football football football football football
I comment on television quite a lot. I do other stuff. It just sounds like I watch a lot of TV, and I guess I do, but not lockin-fat-bloke-call-the-fire-brigade-to-extract-him-from-the-flat-through-a-hole-in-the-wall to much.
I have just seen yet another advert that portrays men as a)stupid and b)football mad.
Here’s my issue. I don’t like football. I am not stupid. I do not sit in my underwear in a pool of my own filth living on pot noodle whenever my wife is away. I’ve never even had a pot noodle.
Why are there so many adverts that portray men as imbeciles, incapable of buttoning their own shirts, who can be rendered impotent just by waving cup final tickets in front of them.
Another classic advert in this mold is the (I think) Old El Paso stir in powder stuff.
The man is cooking. The woman, his soon to be ex, is talking on the phone to her girlfriend saying something like - ‘He’s cooking tonight, I’ll probably die of food poisoning”. She asks him what’s for dinner.
He says (and again I paraphrase) “I’m making sweet pepper and onion fajitas with pan fried chicken in a rich mexican spicey sauce”
She eats the powder chicken onion stuff and stops criticizing him for a couple of minutes.
The thing is, this advert was trying to tell us a couple of things.
- That chopping up some chicken, pepper and onion, throwing them in a pan, putting in some powder and stiring (in slow motion) is cooking
- With Old El Paso powder stuff, you can fool your wife/girlfriend into thinking that you are not a useless footy mad man-blob and maybe she’ll think you’re sexy or something.
So men can’t cook, operate washing machines (I mean come on - they are about the simplest thing in the world to operate, compared to say, an Ericsson mobile phone) or think beyond the World Cup. I dispair.
The worst thing about these terrible stereotypes is that there are just enough men for whom all this is true, to perpetuate the myth.
(Note- even as I type this another advert comes on - father+child eating cereal out of football shaped bowls?????)
Written by exmonkey on May 16th, 2006 with
2 comments.
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Christine
#1. May 17th, 2006, at 9:49 PM.
Huh. My heart bleads. Now you know how women have felt all these years having to watch stupid ads depicting them as feeble-minded beings unable to operate a car or any piece of machinery. Or being superb cooks just by crumbling revolting sawdust cubes over food. Or being morons for not removing the sticky label from their mobies (actually, this one is not an ad, as you well know).