AskMen.com - Worst Male-Bashing Ads:
You’ve seen him plenty of times on sitcoms; he’s the dumb, bumbling, idiot dad, husband and boyfriend who appears useless at everything but bringing home a paycheck. The message: Guys are dumb and women have to lead them around. This, of course, cues the laugh track. Yet a survey from an organization called Children Now found that two-thirds of kid respondents described men on TV as angry, while respondents from another group’s survey said men were portrayed as corrupt on TV by a 17 to 1 margin. Clearly, this is no laughing matter.
Feminists have lots to complain about when it comes to ads. No doubt, some of the rankest gender identity construction can be found in beer ads. But how many think about the impact of advertising on males as well? In my media literacy workshops I find myself particularly saddened by the repeated trope that men are stupidly driven by biology– contrary to some of the classical stereotypes that men are the intellectual masters of the universe. Obviously, both images are wrong. Marc Voyer (quoted above) does a nice job of surveying a number of the worse offenders, although I’m surprised that his list doesn’t contain any alcohol ads, though I suppose that would be too obvious. I have been recently re-reading Susan Sontag, and one comment really stuck out. Violence, she says, turns a person into a thing. It made me wonder, is turning a thing into a person also a kind of violence?
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