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I blame Home Improvement. Seeing that show might possibly have been the first time I was totally revolted by gender roles at a young age. The big gag on the show is...grunting?!?!

To be fair, I'm being totally humorless about this. If someone were pelting me with candy I would probably run and get a net. That's probably also part of the reason why I'm not a competitive speed walker. That, and speed walking looks kinda retarded.

And the fact that I'm totally humorless about this kind of crap is also generally why I avoid the tv. Because commercials just make me angry. Hulk smash angry.

Look at this insanity:

The man-child and his son stand there slack-jawed while the woman sensibly knows her place to clean up the spill. It's always the woman who is using the product. And the idiocy of the men and children in the commercials just reinforces the wrongheaded notion that smart women know that they can do the cleaning better than the incompetent man ever could...it's all a big conspiracy! Men have women trained like monkeys!! Monkeys, I tell you!!!

All paper towel commercials are like this! And detergent commercials, too! As a slob I find that offensive.

_{I really need to look into curing this summertime insomnia.}

This isn't the 1950's, you know! This is 2008! This commercial is the exact same thing as that Winston cigarette commercial that Ken Schultz linked to a few weeks ago.

Don't talk about gender equality "progress" to me. Progress, my eye.

Um, well, the unifying theme of both commercials is that men are expected to be lazy, and that it is presumably a charming or funny feature in them in some way. Which it is not. And aside from the fact that for obvious reasons I disapprove of the continuation of that stereotype -- because it perpetuates the notion that only women can and should be trusted to do the housework -- I would also imagine that men with any kind of functioning brain might find that a little bit insulting.

I wouldn't call that progress. I firmly believe that a lot of women lose their minds picking up after men. Let me tell you a fable.

When I was in junior high, I inherited an unwanted pet chinchilla from a family friend. Whenever I changed Wesley's cage, I had to put him in the bathroom, which was the smallest space I could contain him in where it was still possible to retrieve him (nowhere to burrow) when I was done changing out his cage. Afterwards, I'd have to go around the bathroom for 20 minutes or so, picking up all the shits that he so haphazardly took while I was busy cleaning his cage. After a few years I got sick of this and gave him to a friend of mine who had a female chinchilla and wanted to breed them. (He said he'd give me half the profits from the sale of the babies, but I never saw a dime!).

If I were to judge the state of domestic affairs by commercials alone, I would say I think a lot of married women feel the way I did when I had Wesley. After a while I just got sick of picking up after his shit.

I'm going to try to go to bed now. But I can't promise that I won't be back again in 5 minutes. I'm going to have a rough day of breadwinning tomorrow on such little sleep.

Thanks, Eric. I'm not having any luck with it right now. I suppose I could resort to the ol' Valium, but then I'll really have a tough time in the morning.

And allow me to tie up the loose ends in my last post. I'm sure some of you are thinking "mein gott, that smacky is a real shrew" (guilty as charged) "...comparing men to pets". Well, I'm not saying it only works one way; I've seen real-life examples of some women who seriously don't pull their own weight in relationships and are the picture of incompetence and helpless, childlike dependency, much like my old charge Wesley. What my whole last post was about was what is reflected in pop culture. Either commercials like these are a reflection of society, or perhaps they are influencing society -- or both -- but regardless of which scenario it is, I see it as totally undesirable, from the perspective of both genders.

I think the commercial is pretty overtly homophobic and offensive. (I didn't have the sound on, admittedly, so if the dialogue somehow makes it better, I'll change that. But I doubt it.) It's not so much the commercial in a vacuum that's so bad (so yes, by itself, it's maybe not worth the time spent bitching about it) but that it's another in a long line of "macho het guy puts sissy femme guy in his place" portrayals in pop culture -- like, fuck, another one? Really?

I'll be honest; I haven't read the ensuing discussion in this thread and don't plan to. It's a little too personal of an issue for me. I see gender roles as trends; we're always going to have them, and by themselves they're okay. They're just one part of a whole pile of information that we use to navigate how to deal with people every day, all the time. It's when they're used to corral people into certain ways of acting, and judge people on how "well" they're behaving, that they become really hurtful. It's kind of like the perceptions of geeks and non-geeks, that geeks like Star Trek and non-geeks don't. That's generally truer than not, so it's okay to assume that as a trend. But if we as a society ridiculed non-geeks who were Trekkers, and told geeks who weren't that they weren't "real geeks"; if we swiped Kirk action figures from our non-geek kids and shoved them into our geek kids' hands (in the uncommon cases when they didn't naturally gravitate to or away from them); if a non-geek in a DS9 t-shirt sometimes was frequently threatened with, or even suffered, physical violence based on their sartorial choices ... then I would say that as a society, our geek/non-geek Trek roles are a real fucking problem.

