Give People Flush Toilets And iPhones And They Go Off The Rails
For most of human civilization, life was nasty, brutish, nasty, brutish, and probably not short enough if you went through a lot of that nasty and brutish stuff. (Thanks, Mr. Hobbes!)
Well, I love civilization: Indoor plumbing, cars, refrigerators, iPhones, hot showers, planes, computers, and vitamins that get ordered on a computer and dropped over my fence days later. Oh, and books that you can order onto your "device" in a matter of seconds.
Fucking amazing.
Well, instead of being grateful for all we have and spending time enjoying it, some people busy themselves with grievance hunting -- working up things to be offended about.
The latest incident of this is a business in the UK (which reports its customer base to be 87.5 percent male) being accused of discrimination for having three dudes in their TV spot.
Wesley Yin-Poole writes at Eurogamer.net:
An advert for a bespoke PC retailer was banned for perpetuating harmful gender stereotypes of women.The TV ad, below, for UK retailer PC Specialist, begins with a computer exploding, then shows three men getting excited over using a PC Specialist PC for gaming, making music and coding.
Yin-Poole continues:
The Advertising Standards Authority received eight complaints from people who said the ad perpetuated harmful gender stereotypes by depicting men in roles that were stereotypically male, and implied it was only men who were interested in technology and computers.PC Specialist responded to the watchdog to say its customer base was 87.5 per cent male, aged between 15 and 35 years, and "their product, branding and service had been developed for and aimed at that target audience and the characters in the ad therefore represented a cross-section of the PC Specialist core customer base".
"PC Specialist said the characters looked into the camera as though they were using a PC Specialist machine," the ASA continued. "They did not believe they represented negative stereotypes and were playing the roles of entrepreneurs, forward-thinkers and hard workers.
"They considered there was no comparison between men and women in the ad and the ad did not imply that women were not interested in computers. They said the ad did not juxtapose men using computers with women not using computers, nor did the ad explicitly state that women did not use computers or that the service was unsuitable for them."
..."... the ad repeatedly cut to images of only men, who were both prominent and central to the ad's message of opportunity and excellence across multiple desirable career paths," the ASA concluded.
"We therefore considered that the ad implied that excellence in those roles and fields would be seen as the preserve of men. Because of that, we considered that the ad went further than just featuring a cross-section of the advertiser's core customer base and implied that only men could excel in those roles."
If you are stopped from doing something because they show pictures of boys or men only, frankly, you lack imagination and most likely sufficient drive to do whatever they're picturing.
Personally, I've always seen being cut out as an enormous motivator for doing whatever it takes to cut myself in.
(Missed opportunities, whiners! Or, in Anglospeak, you "big girls' blouses"! (Love that term, though, admittedly, it works better in the singular.)
Oh, and I can't resist: What if there are no men in white pants in tampon commercials?
It seems the number of people who live to find something to be offended by is growing exponentially.
Jay at January 17, 2020 5:45 AM
Yeah, so is every ad now going to have to feature an officially approved cross-section of minority groups? How many people will that be? Do advertisers have to cram 200 different characters into a 30-second spot? Let's see, doing the math... (counts on fingers) (removes shoes and socks), that's 150 milliseconds of screen time for each character. They'll get lawsuits from people with epilepsy.
People have to recognize that in advertising, there is such a thing as a target audience. Just a guess, but I daresay that in New York, TV ads for local businesses don't feature many Southerners. Now, I've patronized many businesses in New York. Am I offended? No, because I'm not the target audience. Because, y'know, I don't live there. I'm sure that New York advertisers would have no problem with my patronage, but since I would get few opportunities to do so, there's no point in them pitching to me. They pitch to people who live there and are more likely to do business with them on a regular basis.
Cousin Dave at January 17, 2020 5:59 AM
Most of modern Western life is so comfortable and safe that we have to invent lions, tigers, bears and hobgoblins to get the heart racing.
I R A Darth Aggie at January 17, 2020 6:23 AM
You guys act like being offended is the key part of this story.
"The Advertising Standards Authority received eight complaints ..."
There were only eight people who complained. What are the chances you can find eight people to complain about just about anything somewhere in the US. If it isn't 100% it is 99%. Quite frankly if the ASA wanted to act and just needed a complaint or two they just need an employee or a relative of an employee to complain. Manufacturing this low level of outrage takes no effort.
The key part of this story is a government bureaucracy deciding to harass a business with no good cause. It doesn't matter what excuses the ASA gave. As Groucho Marx would say if you don't like those excuses, well they can find some other ones. It doesn't matter if you put 200 people in the AD with carefully calibrated demographics. The ASA can still find something to complain about, and punish.
This isn't a safe people finding new things to be outraged about story. It is a government out of control and throwing it's force around story.
Ben at January 17, 2020 9:14 AM
If you give people a way to use government authority to compel behavior in others, they'll use it.
If it offends gamers that PC Specialist focuses its advertising efforts on men, let the offended shop elsewhere. If female gamers were a major market, they'd have a specialty store of their own. That there isn't one tells you this market skews male.
And if ignoring or not highlighting female gamers were to cost PC Specialist actual money in lost sales, they'd change their advertising in a New York minute.
This is a case of 8 people trying use government authority to get a business to accommodate their personal sensitivities, no matter what the market dictates.
Conan the Grammarian at January 17, 2020 9:44 AM
I say it is the other way Conan. This is the government using 8 people as a pretext to exert it's force and intimidate the public.
Ben at January 17, 2020 11:35 AM
While there are instances of "toxic masculinity," such as calling thin, effeminate heterosexual men "f*gg*ts", these people take the notion to a whole other warped level. These nattering nabobs should really resign and, if they cannot find something genuinely productive to do, maybe just sit around the house and live off of their vaunted "dole."
mpetrie98 at January 17, 2020 12:28 PM
The fundamental problem is having a gov agency trying to mediate "fairness" and "niceness". They should just sod off. If a company uses offensive ads, let the customers go elsewhere. It will self-correct pretty quickly. Even progressive over-achieving in ads or corp PR has been self-correcting, hence the phrase "get woke go broke". An example is Dick's Sporting Goods which lost billions after it stopped selling guns.
I heard that Microsoft got rid of its Santa emoji because of 1 complaint. In the case here it was 8 people. If you poll 1000 people you will find some witches, some who believe elvis is alive, some radical feminists and some who are paranoid-schizophrenic. It is not possible to make a movie or ad or song that someone out of this 1000 will not find offensive. A college prof got in trouble using the word niggardly in a sentence because people are illiterate. A guy at a company got fired for talking about his (Celtic) clan regalia because someone thought it was the Klan. Another college prof got in trouble because in his English class he tried to discuss a book by a black author with the word Negro in the title. People are idiots. We should not give idiots power over our lives just because they declare themselves offended.
cc at January 17, 2020 1:11 PM
Given the implcit value propositions in most TV commercials (this product will make you sexier/cooler/smarter/more popular, buy it because everybody else is, etc.) the real target audience is idiots. Thus, to portray any group in commercials is to label that group as idiots, and people should be offended for their demographic appearing in ads, rather than not appearing.
And thus we can rid ourselves of advertisements altogether.
bw1 at January 19, 2020 10:34 AM
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