“Mad Men,” my favorite TV show of the moment, offers a poignant look at the trials of women in the workplace in the early 1960s. The series is set at a growing ad agency on Madison Avenue (that’s copywriter Peggy Olson, played by Elisabeth Moss, above), and it’s full of cringe-worthy moments. Seven of the show’s nine writers are women, which Amy Chozick notes is a rarity in Hollywood television.

Joan Wickersham, who worked as a copywriter in a Boston ad agency in the 1980s, writes in the Boston Globe that “long after the 1960s, the workplace was still stuck in the same cultural blind spot satirized in ‘Mad Men.’” She shares this story of a client presenting prototypes of two computer games, one targeted to boys and one to girls. The boy’s game involved building a railway empire; the girl’s game involved deciding where to put furniture in a house.

I suggested to the client that maybe the girls’ game needed a little more substance. The boys’ game was ambitious, intellectually challenging – couldn’t something similar be devised for the girls? Or maybe they didn’t need their own game. Maybe they’d be just as excited as the boys about building a railway empire. Maybe . . .

One of the men I worked with gave me a look. A look that said: “You’re being a pest, and a troublemaker. Shut up.’’

And I did.

Fast forward another 25 years, and consider Wal-Mart’s gendered back-to-school commercials, as described by Claire Mysko:

Boy version with Mom voiceover: “I can’t go to class with him. I can’t do his history report for him, or show the teachers how curious he is. That’s his job. My job is to give him everything he needs to succeed while staying within a budget…I love my job.” Cut to boy with his new affordable laptop. He’s getting applause from his teacher and the students in the class as he delivers a report.

Girl version with Mom voiceover:“I can’t go to school with her. I can’t introduce her to new friends.” Cut to girl nervously asking “Can I sit here?” to a group of girls sitting together at lunch. “Sure, I like your top!” one of them answers. “Or tell everyone how amazing she is. But I can give her what she needs to feel good about herself without breaking my budget. All she has to do is be herself.” Cut to smiling girls walking arm-in-arm down the hallway.

It appears that much work still needs to be done.

So, if you haven’t heard, Obama’s drinking Bud Light at tonight’s “Beer Summit,” which brings together Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cambridge Sergeant James Crowley in an attempt to seize a “teachable moment” on race relations.

Unfortunately, if this moment is teaching us anything about race in America, it’s that we don’t know how to talk about it and don’t really want to talk about it (Stephen Colbert made this point with his usual brilliant satire). Oh, and that the right-wing reactionaries in America still love to exploit all that unease (Joan Walsh has the best take on Glenn Beck and company).

The real “teachable moment” here is the opportunity to show what a screwed-up relationship Americans — especially American men — have with beer. And how easy it is to fix that relationship — by staying local and trusting craftsmanship over marketing.  I’ve said this before.

And Obama is just the one to do it. He has already showed his preference for microbrews — at parties and at the White House. And he clearly has a sophisticated palate — considering his favorite restaurants, chefs and foodie friends as well as the people he has chosen to take the lead on food policy (especially USDA Under Secretary Kathleen Merrigan).

And he chooses Bud Light? Pandering would be an understatement. Some image maker appears to be telling him he needs to up his NASCAR-Dad credentials. How sad. I really didn’t plan to have to say that about Obama — at least so soon.

For your information, Bud Light receives a D- from Beeradvocate.com and is in the “0″ percentile (that would be out of a 100) on the ratebeer.com scale. Of course, Red Stripe (Gates’ choice) doesn’t fare much better.  Blue Moon gets mediocre ratings (putting aside that it’s a MillerCoors product) — but oh, there are so many better American craft-brewed Belgian white ales out there!

Oops, I lapsed into beer snobbery there. But it’s really not about drinking hoity-toity beer. It’s about honoring authenticity and complexity over a manufactured narrative that can be overwhelming, especially for those of us who have had to sit through the endless line of juvenile beer ads while watching a sporting event on TV.

That narrative, centered around young, goofy men ogling young, goofy women while a “drinkable” beverage loosens them all up, divorces the experience of drinking beer from its production (which is an art form when done right) and the communal enjoyment of its taste (which a site like ratebeer.com or a booth a your local gastropub — we love you, Hopleaf! — revels in).

