Personal Foul: Super Bowl Ads Deliver Old Fashioned Sexism

By Margaret Hartmann  |  February 2, 2009 | 2:30pm
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Every 30 seconds of advertising during last night’s Super Bowl cost $3 million, so advertisers really tried to come up with something innovative: hot girls and crude stereotypes about women.

As the New York Times reports, the ads this year were mostly a letdown, relying on the same gimmicks used in Super Bowl ads again and again over the past 20 years… including sexist portrayals of women.

The ad below, for GoDaddy.com, features race car driver Danica Patrick at a “major league enhancement hearing.”

The Bridgestone tire commercial below is both sexist and tarnishes the reputation of a beloved children’s toy, Mr. Potato Head. The concept of getting a nagging wife to shut her trap is so unoriginal it’s hard to imagine even the Mad Men of Sterling Cooper coming up with such a tired concept.

But the most sexist ad of the night was the Teleflora.com ad, in which a woman gets a box of flowers that starts insulting her because she owns a cat and reads romance novels. The flowers end with the exclamation, “Nobody wants to see you naked.”

As Wired‘s Ken Denmead puts it, “We like a bit of off-color fun once in a while. But these ads were so full of violence, cruelty, and sexism that something needs to be said.”

Your turn, in the comments.

Ads That Pushed Our Usual (Well-Worn) Buttons [New York Times]
The 4 Worst Superbowl Ads by Quarter [Wired]

 
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