Anyway, I've said my piece, and I'm out. I know that you guys who aren't fans of smashing gender roles do agree that people shouldn't be hurt or coerced into acting any certain harmless way, and it's just your personal feelings on the matter. I don't agree with them, but I accept that you're not meanie-heads.

I think it's pretty apparent that there are a lot of traditional gender roles that are bunk. For example, the work vs. stay home issue. I think AR should note that in olden times, women DID work. So did kids. If anyone took care of the youngest children, it tended to be the older children. Women worked the fields and did other jobs in the community. I wonder what would happen to income distribution if the 2/3 sigma and up income brackets were removed. The highest paid people are men and this skews the entire distribution. If these were removed it would probably have a significant equalizing effect. Not to mention that the senior management pool is only now starting to be filled with candidates where women regularly entered the workforce. We can't say much about the composition for another decade or so as we enter the age where women equaled men in college graduation rates and are at senior management age.

As someone who has worked in quite a few industries and been to more than my share of meetings, I can't disagree with smacky that the business world is still pretty chauvinist.

There are more women in law schools and medical schools now. B-schools are the last professional schools that are male dominated.

Well, anyway, my point being that the culture of the business world is traditionally a boys club for boys and their cronies. I can't recall how many times I've seen businessmen lingering outside of strip clubs all drunk with their coworkers. That kind of work environment isn't really hospitable -- or appealing -- to women.

I don't really have another point to make right now, just wanted to add that. I am tired. So tired.

Also, my experience in the business world doesn't line up with smacky's at all. I deal with powerful women every day, all day. Certain industries have a boys club mentality, to be sure, but I don't think one can seriously talk about Business as a whole being inhospitable to women who put in the same time as male counterparts.

There is an element of group dynamic creating the social environment however. I've been on teams mostly populated by women, and team socializing takes on an entirely different air than it did in my most recent team (in which I sat next to "Frat Row"). Teams of mostly men start acting like boys clubs because men act differently when its just the boys present. Women are the same way. Don't tell me the hen house doesn't exist - I've worked in one. Substantially mixed company, with 25% or more of the group representing a strong minority, just act differently.

The trouble I have with this otherwise attractive viewpoint is that people will, in the aggregate, socially segregate themselves into brussels sprouts-eating and non-brussels sprouts-eating groups, and form stereotypes about the other group. "Man, those brussels sprouts eaters, they would totally eat, like, a brussels sprout. Fucking brussels sprouts-eaters." That tendency to segregate is also inborn.

If this were purely socially constructed, it would be easier to say "no, everybody organize yourself by lettuce and non-lettuce eating!" and suddenly there'd be no jokes about brussels sprouts. (Suddenly means approximately 50 years.) But if grouping yourself by behavior is an inborn trait, it's going to be a lot harder to eliminate.

This is actually one of the reasons I think Ayn Rand's philosophy is fundamentally flawed. If we're hardwired to eat as much sugar as we can when it's available, it's not enough to say "check your precepts that sugar is in any way desirable and your obesity will disappear!" But I think it equally applies to gender roles: you can deplore them, but they're going to be compensated for in some way, either by accepting or applying social pressure to counter them. But they won't magically disappear, even if you manage to give everybody amnesia and have aliens train them from infants.

more to the point of course is the exciting world of textual analysis, in which a black man who embodies certain stereotypes is shooting black phalluses from an even bigger phallus (military grade) at an effeminized man wearing short-shorts.

two possible tracks:

1) typical sublimated homosexual desires played out via farce to defuse the emotional impact therein

or

2) it's yet another misogynistic segment from the homosocial, homosexual cabal that dominates the arts and entertainment; only by eschewing the feminine in favor of the aggressively penetrative can men become free.

and of course the tagline, "get some nuts" is a reference to oral-genital stimulation and the ancient pagan practices of eating the body parts of your enemies to take their power upon yourself. in this case, sperm production.

No, because it is a function of women's vocal chords being physically smaller than men's, so that women's voices do not carry as easily as men's. Also, less testosterone causes women's voices to be less deep (or more "shrill" to use the misogynist term) and consequently less audible, and, consequently, less likely to be acknowledged by others. No matter how hard I try, I am never going to sound like Chuck D. I am still trying to make my peace with that fact.

I'm not sure what you're asking here.

All video content is blocked at my work, so I can't see what you posted at the moment.

Whatever. Freak.
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Dammit!

I used to love brussel sprouts as a kid. Not sure why they all started tasting bad for me, though this coincided with my mother making them less and my only occasionally having them from other sources.

With the right amount of meta, it can be. Robert Downey Jr. in black face strikes me as an example.