By Amir Said
There's a change going on in American culture that you might have of missed...that is, if you haven't been watching television commercials lately. This change deals with how advertisers are increasingly portraying the roles of fathers and mothers. Commercials pitching every kind of product from vacuums to cell phones are getting the "mother smart, father dumb" portrayal. Certainly you've seen the type of commercial that I'm describing? You know the type where the mother can do it all, where the mother knows how everything in the house works...meanwhile, the poor father is aloof, even confused and is at the mercy of "mom". Hmmm, kind of hard to buy this portrayal, especially when you consider how rapid technological advancements have been made over the last quarter century. These advancements have not only affected women, on the contrary, they have made both men and women much more adept and sharper. Yet, the way some commercials tell it these days, you wouldn't know that. In fact, the bulk of product peddling commercials go to great lengths to reduce fathers to nothing more than hopeless punchlines. Is this theme in commercials a case of reverse sexism? I don't think so. There's something else going on.
Fact is, after the United States converted from an industrialized job market to a serviced based one, (around the 1960s), many men suddenly found themselves without a job. In homes all across America, many former housewives were forced to enter the labor market, taking those sort of jobs that were readily available to them and not their husbands. Secretary and administrative assistant positions were the main job outlets that were primarily reserved for women. But having gotten a taste of the labor market, these housewives soon realized that they could go even further. Since they now found themselves as the chief bread winner of the family, they reasoned that it was their right and obligation to set and achieve even more ambitious career goals. However, while many former housewives were moving up in the career world, their husbands typically remained stagnated.
But by the 1970s, the children of the career seeker moms and the stagnated dads had a new advantage that wasn't afforded to neither of their parents: technology. For the most part, kids in the late 1960s and early 1970s didn't grow up thinking about working at a factory or the like; in their time, many factories were shutting down. In fact, by the close of the 1970s, the American factory market had dropped dramatically. So for kids growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this meant that they were going to have to figure out a way to earn a living that was not industrialized-based. Many of these kids turned to the recent developments in technology. Turned on to video games, no doubt the influence of the 1970s arcade boom, many kids (now in their teens), saw technology as not only fun, but a way to earn a living--mind you, a living vastly unfamiliar to their parents. Thus enter the big tech boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Fast forward to 2008 and we see that technology is still booming. Moreover, it's booming much more rapidly than it did 30 years ago. There are a number of women who continue to play pivotal roles at key junctures of this present boom. But for better or worse, wrong or right, it is men who remain most prominently at the forefront of this new technological boom. So what's my point? The point is this. If overall, both men and women have become much more intelligent, why then are advertisers investing in commercials that portray moms as do-it-all appliance queens, and dads as aloof industrial workers?
Hmmm... Could it be that someone wants to keep the middle and lower classes in check? I mean by subliminally getting people to buy into a world that no longer exists, you also distract them from actively participating in the one that actually does...
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