Hi! I'm a tech guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS and science of all stripes. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.
I have opinions. So do you. You want to share them with me. I would like to do likewise. Please don't expect a platform for proselytizing that will go unchecked and unchallenged, though. Contact me via the clicky thingies under my banner.
The commenting rules are simple: don't piss me off. This rule has worked for me for a decade; I have never found a need for any other rule, because any other rules leads to rules-lawyering. Just remember --
this is my property, not yours.
I refuse to weigh in on this as much as I could because I have tired of discussing the inflammatory subjects of sexism and racism. I only want to mention that I had no idea that the original Dodge commercial aired during the Super Bowl. In one of many efforts to keep myself sane, I try my best not to watch any TV. I didn’t watch the Super Bowl. I was subjected to this ad, however, when I couldn’t sleep the other night and decided to watch a documentary about the design and construction of skyscrapers on Hulu. I was all, “Ha, ha! Do you think I’m a guy because this is an engineering show?!”
Ten minutes afterward, however, I was shown an ad for hair products primarily intended for women. This mollified me somewhat. I still thought the Dodge ad was unfunny, unimaginative and idiotic. (Give me a break. I like one show about vampires. At least it isn’t Twilight! I don’t even watch it anymore due to my eagerness to avoid watching TV and movies. If I did, I would never “force” DuWayne to watch it with me, because he wouldn’t enjoy it. Come to think of it, if I had a boyfriend who was as passive-aggressively douchebaggy as the men in this commercial, apparently completely and childishly incapable of simply excusing himself from the watching of vampire shows or the long-winded gossip of Teh Evile Stereotypical Wimminz, I wouldn’t bother “forcing” him to do a goddamn thing. I’d just break up with him and let him be on his merry. That’s the worst part of both the original ad and the angry parody of it: the underlying and TV-typical assumption that soul-sucking domesticity is preferable to singlehood no matter how much one’s partner sucks.) In other words, it was perfectly reflective of 99% of Hollywood– in whose town I presently reside. It’s not like it’s some anomaly.
(Yeah. I am annoyed that I went out of my way to avoid the Super Bowl and all its overhyped, overpriced, high-school-never-ends ads and then I wound up with one offensively banal SB ad in my face just because I’d elected to watch Super Structures of the World online. FFS!)
What can one do? Lately, I try to ignore this stuff. I’ve landed a job in a biomedical research laboratory that could also lead to graduate school, and that’s all I care about right now.
NAILED IT. It’s like there’s some preference in Hollywood to maintaining domestic drudgery as it was in the good old days of yore, when you meant nothing if you weren’t married off and in a nuclear family. I think that’s what annoys me about both of these, only I couldn’t articulate it properly (was running on VERY little sleep when I posted that yesterday).
You rock, Juniper. And I’m not just saying that because I want DuWayne to get a Dodge Charger. 🙂
You do realize that the Woman’s Last Stand ad is supposed to be sexist because that’s the whole point of a parody, right?
I’ll let the overwrought sarcasm slide because I like you, Jen — I like your blog, and I like what you do in fighting the more ridiculous parts of humanity. I still can’t countenance fighting sexism with sexism. Nor can I countenance the normalization of, as Juniper put it, soul-crushing domesticity.
Yes, the ad makes a point. I’m even glad it went viral, because a shitty ad like Dodge’s deserves a counterpoint, and at the very least it’s started discussion on this. That doesn’t mean I can’t have a bad taste in my mouth over the whole thing. Or does it? I mean, you had to heavily disclaimer your post just to keep the idiots from crawling out of the woodwork to cry misandry, and you said yourself that sexism is bad whether aimed at men or women.
So… why do you assume I don’t know what the point of parody is, might I ask?
Sorry if that came off snarkier that usual, I just rolled out of bed. ‘Tis not a good time to leave comments on blogs.
I guess by asking “Which is more sexist?” it seemed like you missed the point. The original ad was sexist in order to sell a product, but the rebuttal was sexist in order to go “Okay, see how this is sexist and stupid? Yeah, so is to the original.” To me that’s the obvious difference.
If you get that, don’t mind me.
Fair enough, I opened myself up to that. I titled the post the way I did because I read Greg Laden’s blog fairly often, and he often puts up “which is better, cats or dogs?” posts containing two videos. I get that I might not have made the parallel apparent (in that I’ve only titled two other posts in my memory at all like that myself), and not everyone that reads this blog reads Greg’s. So, yeah.
Also, sometimes I like to stir up controversy just to spark discussion. To get someone who otherwise wouldn’t voice their opinions to do so.
A problem I have now is that I can’t honestly think of how to put together a parody ad WITHOUT being as sexist as the original. And I don’t know if a shovel-to-the-face closing line where you say “see how sexist this was, shoe’s on the other foot now!” at the end, would work all that much better. I just don’t know that everyone’s going to get that this parody shows the flipside of sexism. They’re just going to say “oh, so like a woman to think these things when all we want is a supercharged car”, never realizing that the Dodge ad made some men’s bile rise too.
Yes, well, who knows if those type of people will ever get it =P