simultaneously in the same ad)?

Miller Lite might get away with this, but a chicken sandwich doesn’t get you drunk. Screw you, Burger King.

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I Hate Ads VI

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I Hate Ads