Love and Football

February is the month of the Super bowl and Valentine’s Day. Together, these two highly-commercialized events bring a barrage of sexist commercials to our television screens. The ads from these two events tell us a gendered and limited story.

The story goes something like this. There is a woman. She is attractive, but less valuable than cheap beer. Some football is played. Then, we see her again while someone drinks Pepsi or eats some Doritos. The following week on our TV screens brings the rising action and climax of this story. Our woman is now looking for romance. She sits and waits. Then a man gives her some chocolate, a heart-shaped piece of jewelry, and a stuffed animal, usually some kind of bear. She finds happiness. End of story.

This is the story advertising repeats every February. However, it is not exclusive to February. Year round women are painted as one-dimensional characters in the “hyper-romanticized” world of advertising. She is still waiting for a man while he is out doing things in the world between beers, usually business, barbecue and sports stuff. This broader story is still a sad and limiting one.

The stories show how women are obsessed with cooking the perfect easy meal, finding clothes or shoes that are supposed to express us in lieu of our voice and give us a voice, discovering skin products made from French melons, and always, always searching for love. Sometimes the love is for yogurt, sometimes for a man, and sometimes it is for the right cleaning product to bring us the ultimate satisfaction in life.

This month’s deconstruction features two students from the Media Arts Collaborative Charter School (MACCS). Media Literacy Project teaches a media literacy class with the MACCS ninth graders in Albuquerque each year. This is one of the videos created at the end of the six-week course by Angel Ballejos and Eva Lowry.

Please contact Media Literacy Project to create a media literacy course for your school that is designed to meet your students’ needs and your organizational budget.

Additional questions to consider with this video deconstruction:

What techniques of persuasion do you see in these ads and others like them?

What is the subtext of these commercials?

What values are expressed in advertising targeting women?