Selling Off The Oaf

Once upon a time, when the Dow floated at an altitude of 11,000 daily traded shares and homes were ATMs with windows and gardens, men, as the advertising industry saw them, were the boobs of the boob tube. Portrayed in commercials as the foils to the era of movie-star aspirations for all and the “get mine” disclaimer for all disreputable behavior, the average Joe was the dinosaur in a clown suit, because “average” was ridiculous and ridiculous merited ridicule. And in this climate of self-obsession, advertising realized that schoolyard cruelty toward this unpopular group could get cheap chuckles and prompt people to shell out for beer, cars, phones and pizza. They couldn’t jab women. They couldn’t knock gays. And minorities were off limits. Their reasoning like their tag lines read: high-time for low-brow...kick 'em where they have none. And since society had already created the intellectual and political sport of male-bashing, especially white ones, all advertising needed to do was side with the times. Thirty-second misandry (misogyny’s lesser-known counterpart) hit full stride.

In these drubbings, the scenarios varied little. A bemused man married with kids or a single dimwit with friends identical to him were the tragic protagonists. Both owned the looks and physique of a bag of spanners stuck on a mound of pizza dough. The married guy had an attractive wife (only in advertising), who wouldn’t give him the time of day and two wealth-coddled children who confused “dad” with dud. The single guy, well, he was just too much of a loser for sex and so was the eating and drinking machine who lived in a déjà vu world of Abbott and Costello. The married guy would be ridiculed by his wife in front of his friends or hers, it didn’t matter, or admonished by his children for knowing less about life insurance than they did. And as for the single guy, he didn’t mind being the jackass for all seasons. Rob him blind, stick corn chips in his cornhole, punk him, it didn’t matter.

As someone who thinks about the world from his subterranean den, I can see how this social harrying precipitated the invention of the man cave: a place of solace where the sun doesn’t shine. Didn’t the phantom reside in the bowels of the opera? Dracula keep himself safe in his coffin until dark? The man cave offers sanctuary; that is until advertising realized it was another setting to poke more fun at their most valuable target.

What I don’t get is, why this neutering took place? Why had Mr. America’s America, turned on him? Vilified his simple humor, conservative ideas and unsophisticated tastes? Had the breadwinner become the intolerable drone that furnished consumerism by working 10 hours a day, chewing ulcer tablets in the privacy of his daily commute? Furthermore, why was he a party to his own public humiliation? Was it better to laugh than to cry? Don’t get mad get castrated? Martyn Straw, former chief strategy officer at BBDO Worldwide in New York, gave his industry’s take on their motives in a New York Times interview back in 2005. “In advertising and in general communications there is the notion that things that are ‘negative’ are always much funnier than ‘positive,’ which can get very schmaltzy.” He added. “In order to not cross over the line into denigration,” the situation portrayed in an ad needs to be truthful and funny, “it's not really bashing, it's just having a funny look at the way men work sometimes.” No one likes a chuckle more than a boob, right?

In 2010, truthful and funny no longer intersect. The reality for the boob in the tube is that he isn’t just the butt of everyone’s joke; he is also bearing the brunt of the recession. Male suicide has spiked. The infamous murder suicides of the past couple of years have had men not just take their own lives but the ones they love. Less sensationally, alcoholism and families breaking apart through the complex pressures prompted by economic strain are the scourge of these, here, times. The Financial Times reports that 80 percent of the 5.1 million jobs lost to this economic tsunami were male occupied. Back in 2009, I was awoken by shouts and screams, banging and 10 minutes later flashing blue lights. A man, living the next street over, was taken away by police for trashing his wife and their home. He’d been drinking…laid off from work and didn’t know what to do, or how to make his way. Is this the work of advertising? Directly? No. But attitudes aren’t formed overnight and doofuses aren't crowned with one beer commercial.

Our view of men has transitioned from Gary Cooper to the ass-crack with the man in the middle too uninteresting for consideration. And while the ass-crack has been a God-send for lazy agency creatives and companies such as Bud Light, Domino's, Hummer, T-Mobile and Verizon, men’s dignity has become the collateral damage in their sad craft and marketing stratergies. Does the value of a product have to be tied to humiliation? Why not have a commercial where there’s an average looking guy of average weight, dressed with a modicum of style using a product skillfully, intelligently or in some way that wasn’t slapstick? They exist. I’ve seen them. In Europe, that is.