More TV Men-Bashing

©02 The Media Desk

      Well. It's not just McDonald's that is showing America how stupid and lacking in self-control Men are when it comes to food and other stuff. That's been their mantra for a couple of years now and we expect nothing less from them. That's about third or fourth on the list of reasons the Desk doesn't even like to drive by the Golden Arches.

      Applebee's has gotten in on the act. A frozen dinner outfit 'it's good to be full' went way over the line with a men's chorus singing about how they have to have this mess or their lives as they know them will be over. Even Seagram's has a series of commercials depicting men as idiots that drink their swill because 'it's what men do'. The Volkswagon and Honda and other auto manufacture's ads about men in love with their cars (washing a car with bottled water?). And the list goes on and on.
      Food, electronic gadgets, cars...
      If any of these commercials were made about women, the National Organization of Women with Nothing Better To Do would be circling their lawyers and organizing boycotts. In fact, they do. Women and shoes or chocolate are the subject of coordinated letter writing campaigns and the occasional noisy lawsuit. However, these are about Men, and that's OK.

      The Desk is a man. This can be verified by checking this picture and the one off the main page's 'Meet Dr. Leftover' or whatever that article is called this week. And it does not go running to that 'you want fries with that?' place every time it sees a green light because it can't help but think of anything else except their new menu which happens to be green. Whether or not the green menu is reflective of the color of the hamburgers and fries they serve or your color after eating it remains to be seen.
      The Desk doesn't break into song about TV dinners.
      It has never spent 'quality time with the car'.
      Yes the Desk understands that at least half of these commercials are trying to be funny. Funny at least under the Al Bundy/Homer Simpson view of men. Funny when you paint with the New York/LA Radical Feminist brush that casts all men as drooling rapists or stumbling idiots with BO and a fetish for convertibles.

      But what rubs the Desk wrong is that they never show that tiny percentage of men that don't have one track minds. The few of us in the world that don't CARE what they drive as long as it doesn't catch fire while you are on your way to work. Those two or three of us that don't base their entire philosophy of life on a spokesmodel's bust size.

      The Desk will freely admit that some men are chumps, jerks, idiots, bigots, rednecks, arseholes, fruitcakes, nerds, whatever label you can come up with. Fine. No problem. And occasionally, the Desk is all of the above, and more.
      There are guys that get all flaky and their frontal brain functions cease when in the presence of fancy automobiles, the latest computer toy, even hunting knives or football players. The Desk knows a few. However. In the Desk's case, what it is currently driving was totaled at one time and the Desk ended up with it for the price of transferring the title. It is simply happy its computer works, and does some writing on a fifteen year old 286 laptop with a black and white display. It bought its hunting knife at a flea market and doesn't even own a full set of Chicago Bears NFL trading cards. Oh well.
      Some men are obsessed with women's breasts. They (the boobs and the breasts) made Hugh Hefner a millionaire. OK. Great. Except in the last five years the Desk has purchased exactly ONE copy of Hef's magazine. So it is doubtful that the Bunny In Chief made his car payment if he was counting on that income.

      You are saying, 'OK so?'
      Bottom line time.

      The Desk is OFFENDED by Madison Avenue's treatment of ALL MEN as Morons. Well, honestly, last year's Budweiser 'whaszup' guys may have been.... But that is another discussion.
      Perhaps they think Hillary Clinton's Village raised every man in the country and they are all idiots now.
      It is believable that the guys that do the ads, yes most were written, directed, produced, and star: men, for companies that are mastered by glass ceiling enforcing good-old-boy wealthy white males, and they are trying to explain their own weirdness in some Freudian way.

      Now we have to look at why what appears to be a majority of TV advertisers would go out of their way to do this. Is it an organized effort to lump all men into Dr. Laura's 'Men are the eventual source of most of the world's problems' pile? Do these advertising executives sit around and watch 'the View' and then go to work on scripts to reinforce the man-hating diatribes they just watched? Do they subscribe to Rosie's newsletter for ideas? Do they read the websites of what talk radio calls 'Femi-nazis'? Are they in love with their mothers and are writing the men in the ads to represent their own fathers and are then going to redo Oedipus Rex with him as a character actor in TV spots? Is the Desk having some sort of reaction to that John Wayne coffee they make around here and is off on an endless teargas spewing tangent against harmless TV bits?
      Most likely the answer to all of the above is... Probably.

      But, other than the Desk. Nobody seems to mind the commercials.

      So the Desk will organize a One Man Boycott of Swanson (it hasn't had a name brand pot pie or TV dinner in years), McDonalds (yuck), Seagrams (too expensive), Honda (has never owned one), and so on.

      Wall Street had better watch out. Some of these companies may go broke without the Desk's two bits in their till.

      But the Desk will feel better about it all. Now... for some more coffee...

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