Why would anyone, man or woman, be more likely to buy a product if a man is made to look like a jackass in the advertisement?
Women shop more than men, or at least that’s what we’re led to believe. In my experience, this is true, but that counts for little.
I don’t know how the ratio of women-watching-TV to men-watching-TV stacks up, but again, from personal experience, men watch way more TV. In fact, I never noticed the phenomenon that I am about to describe until my brother started hanging out at my house.
The phenomenon I’m talking about is TV commercials that have men behaving badly or stupidly. To put it more plainly, commercials that make men look like jackasses. The more TV I watch, the more I see products being pitched by way of belligerence or plain stupidity on the part of the men in the commercials.
Keep in mind I have only been doing this intense TV watching for the past year or so (roughly around the same time my brother got his driver’s license and decided he’d rather watch my 27-inch TV than the two big-screen TVs in our parents’ home), so I can’t speak for how long this has been going on. In the essence of full disclosure, I also need to admit that I have satellite, and that I am noticing these commercials on the channels my brother and I tend to watch most: FX (King of the Hill, That ‘70s Show, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), TNT, USA, and Bravo (Law & Order – all three versions). Notice that the FX shows are typically shows that have a male-skewing audience. The L&Os seem to be split down the middle, gender-wise.
My favorite example of all these commercials is one for Dish Network. It, to me, is the pinnacle of the men-are-jackasses genre of commercials. This commercial hasn’t been on for awhile, but it goes something like this: The wife is all for Dish Network; the husband, not so much. But of course, when they get the dish and the wonders within, the husband, in the most grating way possible, takes all the credit for it. The wife eventually shuts him up, naturally, but I just want to kick him.
Who is this commercial for? When I watch it, I instantly dislike Dish Network because the commercial is so garrulous. What woman thinks to herself, "I will get Dish Network so that my husband can carry on about how it was his idea and make me and everyone we know miserable"? What man thinks, "You know what would be cool? If my wife suggested we get Dish Network, so I can tell everyone it was really my idea?" I just don’t get this. In Dish Network’s defense, apparently no one else did, either, because I haven’t seen this ad in awhile.
Another commercial in the same vein that baffles me is the DiGiorno one where the token jackass and his buddies are, for whatever reason, watching TV in the yard. They decide they want pizza, and rather than (A) going inside and making the DiGiorno pizza and pretending it’s delivery or (B) calling for real delivery, the man pretends he’s calling a pizza joint, when he’s actually calling his wife, inside the house, and rather boorishly "ordering" a pizza. The wife, seemingly appalled, nevertheless makes the pizza, even though she exacts revenge by spraying the jackasses with a hose. She was probably hoping for electrocution, considering they are, after all, watching TV outside.
Compared to the Dish Network ad, the DiGiorno spot displays a lower level of jackass-ness, but consider: The wife in the commercial is, at some point pictured in a way that leads me to believe that she has just been grocery shopping. This leads me to believe that the creators of this ad picture women buying DiGiorno pizzas. Now, why would a woman want to buy DiGiorno if her husband is subsequently going to start calling her from other areas of the house or yard and demand she bake and deliver said pizza?
My final examples make the case that men are just stupid. Both of these commercials are for a plug-in air freshener.
In the first, a man sits in front of the television, fanning an air freshener to move the scent. The wife eventually comes into the picture, and plugs in a fan air freshener. Then she rubs his arm with this pitying look on her face. It’s almost as though she pities him for being so stupid he didn’t know there was such a thing as a fan-driven air freshener.
In the second, closely related commercial, the man ties a fan to his pet cat’s tail in order to get the cat to fan the scent throughout the house. This one takes the previous ad a step further. The wife not only frees the cat from the fan contraption, but she plugs in a fan air freshener, and, inspired, invites a friend over, who immediately asks what she’s done with the place. There is some suggestion that the man is going to take credit for this. Instead, the woman and her friend dismiss him. The cat, disgusted, hisses and spits.
What I love about these commercials is the varying displays of pity and contempt the women, and even the cat, show toward the poor men who just want fake flower-scented air circulating in their homes. Men are apparently either too stupid to know that you can buy an fan-air freshener or, maybe, just too lazy to go get one, and will therefore either wear themselves out fanning or tie a fan to a cat’s tails instead.
Why do advertisers think they need to make men look ridiculous to sell things? Why would anyone, man or woman, be more likely to buy a product if a man is a jackass in the advertisement? Even the argument that women do most of the shopping for household goods doesn’t hold up. No woman is going to subscribe to Dish Network if her husband is going to become as insufferable as the one in the commercial, nor is a woman going to buy a certain air freshener because she’s afraid if she doesn’t her husband is going to tie a fan to the cat or dog’s tail. So why make the men in the commercials so lame?
But here’s the flipside: If women are supposed to like buying things because someone is made to look arrogant or ignorant in the ads, then why don’t we have more commercials with ignorant or arrogant women in them?
Think about it. Aside from those Degree deodorant commercials where women are jumping out of windows and sliding down banisters at warp speed to avoid getting white marks on their black dresses, I can’t think of any other commercials that make women look stupid, and none where they behave belligerently. And I think that we are supposed to find these women clever for thinking of ways, doable or not, to get into black dresses without getting deodorant on them. These commercials, in a fairy-tale sort of way, portray women as resourceful and ingenious.
Compare and contrast: woman sliding down a banister into a black dress versus a man waving a fan in front of an air conditioner. Who comes out the winner? Interesting, isn’t it?
I don’t know what the male-to-female demographic of TV commercial writers is. I don’t know whether it’s men or women who want us to think that men are so ridiculous. But I just want to know why commercials make men look stupid, and why more men aren’t offended.
