Miss O’Hara rips Madison Avenue a new one:
I just saw one of the worst spots of 2004, a Chrysler spot. It shows a rugged, dusty man standing in the desert, his motorcycle broken down along the side of an empty highway. A minivan pulls up, and a sweatpants-wearing, ponytailed woman asks, “Out of gas?” After a nod to the affirmative, the woman opens the back door of her minivan, pushes all of the seats down, puts the motorcycle into the car, straps it down, and they prepare to drive off.Which is when we get the kicker. In a moment apparently intended to elicit laughs from viewers, our grungy heroine turns to the crumb-cruncher in the backseat and says, with a viciously Hillary-like snidely sneering look and tone, “Daddy just haaaaaad to get a motorcycle – didn’t he….”
I, for one, am sick of this crap. Because if the men aren’t whipped fools, they are homicidal maniacs and/or horomonally driven lechers. Long gone are the days where men in our entertainment were actually men (this probably explains why I like old movies so much). Their women are more mother than lover, apparently unable to distinguish between their dependent children and their grown-up husband, who is perfectly capable of becoming independent very quickly (these days). And even if they aren’t doing the “mother” thing, they are rude, snotty, condescending, and unappreciative of their husbands. You want to know why we have a DINS* epidemic? Because no man alive in his right mind would want to touch that woman, that’s why. If she didn’t shut him down, she’d either ridicule him or bark out orders. Blech.
Can she get an amen? What’s amazing to me is that some of these “men are idiots” commercials are actually shown DURING FOOTBALL GAMES! Yeah, if you want to be sure that young men will avoid marriage like the black plague, just make sure that they’re exposed to plenty of this sort of garbage.
I saw a commercial featuring two kids talking about their parents’ minivans and before an adult even entered the picture I knew that the Dad would be an idiot. Sure enough, the father no sooner buckles himself in than he realizes he has to go to the bathroom. He rushes out of the car as the child rolls his eyes and says “typical”. HA HA HA HA HA… er, wait a minute, that’s just stupid. MESSAGE: fathers are so stupid, you’re fortunate if they don’t urinate on themselves. Buy a minivan.
The irony is that the first commercial is predicated on the target audience’s ignorance of motorcycles. My immediate thought upon reading this was: “since when does anyone run out of gas on a motorcycle?” Space Bunny said her first thought was that maybe the guy was trying to escape the bitch.
I just wonder why on Earth women are so desperate to get married and to turn every casual dating affair into a serious monogamous relationship if they believe men are such drooling fools. (Note the “if”, the statement doesn’t apply to women who actually like men.) The sentiment isn’t that uncommon, as I’ve heard even married Christian women dismissing their highly intelligent, highly paid husbands as incompetents because they don’t know the proper way to stack the tupperware.
“You know how it goes. You’ve seen me put it away a hundred times!” Yeah, well, she may have seen him install device drivers or change the oil a hundred times, but that doesn’t mean she knows how to do it.
The TV culture is really a cancer on society. I watched part of the first Desperate Housewives episode, and I saw a woman poison her allergic husband, another woman punch hers, and a third cheat on hers then successfully fool him about whether the grass had been cut all in about five minutes. If I was a young guy exposed to that as my primary conception of marriage, you’d need a platoon of Force Recon Marines, handcuffs, leg irons, a gag and a voice synthesizer to ever get me married. The show Sex in the City may have led to Desperate Housewives, but in the real world, it’s going to work the other way around.
*DINS=Double Income No Sex. I had to look that one up.