viz.

Image Credit:  Screenshot from Youtube

Since almost everybody else on the Internet is commenting on this year’s Super Bowl ads, I couldn’t resist offering my take.  The obvious issue with the Super Bowl ads this year is their fairly blatant sexism.  Whether declaring how men need Dodge Chargers because women emasculate them, or entreating men to “wear the pants,” the Super Bowl commercials addressed themselves to a male audience, as noted by the New York Times:

There seems to be a theme in many of the Super Bowl spots: the need to reassure men that they are as manly as they hope they are. That theme recurs in Super Bowl ads because so many of the viewers are men and so many of the products advertised are aimed at them.

Or, as James Poniewozik from Time put it:

Wow, Super Bowl ad men really hate Super Bowl ad women this year, don’t they?

Image Credit:  Screenshot from Youtube

The visuals of the Charger ad in particular, entitled “Man’s Last Stand,” are particularly creepy; the ad features a montage of men staring into the camera, ending on a closeup of one man’s intense eyes before shooting to footage of the car zooming over the landscape as the words “Man’s Last Stand” appear on the screen.  The deadpan of most of the men’s expressions doesn’t directly express hostility, but the voice and the script, which dully intones that “I will carry your lip balm.  I will watch your vampire TV shows with you,” implies a building hostility that can only be recovered through the car’s fast speeds.

What I find interesting about this, though, is how seemingly tone-deaf these ads are to a potential female audience.  According to the Nielsen Company, this year’s Super Bowl reached more than 106 million viewers—it seems obvious that many of these viewers would be women, right?  Why would they risk alienating a potential audience, many of whom are the people who go the store to buy the beer that their families will drink while watching Drew Brees and Peyton Manning?  (At the Super Bowl party I was at, there were ten women and six men—and while the women weren’t all major football fans, we all watched the ads attentively.)

However, in looking at the most successful of the ads, the Snickers ad “Game” that featured Betty White, the message isn’t dramatically different.  Betty White is actually Mike, who is “playing [football] like Betty White out there.”  Once Mike eats a Snickers provided to him by an attractive girl, he becomes a young man again, as the tag line assures viewers that “Snickers satisfies.”  While Betty White getting tackled in a football game is amusingly incongruous, the basic message of the commercial is still the same:  being a man in sporting events is good, and whatever product makes you a “satisfied” man is to the good as well.  Maybe the issue with the Super Bowl ads this year wasn’t their sexist content, but rather that the amount of sexism has to be tempered by equal amounts of humor.  Women can take a joke, but just not too much of one, so advertisers need to not express their angst about the economy and their lost jobs to avoid knocking out a valuable audience.