Just North of Something Important

Super Bowl ads

Look, I don’t want to be all “if you only watch one major sporting event per year, perhaps your opinions on the ads running during them are inevitably going to be shallow and trite,” but here’s the deal: the only TV programs men watch (in any great number) are sports. That is not a stereotype: that is a Nielson-certified factoid.  What that means is that, if you want to reach a male demographic with a TV ad, the only choice you have is to reach to all of it at once.  And that necessarily means that you have to shoot for the lowest common denom-nom-nom-inator.  With women, advertisers have the luxury of both assuming they are going to be exposed to multiple media streams (so they can spread out a bunch of subtler ads over disparate programming and go for a cumulative effect) and being able to target women by their rough taste group.  And so you can run ads that “make sense” more, in that an ad run during Oprah makes sense for that audience and an ad run during The Rachel Zoe Project makes sense for that audience, which somehow seems less insulting?  But with men, you have no such luxuries.  Advertisers have to run extremely blatant ads that sacrifice any hope of getting niche demographics by pandering as hard as possible to the largest demographic.  Which means basically Dane Cook jokes in ad form.

But let’s talk about what those ads are portraying.  People call them sexist, which they are, but that’s not the point.  Images of women being treated like objects and masculinity being defined in stereotypical ways don’t validate a vision of themselves men already have.  Instead, it makes their current lives seem inadequate, or tries to, anyway.  It takes their relationship with their wives and children, a relationship that is precious and meaningful and more important than anything else they probably have, and makes it seem emasculating because you have to drive a lame car.  It takes fleeting anxieties and tries to turn them into a full-blown syndrome.  It takes the reality of men’s real and human relationships with the opposite sex and makes that seem like you are pussy-whipped.  And since you can’t actually change those things—why would you want to change being a father and a decent human being?—you will need to compensate by buying the proffered product.

This is not to say that this appeal works consciously or directly.  But it is to say that the ads are intended to work on men in almost exactly the same way that ads targeting women are intended to work on women.  All of this is cloaked in humor or empowerment, but it’s really communicating inadequacy.  The men’s ads just have the additional unfortunate side effect of being demeaning to their female viewers.  My point here is that we shouldn’t take the appeals made by male-targeted ads and assume they reflect a genuine feeling in men.  Rather, it reflects a feeling advertisers would like to induce in men.  To blithely assume they have been successful is like watching daytime TV and assuming all women are overprotective mothers with undiagnosed OCD.  Or like, say, assuming the attitudes of 20-something artsy urban men reflect the feelings of men in general.  Just saying!

Anonymous asked: Syracuse to NYC: Drive, train, or bus? Weekend-long trip.

To Manhattan or the boroughs?  To BKLYN/QNS/BNX, drive, since the bus takes too long.  To Manhattan, you could bus it, but I really like the drive (and it’s cheaper anyway).  Never take the train; it’s always at least an hour late on the Syracuse -> NYC leg, and way expensive.

Best driving route: 81 -> 17 -> Palisades -> GWB -> West Side Highway.

perpetua asked: So I guess you've started to identify as a Seattle resident, huh?

Yeah, more or less.  Syracuse didn’t really have a culture and I only made one or two close friends and I was driving down to NYC all the time anyway, so I never really bonded.  (Also, identifying as a resident of Syracuse would have meant that I had MOVED HOME, which would be no good.)  But in Seattle, I have a good base of friends, I am inadvertently paying a lot of attention to local issues (I watch the news when I get up, my students are doing speeches about civic issues right now, Rachel is trying to get a job in government), and I’m tentatively dipping my toe into the music scene.  I always meant to write an essay about how central NY has this status in literature as the place you go to briefly, but then leave, like Dagobah or something.  Everyone at Syracuse seemed to be passing through.  Seattle you settle in, and since it’s no longer feasible to think that I could just pack my shit in a truck and say fuck it all and head back to NYC if I felt the urge, here I am.

Whither weather?

In the rest of the country’s imagination, the image of Seattle is a stereotype from 15 years ago.*  Watching the hyperventilating coverage of SERIAL SNOPACOLYPSI, I wonder if this is not because the weather here is so boring that there’s never any national news coverage of the region.  We don’t have flooding like the Midwest (or not very often anyway), we don’t have every single kind of natural disaster like California, we don’t have extreme amounts of snow like the North, and the mere presence of snow is not major news like in the South, and also we don’t have hurricanes.  (We had like 9 inches of snow last year and it not only shut down the city but decided the mayoral election.)  It just sorta rains all the time and gets a little chillier in the winter.  And since weather is the only reason most national news organizations give regional coverage, there’s been no opportunity for most of the country to see what Seattle is like since Frasier went off the air.  Which is kind of weird, but then maybe people in Iowa get pissed off that the media only pays attention to them wen there’s extreme flooding or a presidential primary?  I grew up in Central New York, where we just never expect anyone to pay attention to us since we’re just north of etc. etc., so the resentment I hear out here sometimes is new to me.  But maybe there are reasons beyond the time zone thing, is all I’m saying.

* Which if we’re being whispery is still like 85% accurate, sorry, but it’s not like this is unusual for cities, and at least Seattle doesn’t have people coming here expecting to recreate Sex and the City.

Things I learned about myself today

If I wait until the last minute to pick a title for my Very Serious Political Communication Paper*, it will end up being an Of Montreal lyric.  Ah well.

* This explains the skewed content here lately, which I apologize for.

Blame Obama firsters

southpol:

I feel you’re being unduly harsh here, perhaps as unduly harsh as Lessig is of Obama.

The criticism of Obama in this screed struck me as just an instrument for criticizing congress, and reminding the volk that it is up to us to hold his (and their) feet to the fire to demand better governance.

A good activist demands revolution and anticipates incremental improvement. If it the left stops demanding revolution, the Glenn Becks and Ron Pauls and Tea Party Hatriots will be glad to do take that on, and any incremental change will be predictably regressive.

Nobody needs Lessig to make Obama the scapegoat for a lack of effective government coming out of Washington. That’s going to happen all by itself. It comes with the job. Focusing some attention on the dysfunction of Congress rather than letting the argument rest with ‘Obama doesn’t seem to be an effective leader AKA it’s Jimmy Carter all over again’ seems like a perfectly good idea right now.

Like I was saying yesterday, it’s time to stop pretending like the idea that Obama = Carter exists independently of us.  It exists because people repeat it as if it were true, and every time it gets repeated, especially by someone politically close to yourself, it gains greater power.  So why use it if you don’t have to?  And there’s no reason Lessig couldn’t have said “Congress is blocking Obama’s honest efforts at fixing the country, so we need to fix Congress.”  Easy peasy!  And that way you actually implicitly enlist an ally in your cause rather than pitching your fight against “the system.”

I just think we need to decide, now that the Democrats actually hold power, whether we want to be “good activists” or we want to be successful.  There’s no reason that we can’t assume Obama is on our side in that fight, too.  A good argument can be made that none of the Republican presidents were anywhere near as conservative as their base either, but by making themselves valuable supporters who actually boosted the president’s power and made it possible to accomplish what was possible, the base gave themselves a much stronger voice in the process than if they were just seen as people who would oppose the president on any matter where insufficiently ideological purity was being demonstrated.  Because that will be always!

I mean, sure, it may have helped that Lessig was misrepresenting my area of academic interest.  But whatever!