DADvocate

I've been watching the college football bowl games the last couple of days. Tostitos has been running a commercial frequently that shows three business men eating Tostitos and looking out the window at a road crew. Of the four men in the road crew, one is shoveling gravel while the other three watch. One of the business men comments that isn't that the way it always is, one works while the others watch.

Then the camera angle changes and shows a woman working on a laptop. She then exclaims, "I've got it!" (or something like that.) The men turn and look at her with dumb, blank looks on their faces.

Once again the advertising mavens have chosen to show men as a bunch of comical doofuses while the only intelligent person in the scenario is a woman. Given the audience for football games is overwhelmingly male, I have to wonder how beneficial this commercial is for Tostitos' sales. It might do more good if it ran during "Oprah." I certainly am less likely to buy Tostitos or any other product that portrays persons like myself in a negative light. I wonder what would happen if the genders were changed and a man was the only sensible, hard working person.

Feminist author Naomi Wolf called the beer commercials using the Swedish Bikini Team as part of a "violent backlash against the advances women have made over the last 20 years." Why should routinely portraying men as bumbling idiots be any more acceptable? Because everything wrong in our world in because of men, turn about is fair play, and two wrongs do make a right in this case.