My only sign of aging this week is that anti-wrinkle commercials have really started to piss me off. Especially that one with Andie McDowell, who weighs all of 12 lbs., talking about how hard it is to lose a dress size & how easy to lose your wrinkles.

You get wrinkles when you’re not young anymore. Deal.

Thanks to Emily on the mhb message boards for this one, antfans:

Has everyone seen the ad for the Fisher & Paykel Dishdrawer? A woman is putting dishes away, from the dishwasher into the cupboard drawers. As she bends over the dishwasher, and then the drawer, again and again, her husband, sitting nearby on a comfy chair, is saying “Dish” and then “Drawer” which becomes “Dishdrawer” & voila, he’s invented this genius new thing.

& All I can think watching it is, He should get off his genius ass & help her.

But on a more serious note, I wonder sometimes if the reason women aren’t known to have invented as many things is precisely because they’re usually busy doing stuff while the guy is sitting there watch them.

For my sister, who has put away more than her fair share of dishes in her life, a very very happy birthday.

Comedian Sarah Haskins has these short video clips about marketing that targets women, and her completely matter of fact, dry style is hysterically funny.

The new one’s on Botox. “I’m a form of punctuation that signifies an aside.”

There’s one on women voters: “Stick yourself in the middle of enough women, & you practically are one.”

Another on wedding shows: “They put the WE in wedding, and the End in feminism.”

And my favorite is about yogurt:  “I’m gonna shit my pants.”

Just go watch.

Have you all seen the recent Shur-Line commercial? With a woman from Shur-Line and a wife (I assume) who are trying to coax the husband out of hiding so that he’ll paint? It’s so condescending toward men; like they need to be told what to do and reassured that there won’t be any chores.

On the other side, it makes women responsible for making sure “all’s safe” for the guy to come out.

Idiotic & condescending to both genders: well-done.

Humorless Feminist checking in again - but have you seen the recent Dairy Queen commercial for the Brownie Wafflebowl Sundae? A little girl goes into the DQ with her mom. Sees little boy already seated at table. Waves cutely, smiled, bats eyelashes. Tells mom she doesn’t want a sundae after all. Once mom & daughter are seated at table, mom says how surprised she is that she didn’t want a sundae. Simultaneously, waiter brings sundae to table, says, “compliments of the young man in the monkey shirt.” Same boy as before waves, smiles.

How fucked up is that? That’s right, let’s teach the girls to flirt to get what they want before they’re even 10. Feh.

Imagine it the other way around - a little boy either acting coy & cute so a girl would buy him a sundae, or if the boy acted all touch & strong in order for her to buy him one.

Degrading much?

Most Subtle Sexist Advertising:

Prefer-On, the bogus medicine to get rid of scars, has a woman applying the product where most women get stretch marks from pregancy, while the voiceover refers to “embarassing scars.”

(If men gave birth, there’d be awards for whose stretch marks were the largest & most noticeable, celebrating the effort & physical sacrifice it takes to carry & birth a child.)

Is anyone else horrified by Vagisil commercials? The most recent one has a woman in it who is all dressed up but sees her own reflection as looking crummy, in a hoodie. And why does she feel that way? Because she worries that other people will smell her bad smell.

Ugh. I mean, come on already.

Buying a tube of whatever because your vagina is itchy and/or smelly is demented. First off, if things are itchy and/or smelly temporarily, that’s just how it goes - you don’t need Vagisil; you need a bath and maybe to wear cotton panties for a week. On the other hand, if your vagina consistently and chronically itches or smells bad, you need to see a doctor, not buy a tube of Vagisil. Yeast infections can be fatal, and you can give anything else that would cause itching (like crabs) to sex partners, and you know, that’s just not nice.

But the whole “women are icky and smell bad” = specifically because their vaginas smell bad = is misogynist bullshit. Women’s reproductive systems actually work to maintain a PH balance on their own, and while having a lot of unprotected sex with multiple partners throws off that PH balance, that’s not really an advisable thing to do anyway, considering all the possible STDs, including HIV, and of course potential pregnancy.

Read Natalie Angier’s Woman: An Intimate Geography. It’s a great, scientific, readable book about women’s bodies and how they work, a must-read.

First, email Sheldon Silver and tell him to advance GENDA. His email is speaker@assembly.state.ny.us.

Then go tell CBS & FOX to take their heads out of their asses & show the condom ad; their shows are packed full of sexual situations and they’re being prudish about condoms? How lame is that?

Maple, one of our mHB board regulars, pointed out that some Christians have decided to put up these lovely billboards presenting an alternate vision of Jesus’ attitude toward homosexuality. There are more billboards at the site www.wouldjesusdiscriminate.com.

Okay, for whatever reason, the recent set of Quiznos ads plays while a lot of my Law & Order (my stories!) is on TV, & I cringe every time the Prime Rib on Garlic Bread one comes on.

That woman, at the end, is like nails on a chalkboard to me. No lack of meat, just what a real woman needs. Ugh.

