A disturbing advertising trend:
The ads tell you that fatherhood – indeed, any sort of domestic entanglement – turns you into a dullard, a dope, a neutered clueless dork who can be reduced down to oversized tools and stammering befuddlement at Important Things. Why would any man want to be that? What rewards does the culture offer in return?
Not much, sadly.
Except maybe the Toyota Tundra ads, which tend to show Dads who use their trucks to do Manly Things, like pulling boulders out of yards, building baseball diamonds, and building oversized tree-houses.
It’s not limited to advertising, though; sit-coms have been marginalizing dads as dullards for decades.
OK, this is the perfect setup for my Russian Reversal joke/social commentary.
What Rand and Lileks are observing is that the putative inability of men to understand the women in their lives — wife, daughters, mom, woman colleague — is the subject of so much of our popular culture, from The Honeymooners on to Everybody Loves Raymond. How could you write an episode for Ray Romano’s hit TV series without a formula along the line “Raymond does something and gets Deb all upset, and Ray cannot understand why”? And it isn’t just Deb or Marie. Remember the episode where Ray misunderstands the motivations of Peggy, the single mom who is a fellow parent of a “Frontier Girl” daughter, in competition to get a favorable spot to sell Frontier Girl Cookies?
On the flip side of this is Russian culture, where like Garrison Keillor’s Scandinavian-Minnesotans, the women are indeed all strong and the men regarded as handsome. The Rosie the Riveter meme of women doing hard factory work is even stronger on the Soviet side of the WW-II alliance. It is not just Russian emigre Yakov Smirnoff telling the joke, “In Russia, women are like buses . . . that’s it!” My poppa even told me a politically incorrect joke from Serbian culture that riffs on the kind of male Serb bravado that regards their Russian male cousins as, this is a family site, shall I use the word “initimidated” by women?
In any event, the stereotype is that Russian men are meek and Russian women take on male attributes of both physical strength and gender dominance. So, with that setup, here goes:
“In Putin’s Russia, women fail to understand . . . you!”
Maybe the advertisers are on to something. In my experience the typical married man spends the best years of his life working at a job he hates in order to pay off debts for his house, cars, and credit cards. Every day his mind and body deteriorate a little more from boredom and bad diet.
Actually, that portrayal of the “typical married man” is becoming a lot less typical, and I think you’ve hit on the reasons why
It’s popular these days to depict fathers/husbands as Homer Simpson’s.
Ads are simply following the TV trend of the past 30+ years, at least as far back as “Sonny and Cher.”
This trend is even more disturbing to me than the author.
I used to scoff at the persuasive power of advertising, then I remember a sociology professor asking the whole class “how many of you cover your toothbrush from one end to another when you brush your teeth?” nearly everyone (including me, raised a hand) he then explained that you really only need to cover about 1/4 of the brush, but toothpaste adds have been showing completely covered brushes to get people to use more toothpaste. And it works.
So now this power is being used in far more destructive ways. This must stop
In brushing and flossing your teeth, what you are trying to do is disrupt a biofilm, the “plaque” formed by the, ahem, flora, in your mouth.
My prior dental hygienist taught her patients a technique of placing a dry, soft-bristle tooth brush on the gum line and oscillating the bristles without scrubbing. This process is repeated for each patch of gum line on both the inside and outside of your upper and lower teeth. This takes some time, so this is not done standing before the bathroom mirror but sitting in front of the computer surfing the Web. Part of the motivation to doing this sitting and in a comfortable setting where you are occupied is so you don’t bear down and scrub. There is no toothpaste used.
The objective is to loosen the biofilm at the critical interface between tooth and gum without scrubbing, which stands to erode your gums over time.
My current hygienist is trying to get me to buy an electric toothbrush, which pretty much does the same thing as oscillate without scrubbing. You don’t scrub with the electric brush — you just apply it to patches of gum line and let it do its dance.
I think there is a big disconnect between the world of TV advertising and recommendations of dental practitioners.
I bought an electric toothbrush several years ago after I was diagnosed with receding gums and needed deep scaling.
My gums are fine now, and funnily enough, the round head of the electric toothbrush only requires about 1/4 the toothpaste of a manual brush.
Credit where it’s due: today’s (Father’s Day) ROKU background is a male silhouette wearing a tie, holding a crescent wrench, a barbecue spatula, and a background “swoosh” suggesting supermans cape.
It’s called deconstructionism; it’s a branch of post-modern philosophy that is pushed by the PC crowd. Based largely on false guilt, self-loathing and a twisted sense of “justice”, deconstructionism assumes that instead of objective truths, there are only a plurality of “narratives” — the lenses that we use to interpret the world around us. Injustice, it is said, exists when one narrative becomes dominant in a culture, suppressing the other narratives. Thus, in order to make room for “the Other”, you have to first deconstruct the dominant cultural meta-narrative. In this case, in order for women and minorities to ascend, the dominant white-male meta-narrative — the framework of assumptions and ideals that, left unquestioned, keep the white male dominant — has to first be destroyed. In this case, through cultural brainwashing over decades of popular programming, the PC crowd is succeeding at it marvelously.