And it’s not as if Obama didn’t know there were plenty of beers out there that could have allowed him to step outside that narrative without losing credability. Jack Nicas of the Boston Globe reports on how Boston brewers made their case to be the beer of choice at the meeting — emphasizing how all three participants had Boston connections. Matt Simpson, a “beer sommelier” who writes the “Ask Beer” column for Beer Magazine (which, to digress and paraphrase that ol’ saying, tries have to have its traditional beer narrative and drink its craft beers too), made the rounds with his own recommendations in interviews with NPR and ABC.

That ABC News article also interviews Anthony Bowker from Goose Island, who makes the case for a beer from his (and Obama’s) local Chicago brewery — possibly, he notes, 312 Urban Wheat Ale (a summer fave of mine as well).

Personally, I’d take the Chicago angle as well, but I’d recommend that Obama show his support for an up-and-coming small business … who happens to make the best damn lagers on the planet. That would Metropolitan Brewing, which is quickly making a name for itself on the north side of Chicago. Their Flying Wheel Bright Lager is a perfect choice for a summer day.

A very “teachable beer,” one might say.

Ready for this one? The American Life League, a Catholic anti-abortion organization, is protesting Krispy Kreme for offering Americans their “choice” of a free doughnut on Inauguration Day.

Here’s the innocuous press release from Krispy Kreme that caused the uproar:

“Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. (NYSE: KKD) is honoring American’s sense of pride and freedom of choice on Inauguration Day, by offering a free doughnut of choice to every customer on this historic day, Jan. 20. By doing so, participating Krispy Kreme stores nationwide are making an oath to tasty goodies — just another reminder of how oh-so-sweet ‘free’ can be.”

And The American Life League’s response:

“The unfortunate reality of a post Roe v. Wade America is that ‘choice’ is synonymous with abortion access, and celebration of ‘freedom of choice’ is a tacit endorsement of abortion rights on demand. [...]

We challenge Krispy Kreme doughnuts to reaffirm their commitment to true freedom - to the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — and to separate themselves and their doughnuts from our great American shame.”

Read the full response at Miami New Times. I’ll be in D.C., looking for powdered strawberry!

*cross-posted at Our Bodies, Our Blog

Joe Miller of Factcheck.org dissects John McCain’s desperate, disingenous attempt to combat his multiple mansion problem, which we discussed a few days back.

It’s nice to see a major media outlet willing to call out John McCain for the lies and slimy innuendo that his campaign has become.

But the greatest insight coming out of the whole “how many houses does he own?” episode has to be from BAGnewsnotes, who puts it in the context of McCain’s POW experience.

Read the whole post, but here’s the conclusion:

This shot of McCain in 2000 showing the prison to his son, Jack, evokes just how much the Hanoi Hilton — where McCain dwells so often in his speeches and his anecdotes — actually does seems to resonate as a “primary residence” — those cell walls representing the last, longest home that McCain could call his own.

You might say it’s a bit of a psychological stretch, but there’s no denying that McCain often appears lost in a place only he knows.

It’s about time I found a good excuse to post on beer. It’s a beverage which — particularly in the form of the great American microbrew — holds a special place in my heart and, needless to say, American culture.

Unlike water or wine, beer walks the delicate line between common appeal and refinement. It is at home in a corner bar or in the bleachers but even in its blandest form and contrary to its reputation in fraternities, it rewards sipping and — as any grimacing adolescent will tell you — is an acquired taste.

And when you graduate to the products of small, craft breweries, it can, like nothing else, simultaneously satisfy the desire for simple, locally-produced nourishment and complex flavor.

Unlike wine, however, a beer’s particular reputation or the social expectations surrounding its consumption never overwhelm the moment. Sites of beer connoisseurship like RateBeer.com always end up being — except for a few snobby souls — more excuses for social connection and ways to be in touch with local communities than places of exclusion and privilege.

Through that idealistic lens I read Edward McClelland’s analysis of the rise and fall of Budweiser. McClelland uses the occasion of Bud’s sale to the big Belgian brewer InBev to offer a fascinating (if short and somewhat predictable) analysis of how the “mad men” marketing culture was able to popularize some pretty bad beer:

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Have you caught March Madness? The television ratings thus far indicate that there is a greater chance this year than last that you have not.

