The phrase “dumbing down” has been used frequently when referring to various school curricula, particularly at the high school level. But for this post, my use of the phrase is in response to what I see happening in television commercials, particularly those aimed at the audience that watches sports.
I am an avid sports fan, and watch my fair share of events on TV. It’s baseball season right now, and if a game is on, and I am in the mood for some background entertainment, I will turn on the TV and follow along as I multi-task (a habit I picked up from my Mom and my grandmother). While you might think that nine innings of baseball on television would be enough to put anyone in a coma, even the most avid of fans, what honestly kills me about televised sports is the abundance of inane commercials aired during the events.
Good Lord! Is it possible to portray men any dumber than they are in these ads? Every product is blatantly associated with guys trying to get laid, no matter how benign and unsexy the product is. In fact, the more unsexy the product, the heavier the emphasis is on the guy getting sex if only he runs out and buys that product today.
None of this is new news; advertisers have been using sex as a means of selling products for decades. But if you compare ads of old to the ads of today, there is a clear and distinct difference: men in ads of yore are shown to be sophisticated, smooth, and intelligent (and often wearing suits!) while their counterparts today are bumbling, clumsy, and really, really dumb (often wearing Gap-inspired outfits). Unless the ad is for a male-potency drug like Viagra — in these commercials, men are shown as loving, caring, gentle creatures who want to please their partners rather than get some and move on — ads today dumb down men like no other time in our history.
(On a sidenote, women in ads today are definitely bigger-breasted and slimmer-hipped than their sisters from a generation or two ago, but that’s a topic for another post.)
And, what’s really crazy, is the subtext of these ads is that even if a man is the biggest dumbass on the planet, he is STILL going to win the heart of a beautiful woman, even if it is for only one night!
But the point of my blog today is not the dance men and women do to get each other into bed. My point centers around a few questions about this disturbing trend:Â do any of these less-than-flattering portrayals of men in television ads bother men? Are men okay with being dumbed down to sell shaving cream, cheap fast food, auto insurance, beer? Does the implication that men will get the woman anyway justify the means of achieving that goal, no matter how insulting?
I know a lot of really great men who, in public life, anyway, are the opposite of their commercial world brothers. It is hard to imagine them sitting on a park bench with tiny little hamburgers from the fast food joint du jour discussing how drawn beautiful women are to these tiny little patties and thus, drawn to them because they are eating them. Am I missing something, though? Is there a dumb blundering idiot ready to do whatever it takes just to get the girl lurking below the surface of every man out there who is successful, intelligent, sensitive, generous?
And what does all of this say about the women in the lives of the men who are watching these sporting events?
Consumer statistics show that at least 80% of buying decisions are made by women in this country, not men. Yet men are the larger sports-watching audience. So technically, event though more men see the ads, they are not the ones going into the stores and purchasing the products; the women in their lives are. Which implies that women respond on one level or another to these ads of dumb men or else they would boycott the products. Which suggests these ads are not really aimed at men, but instead are made for, gulp, women.
Wow. Didn’t see that coming.
It still doesn’t change my opinion that dumbing down men in televison ads is damaging, but it does give me pause to consider the subtle forces at work in our culture today and how they shape attitudes and perceptions about ourselves and others. It also makes me more convinved than ever that an essential and required piece of the educational puzzle for all young people today is a course on deconstructing media, particularly advertisements, as they are more powerful forces in children’s lives than possibly anything else.
