At 8:46 AM, a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups commercial popped on TV. “Women want like to make it last,” bold type told us. “Men are done in seconds.”
“Typical.”
Who decided that gratuitous sexual innuendo is inherently hilarious and appropriate in every context, at every moment? Well, no one yet. Again, it is the boors in ad agencies and clods in corporate boardrooms who are pushing us down this uncivil, impolite, needlessly sleazy path. We can remind them that there are limits dictated by taste and decorum, or we can just shrug it off, part of the irreversible ratchet process called “defining deviancy down.”
Of course, we can’t expect advertisers to display respect to their audiences if their audiences prove they deserve none.
How long do you think it will be before we see a Reese’s ad featuring a kinky couple mid-sexual romp, and the naked male points to his erect penis, crying, “Hey! You got peanut butter on my chocolate sauce!” Then his partner, after, ah, checking it out, cries, “Mmmmm! But it tastes great!”
I just learned, via TV ad, that the fantasy sports company DraftKings is endorsed by Major League Baseball.
MLB needs to rethink that. The commercial I watched just concluded with the promise that if you play fantasy baseball using DraftKings, “You could win a ship-load of money!”
Stay classy, MLB. Why in the world would any sport that is trying (not so successfully, I may add) to attract more kids as fans and encourage families to go to the ballpark ally itself with a company that advertises itself during major league baseball games with dumb, gratuitous potty-mouth crudeness like that? It’s not clever. It’s not witty. Anyone who thinks that it’s funny is 12, Adam Sandler, or a moron. It’s rude, that’s all.
Professional and trustworthy operations, including sports, choose partners that are professional too. This advertising equivalent of fart jokes reflects horribly on the sport, and the people who run it.
And, I may add, the advertising industry. The wit who thinks “a ship-load of money” is a real come-on is probably the same slob who gave us Verizon’s “half-fast” internet ads. At least that one was original: this Noel Coward-worthy play on words is the same low-life effort that K-Mart embarrassed itself with in its“ship my pants” ads in 2013.
We all have to swim in this water we call a culture, and this is the equivalent of pissing in the pool. We should be able to expect better from baseball.
When did the writers of advertising copy decide that catch phrases devised to sound like vulgar slang are appealing devices to sell services or merchandise? If you are so devoid of wit and civility that you find Verizon’s new campaign hilarious, Sponge Bob is over your head. Oscar Wilde this isn’t. What it is is one more gratuitous coarsening feature of the public square and common discourse. Now we are teaching children that it’s cool to speak rudely, as long as you pretend that you aren’t intending to. Look! The grown-ups are doing it!
It’s an insult. It’s an insult to the target audience that is supposed to clap like seals at a play on words that would have rejected by the most desperate night club comedian 20 years ago. It’s an insult to the craft of marketing, to which this is what farting on key is to singing. Most of all, it’s an insult to society, the culture, and the United States of America. No wonder Muslims think our way of life is disgusting. It is.
I couldn’t bring myself to post on K-Mart’s abysmal “ship my pants” ad in 2013; I thought it was an aberration. OK, I hoped it was an aberration. Now comes Verizon to sell its FIOS by having actors complain that their internet is half-fast. Half-fast, get it? GET IT???
I’m not offended by the phrase—heck, I scream things ten times as ugly at my computer every day. No, I’m offended that there not only is no respect for others in public discourse, the entire idea that there should be is considered old-fashioned. This began with badly raised kids spouting obscenities in movie theaters, then began metastasizing as TV comedians, Vice-Presidents, Oscar-winning actresses, rock stars and others lacked the inhibitions to keep them from whispering, speaking or shouting obscenities into open mics, and now has gone mainstream. Fortune 500 companies run by Harvard Business School grads believe that promoting their business with coded vulgarity is cute and responsible. Well, it isn’t. It just makes the world we live in a little uglier, and it’s more than ugly enough.
Civility, decorum, dignity, role model obligations, leadership, high standards…never mind all that elite stuff. Just keep catering to the boors, the clods, and the vulgar jerks. I’ll admit, there are a lot of them
When did I miss the evolution of the newspaper comics, always regarded as the young tyke’s entry into the newspaper perusal habit, into one more entertainment medium requiring ratings and advance parental review? The comic above appeared in today’s Washington Post and elsewhere. I think it’s funny—for a Playboy cartoon. Maybe it’s not too racy for the New Yorker. But the funny pages? Seriously? This is an erection joke! In a strip with Mother Goose in the title! (The strip is “Mother Goose and Grimm” by Mike Peters, who is also an award-winning political cartoonist.) It refers to the classic naughty line that had censors screaming when Mae West said it (after writing it.) My Dad read the daily comics to me before I could read, then explained the jokes that I couldn’t understand. Is this the kind of joke toddlers will be having explained to them now? Continue reading →
1. It’s full of lies. Women do NOT make only 77% of what men do in the same jobs. The fact that President Obama blithely quoted this infamous canard doesn’t make it any more respectable. This is the smoking gun of feminist activist hackery.
2. A close second is the completely unreliable “1 in 5 women will be raped or sexually assaulted in their lifetimes.” Yes, what President Obama did to a stranger after voting can add to that stat…or not, depending on what the woman being polled chooses to call “sexual assault.”