I have. I always do. I can’t help myself.

No matter how much I loathe the hyping of March Madness, no matter how mentally disturbed I find many basketball coaches, no matter how hypocritical I find the NCAA, and no matter that I have come think of elite intercollegiate athletics as one of the most corrupt institutions of our time, I still watch.

I love the competition. I love the pure illusion that Cinderella might actually win the Big Dance, even though Cinderella needs to buy a ticket to get into the Final Four. I love all those screaming college students who actually seem normal when they wander into my classroom. I love the all-out effort by the athletes, who enjoy the beauty of competing with such intensity, even as I wonder if they ever give half that level of intensity to their educational responsibilities.

All this being said, the commercialism that now totally dominates intercollegiate athletics is beyond the pale. The corporate sponsors seem to be omnipresent. General Motors is hyping its “March Madness” sale, hoping that hoop fans will catch this form of March Madness for which this staggering corporate giant has paid a pretty penny. The length of the so-called “TV Timeout” is now approaching infinity (actually three minutes). I watched nearly an entire hockey game during these timeouts.

CBS advertising sales are estimated at $545 million on an investment by the network of an estimated $529 million. Advertising rates for the championship game will be $1.256 million, second only to the Super Bowl. General Motors, AT&T and Coca-Cola are the three biggest advertisers for March Madness and pay additional fees into the NCAA’s “Corporate Champions Program,” the NCAA’s top sponsorship level.

This gives these champs additional opportunities to build marketing programs around March Madness and other NCAA sports and the right to use the NCAA logo. One report put the cost of this status at $500 million.

Again this year, CBS and the NCAA will provide online video streaming. This time it is free to users. Sponsors such as Courtyard by Marriott and Dell will pay the freight, and commercials will appear during the games just like real television. Facebook purchased the exclusive rights for the CBS Sports Official Brackets contest. Indeed everything that moves or does not move seems to have a sponsor.

Not to worry, however, because the athletes themselves will not be able to exploit their commercial value while advertising the virtues of Enormous State University and pushing ESU’s merchandise on an adoring public. They will also find little time to pursue their education during a basketball season that sends them around the country to compete at all hours of the day and night so that ESPN, FOX and CBS will have sufficient programming to fill their schedule.

One of my favorite discussions these days is about the David Stern Student Athlete (DSSA). That’s the freshman superstar who has been forced to go to college for a year, rather than to head into the NBA after high school. The television analysts have termed them “the one and done” players. I prefer to think of them as victims of a drive-by education.

One of the more revealing discussions during one of the game telecasts this past week was speculation on whether or not these “one and done” players actually bother to go to class during the spring semester. If they plan on leaving for the NBA after the end of their David Stern enforced exile, why would they bother? It doesn’t matter if they flunk out of school because they’re not coming back to school anyway.

I love this sort of candor.

I doubt that NCAA President Miles Brand enjoyed that discussion on national television. The NCAA, of course, is all about education and student athletes, even if it is only for one year — or even one semester. I am sure someone somewhere is saying, yes, but these players are getting exposed to college (the raincoat theory of education).

This is true and, in the end, much less dangerous than being exposed to high levels of toxic waste or even all that NBA money.

Always equally edifying is the report that comes out of Richard Lapchick’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida, showing graduation rates (PDF) for those universities involved in March Madness. Just how strong the commitment is to education in NCAA athletics is evident from these studies. Although they show some improvement in graduation rates over the past few years, unfortunately once again this year the gulf between graduation rates for male African American athletes and others remains quite significant (PDF).

When all is said and done, then, March Madness really is about the money, and it has either a detrimental effect on higher education or at best no effect. Its purpose, as is the purpose of intercollegiate athletics generally, has been stated quite well by former University of Michigan President James Duderstadt. He said that they exist “for the entertainment of the American public, the financial benefit of coaches, athletic directors, conference commissioners, and NCAA Executives, and the profit of television networks, sponsors and sports apparel manufacturers.”

And finally, did you know that there is an official ladder of the NCAA Championships? When the winners cut down the nets next Monday night, look for this new star of the latest NCAA revenue stream.

No word yet on the scissors.

The Clinton campaign resorted to race baiting early and often in this election season. And lately they’ve moved on to fear mongering.

