A couple of weeks ago, while working on writing projects and half-watching the football playoffs with Baron, I looked up from my laptop just in time to see Freddy Kruger stab through a box of Chicken McNuggets before offering the tasty morsels to a machete-wielding Jason Voorhees. The act of kindness is repaid with Jason pulling an open sauce dipper out of his pocket like a dude presenting an engagement ring to his lady, then the scenes transitioned with hearts floating through the air while girls sing the word “love” in the background. Rubbing my eyes, the next scene was Mario offering a FireFlower to King Koopa, followed by the Democrat donkey and the Republican elephant hugging, a knight in shining armor presenting a soft-serve cone to a dragon, and Wyle E. Coyote blowing up a box of love at the Roadrunner. I was dazed and confused by what I saw.
What I’d caught was part of McDonald’s new TV spot titled “Archenemies,” which the company is calling an evolution of the I’m Lovin’ It campaign “by introducing a new platform that puts more focus on lovin’.” Basically, the idea is that life-long enemies become good friends by the sharing of McDonald’s food – interesting idea, and I’ll admit there have been a few occasions where the presentation of a Quarter Pounder with cheese has prevented me from slugging someone who deserved it. My problem with it is the pairings they chose and how the “sharing” was presented: of the seventeen pairings of “archenemies,” the majority were very distinctly guy-centric and targeted at my generation. That’s not surprising – we’re in charge now, and guys are more apt to grab fast food on the go, so that’s an understandable audience. What bothered me about it was that they took these classic pairings of good versus evil, iconic things that meant something to most of my guy friends growing up, and pissed all over them in the name of love and harmony. I mean, OF COURSE Pacman and Blinky will meld into a giant heart-flower on contact, because heaven forbid we allow conflict to intrude on our world of unicorns and rainbows. What’s more is that with all of the pairings, only two of the seventeen has the “bad guy” of the pair reaching out to the “good guy”; in one, The Wicked Witch of the West takes Dorothy on a broom ride and posts selfies to commemorate the occasion, and the other features the Joker making a balloon animal for Batman (which I maintain is really a distraction for some nefarious plan because we all know the Joker is a psychopath). Seriously, I’d buy into the Freddy/Jason bromance before I ever believed Batman and Joker would share a Coke together. So in essence, it’s almost always the good guy bending over to make things happy and sunshiny.[1]
And that really pissed me off. But not as bad as the next ad that came up.
The next ad, for a cable company, started with a woman walking into her living room to watch a television program. The look on her face immediately turns to disgust because her living room has been rearranged into an awesome couch fort. We see a father and son (presumably the woman’s husband and child) having a grand time chasing each other around, laughing hysterically. Does the woman appreciate the fact that the other two are clearly bonding, with the dad exhibiting the care and involvement needed for solid parenting while the kid forms positive experiences with his dad that will build a foundation for a healthy, open, and supportive relationship down the road? Nope. She turns on her heel and storms off to find some quiet area of the house to watch the TV show on her tablet, because that’s obviously more important. How DARE that guy infringe on her need to keep up with Honey Boo Boo and the Kardashians?
Which brings me to why these ads caught my attention in the first place: when did we get to the point where being male was something to be ashamed of? How are we as a society getting away with trashing and degrading any of the positive male traits we come across while still bitching about glass ceilings and patriarchal tendencies that I’d argue (and I know I’m going to piss some people off here) don’t really exist? Say what you will about the traditional viewpoint of men historically being in charge of everything, but in 21st century America it’s simply not true, and continuing that false thinking is destroying any chance we have at creating and maintaining a balanced society. Advertisements cater to specific mindsets in order to sell a product, yes, but at their most basic level what they’re really selling is ideas – the idea that it’s important to watch your television programs whenever and wherever you want, the idea that McNuggets can turn evil to good, the idea that you’re entitled to whatever you want and anyone who says otherwise is trying to oppress you.
That the last idea keeps coming up so frequently – with the young men of our generation nearly always the target – is a scary and dangerous thing.
