This one’s a treat:
“Wildflowers And Shame”
Comments
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Anonymous
Sociological analysis unfortunately still doesn’t deal with humor so well, and I think it would be actually missing the point (and you’d actually lose some of your students) by forwarding this ad (and many of the ads on here) as a straight read of static, traditional, hegemonic encoding of gender norms a la 1980’s era content analysis. Ads like this are pretty clearly playing with those gender categories and boundaries, and I’d be really hesitant to say they’re enforcing them. Acknowledging they exist? Absolutely, and I think subverting them to some degree. In any case, media as the ideological enemy or as something to be merely deconstructed and mined for hidden messages and codes of sociological import probably isn’t going to win over a lot of students these days. The culture has moved beyond those simple Marcuseian readings, and I think it’s time that we catch up, particularly because our students already have.
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Lisa
Oh sure! It’s totally tongue in cheek. That’s exactly why it’s so useful. It shows that these ideas are out there AND that we can play with them in a more or less sophisticated way. I didn’t mean, at all, to imply that this commercial was earnest.
But thanks for pointing that out and reminding me to make that explicit.
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Jason
It may not be earnest, but it does beg the question of who the target audience is for this particular ad.
Is it really guys who like wildflowers? Or is it guys who feel the need to be “manly” but also feel cliched for exemplifying such an obvious stereotype?
To me, this kind of ad tries to put an edge on hegemonic masculinity so that it feels fresher and more modern while still placing it at the top of the hierarchy.
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Anonymous
Lisa,
thanks for your response. my comment was more of a general concern, and not directed entirely toward that single post, and certainly not meant to be a critique of your motivations/readings of that ad (sorry if it came off that way — wasn’t intended at all).
Jason,
I think we do basically know who the ad is directed toward, but what the satirization of those cliches actually DOES or is trying to DO isn’t really that clear (at least in my mind). While that hegemonic, reincorporative reading is pretty familiar and easy to us as trained sociologists, I’m just really not too sure if we can come to that conclusion so simply. The problem in my mind is that while in one sense this classic version of masculinity is being placed at the top of the hierarchy (as you state), the hierarchy in itself based around this form is also being played with, made fun of, and exposed (for corporate and commercial gain, obviously, so it’s not entirely sincere by any means) for comedic effect. I think that destabilization is worth taking more seriously than to just say it’s another whirl around the Gramscian wheel. Humor — and satire in particular — are immensely important facets of daily social life. As sociologists, we don’t do them that well. I think this video is a great teaching tool and a great conversation starter for how complicated all of this stuff is, but it’s kind of a disservice to the complexity of popular culture and the study of it to present videos like this through the singular, ideologically comfortable (for many of us in the field), definitive script of power relations. Surely that’s there and an important part, but I don’t think that’s enough.
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