No Such Thing As Mr. Mom

Recently a new toy has come out for children, or should I say, little girls. They are baby Elmo's and friends. They come with blankets and pacifiers. In the commercial advertising them they have little girls playing with them. This explains why little girls grow up knowing how to care for children and what roles to play in the house hold. Girls grow up playing with baby dolls and caring for them and playing house while young boys run around with fake guns and shoot one another. We question why females are still categorized as the ones who should be in the house doing the traditional work there, but this is why. We still only allow our little girls to play with baby dolls and think it's weird if we allow a little boy to do so. If the little boys played with baby dolls like girls did then they too would know how to care for an infant.

It Smells So Fresh!

Have you ever seen any of the Glade Candle commercials on television? Well if you've seen one, you know the theme of all of them. They all are commercials with women lighting the candles and bragging about how great they make their houses smell. A commercial in particular that I recently saw was the one of the lady lighting the candle and taking the label off so her guests wouldn't know that the candle was made by Glade. Only she didn't realize that when she through away the label from the candle, instead of going in the garbage can, it got stuck to the side of her dress. When she opened her front door to let her other females friends in they immediately commented on how her house smelled, it was as if she was baking a pie. She told them it was the candle but when they asked if it was one of those glade candles she lied and said it was from France. Her friends didn't believe her for a second because as soon as she said that one of her friends pulled the label that had gotten stuck to her off of her and showed her the label. All of these commercials are pretty similar to one another. They are all of females trying to make their houses smell like they are cooking something yummy. These commercials tell the viewers that only women should care about what their houses smell like, that only women care that much to go out and buy a candle just to make it smell like a house usually wouldn't smell. The fact that all of these commercials shows the candle making the house smell like a delicious treat says something in itself. That alone is telling us that the one who is to be in the kitchen and cooking these delicious treats and anything else that needs to be cooked is the woman of the household.

Let's Order a Pizza

While watching television, a commercial came on advertising the Digiorno Pizzas. It showed a man and two of his friends watching a sports game outside and they had the bright idea to order a pizza. The guy who lives at the house they were watching the game at pulled out his cell phone and called his land line phone to speak to his wife who had just gotten back from the grocery store. She answered the phone and he began talking to her like he was talking to someone who worked at a pizza shop and was ordering a pizza, he told her how he wanted it cooked, what toppings to put on it, and to make it snappy. And to this man's orders, she made the pizza and brought it out to them. At first this is a bad enough statement of how men have been allowed to order their wives or females in general around and serve them as they please. But then this commercial gets worse when she actually makes the pizza and brings it out to the men like she should be their servent or something. And she doesn't even seemed bothered by the fact that her husband orders her to do something like this for him and his lazy friends. These types of commercials on our televisions are what is shaping the next generation and had I been the one who was called and ordered to make a pizza I would have made him get up and do it himself. She just got back from the grocery store, maybe she wanted to sit down and watch the game herself.

One Pound. One Pan. One Happy Family.

Hamburger Helper. A tasty easy to make meal that many familys love. Hamburger Helper has been around for many years and throughout the years has put many commercials on television. Recently one of the commercials has stood out to me. A series of different females comes up on the screen with the famous Hamburger Helper glove on their hand talking about how tonight they're making a real meal so the family can sit around the table and have a real conversation. Right away this commercial is portraying that the female of the household is the one that is to do the cooking in the house. And from the looks on the females faces, they don't seem to mind. They look like they're happy doing it. It's like this because this is how it has always been. The woman of the house cleans and cooks all day while the man goes out and works. Which is also portrayed in the commercial. One man comes up with the glove on during the commercial but he says, "Let's give mom a hand tonight." He's also wearing a construction hat and is in a construction setting, portraying that the man is working while the woman is cooking and he even mentions that she is the one to be cooking. Commercials like this are all over our televisions and are portraying to all young and old that this is how all households are to be ran, the woman cooking and cleaning and the man working. It's been like this for so long, yet it's time for things to change. But how will these things ever change if these are the kinds of commercials that we are allowing our children, the next generation, to be watching?

Dumb Blonde

While searching through some funny commercials on YouTube.com, I came across one that not only made me laugh, but intrigued me. It was a commercial made by Mercedes Benz and was of a blonde woman in a library who goes up to the librarian behind the counter, a brunette, and quite loudly says, "I'd like french fries, a burger, and a milk shake." The librarian gives her a funny look and tells her she's in a library. Therefore, the blonde whispers to the librarian, "I'd like french fries, a burger, and a milk shake." Of course at this I laugh because blonde females have always been stereotyped as being dumb or stupid. The commercial then goes into saying that beauty is nothing without brains. As I mentioned, this stereotype has been around for as long as I can remember, how blonde females are dumb. Thinking further into it though, I realized that this stereotype has never been directed towards the male gender. In all actuality, both males and females can have blonde hair, so it isn't necessarily the blondeness of the hair that the joke is being made about, in fact, it's the gender of the person that the hair is coming from. So if it is a female that the hair is coming from that is being joked on, then it's the female gender in general that is being called stupid or dumb. I'd be willing to bet that never once would you hear a dumb blonde joke made about a male. For many, this isn't something that would be thought about and if anyone mentioned it they'd simply say it's just a joke and put it out of their minds. But it's hard to believe after all of this time, the female is still being joked on for not being intelligent, when in fact the women of our world are just as intelligent as the men.

Cooking is For Girls

While falling asleep one night I had the television on MTV where a show I watch often was on, Run's House. At the beginning of this episode, they showed youngest brothers, Russy and Diggy in one of their bedrooms. Diggy was laying on the bed while Russy was standing up playing a Wii cooking game. Diggy asked Russy why he was playing this game and Russy simply replied, "...because it's fun. I like cooking." Diggy's response to this was, "Cooking is for girls." The fact that these are kids who not even teenagers yet and are saying something like this amazed me. This shows that our society has continued to gives generations the message that the woman is the one who should be stuck in the kitchen cooking and cleaning. This needs to be changed so this message doesn't continue to go through the generations. To this day there are nearly just as many men in the kitchen cooking as there are women.

I Watch the Superbowl for the Commercials...

On February 1st, millions turned their televisions on the the NFL championship game, the Steelers versus the Cardinals. While this was a great game with a great outcome, many watched for the entertainment of the comical commercials that the Superbowl is known for. One of the commercials that came on during a break from the game was an ad for the new Pepsi Max. This commercial was full of males, doing "manly" things like working out in the garage, playing golf, bowling, and fixing electrical things around the house. There was not a woman to be found throughout the commercial. While these men were doing their "manly" things, not so great things were happening, including getting hit pretty hard by a piece of wood, getting hit with a golf club, a bowling ball falling on a guys head, and a guy getting shocked and through across his yard. After every incident the man said "I'm okay!" Towards the end of the commercial, a narrator comes on and says something along the lines of "Men can handle anything, except the taste of a diet cola..." First of all, who' s to say a woman can't handle anything? And second of all, who's to say all women can handle a diet cola? Personally, I'm a woman and I can't stand diet cola. At the end of the commercial, the narrator says "Pepsi Max, the first diet cola for men." And third, who's to say a woman wouldn't like Pepsi Max? This is very stereotypical in saying that only women drink diet colas when in fact many men drink them as well. Why does a diet drink have to be a "girly" drink? Perhaps Pepsi is pointing out in this commercial that it is the female who is more considerate of her body and doesn't want to fill it with pointless calories from a regular cola. Also, in this commercial, I don't like at all how they are saying that men are stronger than women and they can handle so much more than women can, women can handle just as much as men can.