If there’s one thing I need as a woman, it’s a slew of commercials telling me that men are bad, I’m a victim, and that some product will somehow change all of that.
The latest example of this nonsense comes from car maker Nissan, who debuted a new commercial this week featuring Brie Larson – who has made her modern feminism and anti-male bias well known. In the ad, a woman is out getting food-stand tacos with her male boss, who casually tells her, “So, I’m gonna hold on promoting you this quarter, cool?”
In an instant, an orange Nissan Sentra screeches to a halt just in front of the pair, and Brie Larson – a total stranger to this woman? – demands: “Drop the taco. Get in the car.” The car then speeds away, darting erratically through traffic. Larson asks, “Does this car feel like a compromise to you?”
“Wait, what?” the businesswoman asks, seemingly now second-guessing her life choices. Maybe her poor decisions are the reason she didn’t get the promotion. Maybe she doesn’t understand how her boss telling her she wasn’t getting a promotion yet is somehow a “compromise.”
Larson keeps asking the terrified woman (seriously, she’s on par with the Pelaton woman at this point) about compromises. Larson speeds around a city corner and asks about the car’s handling, “no compromises there,” she tells the woman, who responds fearfully, “nope!” Larson then slams the breaks and put the car in reverse, even though they’re in traffic in a busy city. An instant later, the traffic in front of them is gone and they’re reversing almost into some concrete barriers. Continuity means nothing when you’re fighting the patriarchy, apparently. Well, thankfully, this Nissan has a rear camera and a warning system so Larson doesn’t have to be a competent, safe driver – the car will alert her when’s speeding backwards into danger.
“So, if this Nissan Sentra isn’t going to compromise, why should you?” Larson asks the woman, even though, again, not getting a promotion isn’t a compromise.
“You’re right!” the woman says before getting out of the car, presumably to tell off her boss. Because nothing ensures the promotion of a woman who makes sound decisions like getting into a stranger’s car in the middle of a workday and then accepting that random person’s advice.
It’s just the latest in a long line of commercials that either portray men as villains and women as victims, or go overboard with the “girl power” sentiment (such as the unnatural Budweiser commercial where Charlize Theron is able to successfully arm wrestle men three times her size).
Car commercials have been some of the worst offenders. Nissan had a previous failure in this department with its Murano commercial featuring a woman boss who is supposed to be some kind of “modern boss” but who spends the commercial ignoring her employees to the extent they have to try and hold a meeting on the back of a semi-truck to get her attention, which still fails. Then there was the Audi commercial that tried to push the myth of the gender pay gap only to prove that it is not due to discrimination. The company was quickly called out for paying its female employees less, on average, than their male counterparts. Audi responded by saying there are various “factors that go into pay,” and when those are accounted for, “women at Audi are on par with their male counterparts.” Those “factors” apply everywhere, not just to Audi, and explain away the gender wage gap. Yet companies like Audi and Nissan want to profit off these alleged biases in our society.
Car companies aren’t the only ones playing this game. Job website Indeed has a commercial where a woman is disappointed when she is passed over for a promotion – again. This time a man gets the promotion, but we don’t know whether previous promotions went to women. Also, we know nothing about the alleged victim of this commercial, Claire. She is standing next to one person at the beginning of the commercial, but soon has no one around her. Maybe she’s not a team player. Maybe she’s a terrible middle-management type. Then she cheers too loudly for the man who got the promotion because she got a notification on her phone for a job interview at another company. If that’s going to be her attitude (remember, an interview does not guarantee a job) then we might be able to make some assumptions about her work attitude. Just saying.
The final example I’ll give – because we don’t have time to get into all the “husband is a moron and wife must save the day” commercials – is that odious Gillette Razors commercial that insisted men are just toxic sexual predators who need to change their savage ways. As I wrote previously of the commercial: “Imagine applying this idea to any other group and telling them to police themselves because some members of the group are terrible – and smearing the entire group while you’re at it.”
It has become so tiring to watch cable TV and constantly seeing commercials portraying women as victims in an unjust society. It simply isn’t true, but because of modern feminist politics, that’s the message being given to young girls – not that they can be anything they want, but that men are holding them back from that.
Companies seem to have been increasing their pandering to a specific segment of women in the past few years – women who see themselves as victims but have the money to spend on new cars. It’s infantilizing. Women are doing what they want and what they need to do to get ahead, they don’t need major companies telling them that they can do these things. We already know what we’re capable of.
Meanwhile, as companies cater to the paranoid delusions of modern feminists, boys are getting left behind in school. Maybe it’s time to start telling them they matter instead of acting like they don’t exist except to tell them they’re monsters.