But, after reading Orlando Patterson’s New York Times op-ed today, I might have to coin a new phrase: racial fear mongering baiting. OK, that phrase isn’t going anywhere — but Patterson’s analysis of the racial undertones in Clinton’s now infamous “3 a.m.” ad should:

I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad?s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist movie epic that helped revive the Ku Klux Klan, with its portrayal of black men lurking in the bushes around white society. The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man, someone who could not be trusted to protect us from this threat.

This reading shouldn’t have surprised me — pandering to America’s racial prejudices and manipulating America’s fears, of course, have never been mutually exclusive. But I did miss it on my first, cursory viewings of the ad — maybe because I quickly saw and dismissed its evocations of early LBJ and Mondale fear-based ads.

With this perspective, the fact that many voters in Ohio and elsewhere might have fallen for it makes me even more depressed that I already was.

One sign of hope, though, might be that the sleeping white girl that is the initial focus of the ad (the opening sequence is actually old stock footage) is a big Obama supporter — and is letting everyone know it. She’s not sleeping anymore, it seems.

My broader hope is that Americans are not buying this stuff anymore. In this media-saturated political age, in fact, Americans have — maybe unwittingly — become fairly sophisticated viewers of all of these verbal and visual machinations. The initial race baiting, after all, came back to bite the Clintons.

The media will need to help, though. They’ll need to make a bigger deal out of Clinton’s “as far as I know” response to a question about Obama’s religious background.

And they’ll need to jump all over Geraldine Ferraro’s latest series of comments about how Obama is only winning because he’s a black man and she’s only being criticized for thinking that because she’s white.

We’ve posted a new article in our online magazine: “Brewing Globalization With a Local Flavor” by Allen McDuffee.

McDuffee writes,

It would seem like a real blunder, maybe even cultural insensitivity, for Starbucks to market a new food product just for the month of Ramadan — the month Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset. But Starbucks executives seem to think this caffeinated version of “think globally, act locally” strikes the right marketing balance.

Read the full article here.

Trojan condoms has unveiled a new advertising campaign that both CBS and Fox networks have refused to air — apparently because pregnancy prevention is not a good enough reason to promote condom use.

Andrew Adam Newman writes in The New York Times:

Both had accepted Trojan’s previous campaign, which urged condom use because of the possibility that a partner might be H.I.V.-positive, perhaps unknowingly. A 2001 report about condom advertising by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that, “Some networks draw a strong line between messages about disease prevention — which may be allowed — and those about pregnancy prevention, which may be considered controversial for religious and moral reasons.”

Representatives for both Fox and CBS confirmed that they had refused the ads, but declined to comment further.

In a written response to Trojan, though, Fox said that it had rejected the spot because, “Contraceptive advertising must stress health-related uses rather than the prevention of pregnancy.”

In its rejection, CBS wrote, “while we understand and appreciate the humor of this creative, we do not find it appropriate for our network even with late-night-only restrictions.”

“It’s so hypocritical for any network in this culture to go all puritanical on the subject of condom use when their programming is so salacious,” said Mark Crispin Miller, a media critic who teaches at New York University. “I mean, let’s get real here. Fox and CBS and all of them are in the business of nonstop soft porn, but God forbid we should use a condom in the pursuit of sexual pleasure.”

While Fox and CBS are being criticized for their decision, the commercial itself is drawing mixed reviews.

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After purchasing a "really cool messenger bag" — featuring a red star and a quote in Chinese lettering from Mao Zedong — Vincent Williams of the Baltimore City Paper begins contemplating the risks we are all taking "when cultural history gets appropriated into popular culture":

Disagreeing with Russell Simmons’ comment that “comparing Don Imus’ language with hip hop artists’ artistic expression is misguided and inaccurate,” Maya Angelou on the CBS Evening News just said:

It’s all the same. All vulgarity is vulgarity. If you mean to demean a person, to make her or him less than whole — anyone could say it, you could say it from a robot — it means that this person is not worthy of my concern. But at last we’re going to have a dialogue, I’m telling you. Nelly, P. Diddy, Snoop Dogg — all of those men, who are very intelligent — and I include Dave Chappelle — for the first time we are going to sit down and see how have we come so late and lonely to this place. I would ask the hip hoppers, if you wanted to say something and see how powerful you are, use Ms. Laura Bush and call her one of those “b-” words — and see how long you will live. There wouldn’t be enough rope to hang your butts. No. But black women, because we are last on the totem pole, everyone has a chance to take a chance on us. Well, not now.

