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The 44th Super Bowl was a fairy tale for the New Orleans Saints—and a bad dream for the women who made up one-third of the television audience. Over at The Sexist, Amanda Hess has graciously compiled all of the most egregious instances of sexism, racism, and homophobia broadcast during the commercial breaks last night. None of them are funny. Most of them are downright offensive. But all of them, Hess points out, were approved by CBS.
Here it’s important to out CBS as complicit in all of the advertorial programming shown during the Super Bowl—most of which was ineffectual at best, dangerous at worst. And as Dana Goldstein reported last week, CBS made particular overtures to Focus on the Family, offering the same “guidance” it administers to all wannabe Super Bowl advertisers on what would be “appropriate” for their anti-choice advertisement starring football star Tim Tebow. But by allowing the barrage of misogynistic (‘milkaholic’ babies fighting over a howling 'wolf'?) ads to blanket the year’s most-watched evening of television, CBS has done both short- and long-term damage to women’s well-being.
Based on some informal friend-polling, I’m not alone in thinking that these ads were some of the worst cases of lady-bashing in Super Bowl history. But if Mad Men has left any practical lesson, it's that the glamourous cadre of Madison Avenue hacks are also pop psychologists plugged into the elusive id of America, knowing what we want and how we want it before we do. What’s more, companies dropping upwards of $1 million on airtime surely focus-grouped each spot within an inch of its life.
So someone in the midlife-male group that's the target demographic for Bud Light, GoDaddy.com, or Doritos liked these ads—thrilled to them, even. What could possibly justify the attraction? Economist Brad DeLong flags a graph that may hold some explanatory power.
Men ages 25-54 are experiencing their lowest level of employment in the United States ever. Despite the recession, women are doing compratively well: Unemployment for men of all ages is at 10.8 percent, while only 8.4 percent for women. (Black men are at 17.6 percent.) And the precipitous drop since the beginning of the recession means that there are fewer men who can fulfill the hetero-normative cultural diktat to be “master and commander” of their domestic lives. Reihan Salam's essay on "the death of macho" laid out the emotional terrain:
[A]s men get hit harder in the he-cession, they’re even less well-equipped to deal with the profound and long-term psychic costs of job loss. According to the American Journal of Public Health, “the financial strain of unemployment” has significantly more consequences on the mental health of men than on that of women. In other words, be prepared for a lot of unhappy guys out there—with all the negative consequences that implies.
In other words: These men may not be carrying lip balm, but they are out of work and mad as hell.
The facts on the ground are not funny—families are doing more with less, less with less, and pride is being swallowed with every unanswered resume sent out. Sublimating these anxieties into that quietly violent Dodge Charger ad is therefore manipulative in the extreme (and pointless: If my theory holds, brand-new, $30,000 cars should be out of reach for this audience). Whether the commercials interpret the present or predict the future, this ad trend—like selling your wife for tires—should be roundly condemned.
Photograph of man by Photodisc/Getty Images.
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Amanda, I disagree that the Tim Tebow ad was meant to be cruel and braggy. I found it innocuous—and even when I thought it was going to be more explicitly anti-choice, I did not think pro-choice people should protest in order to get it yanked off the air. Dayo, you say that CBS was complicit in the airing of sexist, misogynist ads during the Super Bowl. I agree that those ads, particularly the FloTV commercial, were deplorable. But I don't think asking CBS to be more strict in its regulation of standards and practices is a good solution. Especially since it's one that might backfire.
Yes, these misogynistic ads were approved by CBS. But humor is almost always a matter of taste. When you're asking a network to police something as subjective as taste, there are going to be missteps and some segment of the population is going to be offended. CBS has proven itself to be fairly conservative and tasteless by our standards, but that is its right, as it is our right to complain or to change the channel. It's better that these ads air and create discussion—and there's been fantastic chatter all over Twitter and from sites like Jezebel about these awful ads—than for the networks to be censoring more than they already do.
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Amanda, I disagree that the Tim Tebow ad was meant to be cruel and braggy. I found it innocuous—and even when I thought it was going to be more explicitly anti-choice, I did not think pro-choice people should protest in order to get it yanked off the air. Dayo, you say that CBS was complicit in the airing of sexist, misogynist ads during the Super Bowl. I agree that those ads, particularly the FloTV commercial, were deplorable. But I don't think asking CBS to be more strict in its regulation of standards and practices is a good solution. Especially since it's one that might backfire.
Yes, these misogynistic ads were approved by CBS. But humor is almost always a matter of taste. When you're asking a network to police something as subjective as taste, there are going to be missteps and some segment of the population is going to be offended. CBS has proven itself to be fairly conservative and tasteless by our standards, but that is its right, as it is our right to complain or to change the channel. It's better that these ads air and create discussion—and there's been fantastic chatter all over Twitter and from sites like Jezebel about these awful ads—than for the networks to be censoring more than they already do.
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Anthropologist Grant McCracken had a good post a while back about the mythic Beer Guy. Beer Guy is the guy you usually see during Super Bowl commercials. He is the likeably dumb, happy-go-lucky former frat boy. He showed up during this Bud Light commercial. McCracken didn’t get into this, but Beer Guy requires that the people around him—often, women—be his foils. They are humorless, dull, competent. They join book clubs and actually want to talk about the books.
I skipped the Super Bowl, but watching these commercials, I’m not seeing a lot of Beer Guy. I see his angrier counterpart. This guy maybe used to be Beer Guy until he started dating some horrible shrew who makes him carry her lip gloss. Now he’s just resentful. Beer Guy was hovering in between the joyful, beer-soaked depths of his animality and the banality of civilization. This new guy, he of the Flo TV and Dodge Charger ads, has tipped over into civilization and feels oppressed.
The Dodge ad is about escape, a solid if not particularly groundbreaking theme for a minutelong spot. This universal fantasy of deliverance from daily life is taken, for reasons unclear, to be exclusively male. Men like to drive fast cars. Women? Well, we adore recycling, cleaning the sink, going to work, walking the dog. And don’t get me started on sorting the laundry! Bliss. We couldn’t possibly ever dream of getting away from such chores; mostly we dream about our male partners learning to master them. The men in the ad are only truly themselves when they’re driving. Women are most fully realized while separating whites from darks.
So before I go share a very special moment with my vacuum, I'll just add that the the Dodge commercial brought to mind Fantastic Mr. Fox, a good movie with the same sad theme—likeable male fox struggles to choose between animal nature and the graces of civilized family life. Dull, humorless wife-fox pushes for civilization. We know life would be easier if Mr. Fox submitted. But we’re never really on the side of the shrew. We’re always pushing for revolt against the pressure of civilizing conformity. And so when the story inevitably casts the woman on the side of domesticity, the woman inevitably loses.
Photograph of couple by Stockbyte/Getty Images.
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Kerry, I watched the Super Bowl with my husband, 14-year-old daughter, and a friend of hers, and we were all discouraged by what you identify as the truly nasty tone toward women that ran through the ads (and let’s not mention the explicitly porn style of the Go Daddy ads which had the girls vowing they would never use Go Daddy.) And Jess, I agree with you that if this is the way companies want to advertise their products, let them. But I was struck that all the loathing of domesticity in the commercials was completely undercut after the game by the image of a tearful Drew Brees tenderly holding and kissing his baby. In his post-game interview Brees made clear that while he was thrilled for this win, the bigger deal was the birth of his son.
Photograph of Brees family by Timothy A. Clary/Getty Images.
