The other day a friend sent me an e-mail that I should not have opened because I didn’t have time to be looking at an e-mail. But I clicked on the link contained and the very first thing I saw made me laugh so very hard. I sent off a quick e-mail back to her explaining my laughter and explaining that I would have to look at the rest later. I had not sat down to look at the rest of the stuff on the link until now but the first thing I had seen keeps running through my head and making me laugh. The subject of the e-mail was “Talk about sexist attitudes, these make me angry but that’s the way it was ‘back in the day'”. I didn’t even read the paragraph that is included on the post until right now as I am typing this. As I said, the first thing I saw was the first ad and it made me laugh soooooo hard. And . . . not only did it make me laugh I had an earworm for the rest of the day AND every time I thought about the e-mail. Yeah the tune is very catchy.
The ad on the post shows a woman in a car and the tag line is “I can’t tell which they’re whistling at . . . me or my new Chevrolet!”. There is more blather and other information that is just too small for me to read, but it reminded me of the commercial my husband and I refer to as “Stacy’s Mom”. There is a song playing that clearly says, “Stacy’s mom has got it goin’ on.” What else it says I don’t know. It is a very catchy tune. Look at the ad yourself and tell me if the old print advertisement is not the same as the new TV commercial.
Well, what do you think? It is clear the men in the TV commercial are participating in the dropping off of the kids from school, whereas the ones in the print ad are just standing there. But since it is print we don’t know what they are/were doing. But both advertisements seem pretty much the same to me.
I glanced at the rest of the ads on the link she sent me and I would bet there are ads and commercials that are pretty much the same today as they were then, but I didn’t look that close to them or give them too much thought. I mean for Heaven’s Sake it is advertising. The way they prey on us is by trying to make us feel inferior and telling us that we will be superior if we buy and use their product. No matter what their product is; something we eat/drink, something we drive, something we slather on our bodies, something we wear, something we use to take something off of our bodies, no matter what they are selling us they are telling us we are not as good as we can be unless we use their product. And sex . . . . as we all know SELLS. So they are going to use it. And KEEP using it, obviously – Cadillac and Chevrolet are GM products!
I mean, why is an AXE commercial any better than an ad saying a woman is nothing without a man? Have you seen those Axe commercials? Apparently all a man has to do to make woman swoon over him is smell good. Yeah right, if as if THAT were the case.
Anyway . . . I just thought I would share a chuckle at the thought that we have come a long way and that advertisements and commercials from the PAST were sexist.
Oh . . .and now it is even MORE funny to me . . . because if you watch the video of “Stacy’s Mom” you will see that the commercial is even more about sex than you might have (at least more than I) originally thought!
So what do YOU think? Do you think the commercials of today (at least this one) is that far from the ad from the past? Share any other thoughts you have about commercials.