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Gender Bending But Not Breaking: The Displacement of Objectification in Super Bowl Advertising
At first glance, this year’s Super Bowl ads appeared to avoid, almost entirely, the objectification of women that has been the hallmark of previous broadcasts. While the trend has been heading this way the last few years (reflecting, possibly, an attempt to appeal to growing female audience), as recently as last year we found plenty to talk about.
This year perceptive critics like Steven Johnson didn’t even mention any portrayals of women, noting, instead, that “the strangely dominant theme of the night’s ads was the undertone of violence.”
Gender, though, played a role throughout the night — even if it was hidden behind closed doors or behind role reversals.
The only company that took the old-fashioned route was Go Daddy. Even their ad, however, included elements of ironic self-awareness of the straight-up exploitation of their previous Super Bowl ads. A well-coiffed executive tells us about all the great parts of the company, but when he opens the door to the marketing department, it reveals a party of over-the-top excess, featuring their “Go Daddy Girl” from previous years as well as an assortment of ridiculous, offensive partygoers.
He notes that everyone wants to work in marketing, but then shuts the door before the ad comes to an end — symbolically admitting, perhaps, that we no longer can have that out in the public eye.
What we can have, however, are ads that mock masculinity — and by the ridiculous results of that role reversal, make the audience consider all the femininity they are missing.
The ad for the Chevy HHR, for example, featured, somewhat inexplicably, a bunch of topless men of varying ages writhing about a car full of young women. It was designed by a college student, Jessica Crabb, who won a Chevy-sponsored contest. Crabb said her motivation was to bring a rare female perspective: “We never get commercials that are for us — very rarely we do, especially with car commercials.”
Unfortunately, all it did was justify, by exclusion, all the ads that objectified women — which, while they might be offensive, were undeniably sleeker and just made more cultural sense. Crabb’s ad had simply no critical perspective through which we would question those cultural assumptions.
Another ad in a related vein was the Snicker ad featuring an unintentional kiss between two men who were working on a car. To re-assert their masculinity after the incident, they tear hair from their chests.
Again, without women, men are left awkwardly to exploit themselves. While homophobia might have provided the foundation for the humor (or were they actually mocking homophobia?), women were, once again, the absent presence.
Even without Go Daddy telling us, it was clear that women had not simply disappeared from the ads, they were simply being hidden in the marketing department, waiting to emerge more objectified than ever.
Posted at 8:02 PM | Permalink | | 
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February 5, 2007 at 11:03 pm
the Chevy HHR ad is more about the gendered fetishisation of the car than gendered relationships between men and women as such. see Anger’s Kustom Kar Kommado which is availble online somewhere if I remember correctly. he is a short comment: http://www.bentclouds.com/films/kustom.html
I am not sure if ‘gender’ is the best way to talk about this sort of relation because it is between human and non-human bodies.
however, maybe this intertextual reference was unintentional and Crabb was simply inverting the mechanisms by which advertisers captured the heteronormative masculine libido through images of ‘naked [female] flesh’ and ‘naked chrome’ through the eroticisation of automobilia (=automophilia?).
so you are right, it has nothing to do with objectification of females and everything to do with highlighting the specific mechanisms of fetishisation and the capture of libido deployed in advertising and advertorial discourse (e.g. motoring magazines) more generally.
February 6, 2007 at 4:37 pm
Your translation of these ads definitely makes them look pretty useless. None of the ads mentioned includes a positive portrayal of women, nor, really, a positive portrayal of ANYBODY. Who are they even trying to sell to?
However, there’s a different hermeneutic angle we can take here. After all, third-wave feminism isn’t about establishing a new, well-defined feminism… it’s about breaking down the nasty physical and psychological barriers that separate masculinity from femininity. With that in mind, the ads mentioned here… especially Chevy and Snickers… make much more sense as a deconstruction of masculinity than as a reinforcement of any type of femininity.
Chevy says: men, take note, you don’t stand up to your own feminizing scrutiny.
Snickers says: homophobia is stupid, and your shows of masculinity are transparent.
Men need to reform their ideas about themselves, too. I’m 100% with you on this: it’s sad that these ad campaigns weren’t capable of portraying a positive female. My only point of reassurance is that they’re looking a little more critically upon themselves.
March 7, 2007 at 7:25 pm
Your analytical interpretation definitely raises questions and concerns about the negative portrayals of women and men in advertisements in general, not just super bowl ads. These companies really have a lot of nerve thinking that gender can be intermediated in ads without taking gender issues over the limit; there is no compromising when it comes to gender and companies can not just do and say what they please when it comes to gender.
However, by incorporating ads that ?mock masculinity? we aren?t nipping the problem of gender stereotypes, but we?re reinforcing it. The ad for Chevy HHR is a great commercial when it comes to role reversing in gender representation. If I had seen men in the Chevy and woman running toward the car prancing and panting over the car, I would have been very upset at the negative portrayal of women as idiotic and superficial for behaving that way over a car. But, since it was the opposite, I did not care to think twice; which can also be counted for as a negative portrayal of men, assuming that all men go goo-goo-ga-ga over cars.