Part of me wants to praise Angelou for asserting, as so few commentators have this past week, that race and gender cannot be separated in our discussion of Imus or hip hop lyrics — and that the whole controversy is really about cultural power, not about simply giving offense or being racially insensitive.

But part of me want to take issue with Angelou’s blanket characterization of “hip hoppers” — of her (and the mainstream media’s) lack of recognition of the diversity of hip hop. In the last week, I keep waiting to hear the voice of someone like Chuck D or Mos Def, public hip hop figures who defy the stereotypes and are not afraid to get political, to reclaim the genre and say that it’s not about hip hop — it’s about the popularizing of a very specific misogynistic, self-indulgent strain of hip hop. And that popularizing is something for which many people — not simply the artists themselves — should feel guilty. It’s about our collective silence about demeaning representations of women throughout our culture — not just in music but in everything from advertising to television.

I also want to point to someone like Boots Riley of The Coup who isn’t afraid of describing the Bushes in an unsavory light (check out the opening line of “Head (Of State)“). He and other hip hop artists are continually taking political risks in their music — and know the consequences.

In the end, though, I think Angelou leaves room in her comments for a truer hip hop. In fact, I believe, in her own way, she is calling for it.

This is not exactly a you-got-to-be-kidding-me moment. But it certainly begs the question: why?

Uncle Ben is back. Or, um, “Chairman Ben.” Yes, Mars food corporation is resurrecting their original spokesmodel for Uncle Ben’s rice, but he’s new and improved — breaking stereotypes instead of perpetuating them.

Annalee Newitz of Wired does a great job breaking it all down, including a strangely detailed website giving us Ben’s new backstory.

In Abe Aamidor’s recent article in the Indianapolis Star, Robert Thompson, the you-got-a-pop-culture-article-I’ve-got-a-quote-for-you professor from Syracuse University, makes this statement about how “Ugly Betty” isn’t really such a radical show:

I’ll believe this when someone makes a TV show or movie about someone who is really ugly …. Yes, she (Ferrera as Betty Suarez in ‘Ugly Betty’) is not as beautiful as Charlie’s Angels, but she’s not ugly. I think she’s kind of cute. She’s also engaging and articulate.

Another local woman agrees: “They make her look dorky, not ugly.”

I would respectfully disagree. I think the show goes to great lengths to make Betty look rather ridiculous at times. Yes, she’s endearing — but that doesn’t change how different she looks from anyone else on television.

A legitimate criticism might be that the show still needs to place her amongst beautiful people at a fashion magazine — and that her appearance is more a source of comedy than critique.

But that criticism is muted by the fact that much of the show takes place in her exceedingly ordinary (if you can say a working class Latino family on primetime television is ordinary) home.

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.

This year’s Super Bowl ads were most noteworthy for what they were not — there wasn’t an abundance of overtly sexist ads (not that we didn’t see some covert action that we’ll take up later), and indeed some were even subversively amusing. While we work through the pain of the Bears loss, here’s a quick take on those that worked and those that were, well, painful:

Most Mesmerizing :
- Coca Cola: Video Game

Laughed Out Loud:
- CareerBuilder: both ads
- Sprint Broadband: Connectile Dysfunction*
- Bud Light: Movie (Hitchhiker)

Laughed Despite Trying Not To:
- Nationwide: K-Fed
- Bud Light: Rock, Paper, Scissors

A for Effort:
- Doritos: Live the Flavor
- Budweiser: Spot Wink

Most Cringeworthy:
- Revlon: Colorist (Sheryl Crow)

Why?:
- Chevy: Car Wash
- Snapple Green Tea

* I’m willing to admit that being the smug owner of a Sprint Broadband card may have influenced this call

Plus: Patriotic themes also took a backseat this year, but Stuart Elliott asserts that “the ongoing war seemed to linger just below the surface of many of this year’s commercials.” OK, but this headline seems like a stretch: “Super Bowl Ads of Cartoonish Violence, Perhaps Reflecting Toll of War.”