Super Bowl Ads « Jehmu Greene

Though the New Orleans Saints’ decisive victory left little room for Monday morning quarterbacking, the same cannot be said about the Super Bowl ads. CBS and its advertisers served up enough offensive fare to give everyone with an opinion an opportunity to take a swing – and they’re not holding back.

Amanda Hess at Washington City Paper took a turn explaining why Super Bowl ads are the way they are. Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon has a witty play-by-play of what she’s termed the Misogyny Bowl. Feministe takes Madison Avenue ad firms to task for forgetting it’s no longer the era of Mad Men.

And just because there will never be too much analysis of sexism, here’s the Women’s Media Center’s take:

$2.8 million – How much Focus on the Family paid CBS to attempt to pull the wool over America’s eyes. As expected, the benign ad featuring Tebow and his mom tried to hide Focus on the Family’s intolerant and divisive agenda. That the ad was allegedly ‘co-produced’ by CBS should be seen as a serious referendum on the status of women in the media.

5 henpecked, long suffering husbands. Before last night, I never really understood how horrible and unfair it must be to be a man. Having a job. Dressing oneself and taking out the recycling. Practicing basic human hygiene. A devastating existence made more trying by the presence of a demanding, overbearing woman. You might even have to carry her lip balm. The horror. Luckily for all the desperate men out there, Chrysler, Dove, and FLOTV produced spots on how to buy back your manhood. Buy a car. Buy some soap. Get a miniature TV. Never have to put down the toilet seat ever again.

$1200 – price of 4 Bridgestone hot rod tires. The official tire company of the NFL served up a particularly disturbing version of male devotion to their automobiles. In this ad, a faceless driver tosses his wife out of the car and into the clutches of a waiting evil villain rather than surrender his tires. Simple math: if the tires are worth $1200, how much is this wet, abandoned woman to whom he’s supposedly pledged his life worth? $1000? $800? Shameful.

2 older women sacked by big, bulky football players. In what kind of culture do we live when slamming an older women into the ground makes an appearance in not one but two commercials? Snickers rags on older people by comparing lagging players to Betty White and Abe Vigoda and then slamming them into the ground. The Focus on the Family ad tried a strange stab at humor when Tim Tebow sacked his own mother. Not funny, just unsettling.

20+ pasty office drones in their tighty whities. Even though it had the uncomfortable effect of forcing you to imagine your office mates naked, the careerbuilder.com ad was one of the few that managed to show skin without imposing sexual or homophobic tension. In fact, its’ representation of real people with real bodies was a refreshing departure from the white, All-American boys and girls from central casting.

1 woman in a bath tub. Megan Fox referenced the sexting craze from her bubble bath, wondering aloud what would happen if she sent a nude pic flying around the web. The sexism goes both ways here, as Motorola assumes men lose all self-control and common sense in the face of a suggestive picture.

26. The number of laps Danica Patrick led the year she placed third at the Indianapolis 500, becoming the first woman to ever place in the top three. That she is such a successful sportswoman in a field dominated by men makes it even more frustrating to see her reduced to the GoDaddy.com logo across her breasts year after year. Even though GoDaddy.com sponsors her race car, she’s never portrayed on the track. This year she’s trying to live her normal life – getting a massage and appearing on a talk show – but perky blonde women keep insisting on ripping their clothes off for her. Whether it’s some writer’s idea of a primetime lesbian fantasy or just more catnip to draw men to the soft porn commercials on their site, GoDaddy.com is once again one of the worst sexist ad offenders of the year.

1 Creepy Beaver – Attention Monster.com: Women aren’t born to be awarded as bikini-clad prizes to talented men OR semi-aquatic rodents. That is all.

30+ pantless dudes marching through a field. A continuation of the theme of the night: bemoaning existence as a male human being in a world of power hungry, castrating females. This ad brought to you by Dockers, the proud authors of the absurdly sexist and bizarre ‘Wear the Pants’ campaign that caused an outcry earlier this year. Add khaki pants to the list of things that will help men feel better about their penis size.

40 million – Estimated number of American women who tuned into the Super Bowl only to see themselves maligned, sexualized, objectified, and blamed for men’s problems big and small.

Super Bowl advertising has always been a showcase of overt sexism. This year the biased barrage also includes CBS’s and the NFL’s decision to air a seemingly subtle ad highlighting college football star Tim Tebow’s story, sponsored by Focus on the Family, which aggressively works to strip women of medical choices. This decision should be seen as a referendum on the status of women in the media and marks the first time the Super Bowl will be used to push a polarizing, political agenda.

The Women’s Media Center and a coalition of organizations dedicated to reproductive rights, tolerance, and social justice is calling on CBS and the NFL to pull Focus on the Family’s anti-choice propaganda ad. We do not have to see the ad to know Focus on the Family’s real agenda. While pretending its message is a “celebration of life,” their true intent is to have the government intrude in women’s reproductive health decisions. The subliminal messaging of the ad is also a thinly veiled effort to shame the one in three American women who have an abortion and a dangerous suggestion that choosing to carry a pregnancy to term — regardless of the risks — is the right decision for all women.

Would CBS and the NFL really have accepted a Super Bowl ad promoting reproductive health care from Planned Parenthood? History suggests not a chance. At best, CBS’s last-minute offer to air a counter ad by a reproductive rights organization was nothing more than a public relations gimmick. At worst, CBS’s executives purposely devised a revenue model that involves airing incendiary advocacy ads, thereby pressuring opponents to pay the network to respond. Any effort to increase ad sales by equating the serious attacks on reproductive rights to the same playing field as Coca Cola vs. Pepsi irresponsibly ignores the increasing vitriolic climate around reproductive health. The Women’s Media Center recognizes that engaging in a multi-million-dollar, 30-second ad war with Focus on the Family, an organization that promotes forced pregnancy, is a losing strategy and does little to advance a more meaningful dialogue about the difficult reproductive choices women make every day.

Women’s health is not a game, and abortion is only part of the reproductive health equation. Every year women turn to family planning clinics and their doctors for sound advice, mammograms, pap smears, breast exams, prenatal care, sexually transmitted infection testing, and preventative services like sex education and access to contraception. According to the Guttmacher Institute, half of all pregnancies in the United Stated are unintended. Women’s reproductive health should be fair, safe and covered and we stand up against organizations like Focus on the Family, which use medical misinformation, politics and 30-second ads to preach morality to women.

Our campaign to get the ad pulled is not a first amendment issue — the Women’s Media Center, NOW, Feminist Majority and others are not government entities attempting to regulate speech. As we exercise our first amendment right to protest, we are incorrectly labeled “would-be censors.” The FCC and media corporations make decisions every day about what can air over the networks without charges of censorship. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if the ad was sponsored by the KKK. CBS’ decision to debut its new policy of accepting advocacy ads during the Super Bowl by climbing in bed with a right-wing, anti-woman, homophobic organization — and the NFL’s explicit endorsement — indicates a clear bias. That this unprecedented break from a longstanding tradition of relative political impartiality comes on the heels of a Supreme Court decision bestowing person-hood on corporations is a real threat to fair representation in the media.

CBS and the NFL gambled that women would allow this biased decision to go unchecked. A week into our campaign, over two hundred thousand emails have been sent to CBS, the NFL, and their advertisers protesting the airing of the ad. This campaign will continue through the Super Bowl as multiple organizations mount boycotts and protests.

Would-be perpetrators of sexism and bias in the media take note. We are watching, monitoring and will mount similar campaigns as necessary.

—Jehmu Greene

Political commentator and social justice organizer

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