So how did we get to this point? As I grew up through the late ’80s and 90s, a considerable amount of time was spent being cultivated to the idea that girls can do anything; that’s a powerful notion that had been ingrained into the very fiber of our being from the time we were toddlers. For example, growing up I heavily favored wearing dresses and skirts over more practical clothing for running around the woods. If there was baking going on, I was certainly involved. But I also got my first typewriter as a Christmas gift before I’d hit kindergarten. When other girls were weaving ribbons into their dolls’ hair, my doll and I were gluing those ribbons inside of old cigar boxes as rudimentary (but very colorful) wiring for our pretend space computer. I was ten when I started building working projectile weapons out of LEGO bricks. In grade school, when we weren’t being taught wilderness survival skills from our friends in the Boy Scouts (because, interestingly enough, that was our Girl Scout leader’s suggestion when we asked when we were going to learn to build fires and tie knots – yay girl power!), my cousin Katie and I were the ones founding a Star Trek fan club on the playground (which led to exchanges like “Jen wants to play Dr. Crusher? That means she has to marry an OLD BALD GUY! EEEEWWWW!” and me responding “But he’s the captain. And he’s British.”).
So yes, I was a girl nerd. From the very beginning, I was brought up to be a very well-rounded, reasonably confident, seize-the-day-because-you-really-can-change-the-world type of girl nerd. And I wasn’t the only one.
But as nice and empowering as that experience was for the girls, the guys didn’t get the same support – girls could do anything, but if a boy said he enjoyed baking he was automatically a weirdo. A lot of my guy friends were (and still are) moved by classical music, but admitting that would have made them targets for harassment on the playground. They learned early on to keep quiet. Boys were supposed to be tough, not sensitive; aloof, not engaged. Even in the sitcoms we watched growing up, it was always the men doing the stupid things and the women rolling their eyes and cleaning up the mess. Boys were raised with the conflicting expectations that they were supposed to be manly, yet at the same time defer to the girls who also wanted to do the traditional “manly” things. Guys were supposed to be chivalrous, but at the same time ran the risk of being verbally attacked for opening a door for a lady. I witnessed this last example several times in college, where the girl would actually lash out that she “was an independent woman and didn’t need a man to open the door for” her. The guys, meanwhile, were crushed and confused – they couldn’t win no matter what they did, and as they were pushed further and further out of the traditional “man” picture they were given nothing solid for them to base a new identity on. Instead of evening the playing field, we’ve really just shifted the power from one side to another.
Killer made a good counterpoint during our last writing session when we talked about this: his argument was that it’s not just men, but everyone taking a beating because too many important issues are being turned into gender issues when they’re not. He referenced an interesting stream-of-consciousness type blog from a few years back called The Last Psychiatrist that highlighted both some of the specific issues he was thinking about and also the cyclic nature of the issues, and how too often the issues themselves are diluted into a never-ending he-said she-said type argument that gets us nowhere. And he’s right – there are plenty of legitimately important issues out there that need to be addressed, and I don’t mean in a Lifetime: Television for Victimhood TV movie.
But my argument was that popular culture of late has been resoundingly anti-male. And I stand by that – the cable ad didn’t show a woman noting her family was having a good time in the living room, it didn’t show her being a team player and cooperatively going elsewhere to do whatever she wanted to do because she had the technological capability to do, so like it could have done; instead, it showed someone actively disgusted that a man and a kid were getting in her way. Never mind what the reason was, that was the message being sold. But to Killer’s point, would I have felt differently had the roles been reversed? No, the same argument would apply, which means what I’m really pissed about is the idea that it’s okay for someone would be so disconnected from their spouse and child that they prefer television over human interaction – which, like domestic violence, the trouble in our education system, and countless others, is an us issue.[2]
The point is this: to have a truly stable and productive society, there has to be a balance. There are plenty of things that guys tend to be stronger at than the ladies, and vice versa – to grow as a culture, we need to be able to tap into those differences and work them to our advantage. But to tap in, we have to know who we are and have a sense of purpose. We have to have that stability of knowing our contributions are important and appreciated. That can’t happen when one is under attack all the time, especially when those attacks are for crimes no more than exhibiting the manners expected of them, or for trying to do the right thing.
So where do we go from here?
[1]This isn’t to say that playing the nice guy won’t get you ahead in the long term – one of the most interesting lessons my stats professor taught us in college revolved around a problem called The Prisoner’s Dilemma that showed over the long term, being nice actually did put people ahead. There’s a fantastic video illustrating this problem here.
[2]Which is why I appreciate having a writing partner who’s not afraid to disagree with me and help balance my thinking when I need it.
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