3. The stat about women who were A students earning as much as men who were C students is similarly bogus. The study apparently being fucking referred to was about high school grades, not college grades. It was also widely distorted in the media, which claimed that the finding was that “high-achieving female students still won’t earn as much as male counterparts who didn’t work quite as hard” [TIME], which explains nothing about what jobs we are talking about, or career choices. More female attorneys, for example, go into family law; more male attorneys go into tort litigation. Trial lawyers are famously non-academic–they are combative, aggressive and street smart, and the good ones become millionaires. What does this prove about gender discrimination? Not one thing.
4. Apart from substance, the ad is one more coarse and cheap bit of sensationalism employing assaultive vulgarity to get attention. This is cultural rot, nothing more. Gutter language doesn’t illuminate or explicate, and used as it is here, it doesn’t even convey genuine passion or emotion. This is the pseudo kiddie-porn equivalent of TV ads for Go Daddy.com featuring a busty actress making sexual innuendos to attract attention to a product having nothing to do with busty actresses. An ad currently running for a cable show has the host talking about the time he “got crabs” but how he’s going to go to an “orgy” anyway. HA! A crab orgy, get it! See, he made you think he was talking about sex, isn’t that clever? In a 7 PM commercial? No, it’s not clever. Just cheap and tawdry, like having a lot of little girls yelling “fuck” at you.
5. This isn’t even a genuine ad promoting feminist objectives. This is an ad exploiting feminists themes to sell T-Shirts. Continue reading →
“I should have been smarter.It was a Monday Night football game so the cameras were probably solidly on me so you need to be smarter about that.”
—Rookie Cleveland Browns quarterback Johnny Manziel, aka “Johnny Football,” brushing off his raised middle finger flashed at the Washington Redskins bench during their exhibition game.
Johnny’s Number One!
Good luck to the Cleveland Browns, who drafted a player that earned a reputation for being a a hard partying, rules-defying jerk in college, and then watched him get his first publicity as a pro by, surprise, being a jerk. Then, true to form, Manziel chastised himself, not for behaving in an uncivil, unsportsmanlike, unprofessional fashion, but for being caught at it. And he’s supposed to be the field leader of the team.
Great role model, that kid. If he does well, I think Cleveland may have a real juvenile delinquent problem in a few years.
Let me see: What epic event would justify an elected leader, public figure and inherent role model intentionally doing his best to undermine beleaguered efforts by parents, teachers, employers, Federal regulators and ethics blog authors to protect the vital cultural values of civility and respect from the onslaught of the boorish, inconsiderate and inarticulate who would make obscenity part of everyday discourse?
Occasionally, public figures like Joe Biden (but he has…well, you know…issues) have accidentally tossed f-bombs into unwilling ears canals, but never before has an elected official set out to do so. It is irresponsible, and demonstrates how America is increasingly electing children to high office. If the Mayor of L.A. thinks that a hockey game victory provides a sufficient pass to issue officially sanctioned vulgarity to America, what chance do parents and teachers have when they try to instill manners—that is, routine respect for those we interact with— into their young charges? Answer: less of a chance than they had before Mayor Garcetti opened his smug, pandering, dirty mouth. Continue reading →
How could this happen? I’ll tell you…but first, let’s be horrified together, shall we?
In Bellingham, Washington, the High School’s drama club held an evening awards ceremony. A parent who attended the ceremony in the school auditorium with her 17-year-old daughter, who was nominated for an award, reported to a local TV station that the ceremony was, to understate the case, “inappropriate.” In an email to KOMO News, the mother said the teacher, Teri Grimes, a 30 year veteran who is retiring after this year, repeatedly used profanity and told a vulgar joke. Sex toys were given for one of the awards; the category was “Horniest Stud.” She wrote:
“I sat there with my mouth open in shock and the final straw was when a joke was told on stage about a teacher, a lawyer and a priest on a plane. The plane was going down and the teacher says we have to save the children. The attorney says ‘Fuck the children!’ and the priest says “Ooooh..Do we have time for that???”
Me too! Uh, all in the interest of breast cancer detection and awareness, of course. Wait, what did you think I meant?
As is often the case, this topic interests me more than it appears to engage Ethics Alarms readers, so I was thrilled to see the following comment by Ulrike, who seems to share my belief that “Keep A Breast” Foundation is the ethics villain of this First Amendment skirmish, choosing buzz and cheap publicity over responsible messaging and being willing to throw well-aimed, legally immune monkey wrench into the classroom as well.
Here is the Comment of the Day by Ulrike (who also has amassed a bumper crop of Ethics Alarms brownie points by being the blogs most determined volunteer proof-reader) on the post The “I ♥ Boobies” Saga.
I beg anyone’s pardon if you may find this off topic, but I really need to vent my anger about these bracelets: The message that these bracelets are sending out is not “Save your life by having regular check-ups!” but “Women are perceived as having breasts first, and subsequently as a person”. All this bracelet manages to do is to reduce women to their sexual attractiveness while fighting for their very lives. Well done, “Keep A Breast” Foundation. I wonder what bracelets girls and women who fell victim to aggressive breast cancer and lost one or both breasts are supposed to wear. Maybe “Don’t got boobies you can love anymore”? Continue reading →
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