i'm in the middle of cramming episodes of season 2 of one of my favorite shows, Mad Men, before season 3 commences on August 16th. For the unexposed, Mad Men is set in 1960s New York and follows a Manhattan advertising firm and the men and women involved therein. Gender politics is a chief plot point- husbands and wives, execs and secretaries, the glass ceiling, etc. Oh, and it's GENIUS writing and acting. And it's on AMC, not HBO, so if you have cable you can set your DVR.
So it was in this context that i viewed a commercial for One-A-Day vitamins. In particular, it was pushing the One-A-Day vitamins for teens. (they have different vitamins specially formulated for the needs of women (bone strength/breast health), the needs of men (heart health, blood pressure), expectant mothers, etc) The teen vitamins are different for boys and girls. For boys, it promotes muscle function. For girls? Healthy skin.
i immediately felt like the One-A-Day ad was written by the knuckle dragging ad men of 1960.
Why are adolescent boys assumed to need muscle strength for strenuous activity and adolescent girls are assumed to need healthy skin to look pretty? i seem to remember my female friends being warriors when we were teenagers- playing as many school sports as they could and snowboarding and wakeboarding on the weekends. i also remember a fair amount of my male friends having some pretty gnarly acne, and even a few that could've cared less if they had a varsity letter on their class ring.
What the hell, One-A-Day? Have females not progressed any further in the last 49 years than to care only about looking cute while the males do all the working and playing? And, for their part, are males not allowed to care about what they look like? Aren't they allowed to progress beyond being the jock?
To quote a badass lady: "Blerg." One-A-Day can count me out of its customer base until it can catch up to the current calendar year.
August 05, 2009
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