What this real woman needs is for them to stop running that damn commercial.

There’s a Singular commercial that shows two guys listening to The Clash’s Rock the Casbah who can’t understand the lyrics,and who come up with the sheep don’t like it / stop the cat box / stop the cat box (the correct lyrics are the shareef don’t like it / rocking the casbah) and every time I see it I wonder if a guy I knew in junior high & high school ever thinks of me when he sees it. I made him a tape of the Combat Rock album when we were in maybe 8th grade biology together. I have no idea where he is now, or what he’s doing, but I think of him every single time I see that commercial. He was always a nice guy, even when I went full-on punkrock and he was something like captain of the football team. So, wherever he is - hello, Mike.

The “Real Beauty” campaign by Dove is finally getting serious. Check out this film of a woman turned into a makeup ad.

Then look at this movie about the beauty our girls should know they are.

(Thanks to Diana Lynn for the links.)

As if Anne Coulter hadn’t pissed me off enough, I ended up seeing coverage of the crap she’s spouting inbetween offensive commericals.

(1) The Tostitos commercial, where three guys are looking out the window eating Tostitos and commenting on the work gang below, and how three guys standing around and one guy working wouldn’t cut it in the corporate world. They pull back the camera to reveal a woman working feverishly on a laptop, who then announces, “I got it” and while the guys are high-fiving, she smiles weakly.

Fucking hysterical.

2) Then there’s the “Man Laws” of Miller Lite, which, I kid you not, has been written up by The New York Times as an attempt to atone for the “catfight” commercial they did a couple of years ago.

Are they shitting me? One of the “Man Laws” is that men only clink bottles toward the bottom, as otherwise their saliva might mix and Burt Reynolds claims that would “qualify as a kiss.” WTF?! How exactly is this supposed to be better than two women wrestling over “tastes great / less filling”?!

I can’t even talk about the “you poke it, you own it” one.

Betty is watching the NBA finals, too, which means I’m going to hear this crap every freaking time a game is on. Did someone say Worst of Both Worlds? Except this is like worst of all worlds, now: Betty en femme, drinking beer, watching sports, while sexist, idiotic commercials play. Woohoo. I’m loving life, really.

A beautiful Campari commercial.

Betty looks like the woman, but I’ve got a few more pounds to lose and a lot more hair to grow, and you know - I’m still not going to look like her. But I aspire to. (Okay, I just checked the model’s stats, and I’d have to grow a few inches, lose more chest, waist and hips, and probably 50 more pounds. But I can dream. Or alternately, I can just be a shorter, slightly curvier version.)

(Thanks Marlena for finding it, and VeronicaMoonlit for finding her name.)

Tonight I caught a Secret deodorant commercial and noticed the tag line is now: Strong Enough for a Woman.

I had no idea they’d changed it, but bravo!

Okay, so I’m watching way too much TV I guess, because I just caught Kirstie Alley’s most recent Jenny Craig commercial: she is walking down a dark street, alone, when a guy’s voice yells out, “Momma, you’re looking good!” (or some approximation thereof). And she says - here’s the red herring that made me pay attention - “Are you talking to me?”

And when he says yes, she doesn’t hollaback, oh no. She starts into a ‘Singing in the Rain’-styled dance number set to the tune of “It’s Raining Men.”

I guess this is the best you can expect from someone who has had bodyguards for so long she doesn’t remember how it feels to walk down any street alone (much less a dark, deserted one) and have some asshole decide that’s a good time to tell you how good you look.

Connecting being thin with “earning” this kind of bullshit, scary compliment loses her a few more status points. All kinds of women get harassed on the street - not just skinny ones.

Okay, I confess: this Nextel commercial cracks me up every single time it’s on.

I have a dumb sense of humor (apparently). A friend of mine decided years ago that intelligence and sense of humor are inverse ratios: the smarter the person, the dumber their sense of humor (which says a lot about the pun & joke response threads on the boards).

The other night I was watching something during primetime - I don’t know which show, I was flipping channels - and suddenly a KY commercial came on. KY! Apparently they’ve got a new product they’re marketing for women, something that could have been the next product in the old SNL dessert topping/floor wax spoofs: it’s part massage oil, part personal lubricant, and all of it is self-warming. It’s called Touch Massage. The commercial features an attractive couple, suggests sexual arousal tastefully, and shows the man rubbing her shoulders with the oil. Certainly tame enough.

Another day, I saw a commercial for Cialis, which is the new, improved version of Viagra.

Personal lubricant and erectile dysfunction during not-late-night viewing hours.

And yet there’s still no ads for condoms, are there? And you know why? The American Family Association and other groups of their ilk have protested the possibility with the usual arguments (key words: promote promiscuity) even though a quarter of the million+ people in the US who are infected don’t even know it.

I’m sure keeping those condom ads’ll off TV will help out with preventing teen pregnancy, right? Uh, no. Right now the US has a higher percentage of pregnant teens than countries with condom ads on TV.

Ah, the American Family Association: keeping your family pregnant and infected. Thanks guys.