Sociological Images

This afternoon on Marketplace (on NPR) I heard this story about a new McDonald’s commercial, called “Intellectuals,” that pokes fun of Starbucks. Here is the commercial (available here if the video doesn’t show up right in the post):

Here’s an older one for the guys:

Now, I’m all for making fun of pretentious hipsters (or anybody else pretentious, for that matter), and I’m not a fan of Starbucks for a host of reasons. But I think the anti-intellectualism in these commercials is fascinating. Now that McDonald’s offers a lower-cost cappuccino, women are free to wear heels again! They don’t have to pretend to like jazz, speak a foreign language, or care where Paraguay is! The men are liberated, not just from Starbucks’ prices, but also from pretending to be sensitive intellectuals. Both groups can stop acting as though they like reading and go back to watching TV. Men don’t have to watch films anymore. Being intellectual, i.e. reading books, watching “films” (as opposed to “movies”), and not wearing heels, is posing; going to McDonald’s, watching sports, and wearing short skirts (the one woman says “I just want to show my knees, you know?”) are authentic. And in the case of women, presumably being an intellectual forces you to wear stuffy clothes (turtlenecks and long skirts) that probably preclude you from ever having sex (although maybe you can attract the guys posing as intellectuals).

Maybe I’ve been out of the loop, but do intellectual women never wear heels? Are we not allowed to wear skirts above the knee? I love fashion and have lots of heels in my closet and I spent a good part of the summer watching “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” a TV show. Crap–do I have to give my Ph.D. diploma back now?

In the Marketplace story I linked to above, one commentator connects this to Sarah Palin, saying,

It really seems to be in the Sarah Palin moment. Because all that is about anti-intellectualism and shootin’ and huntin’ . . . . And this is, you know, “Oh, we really always hated Starbucks, and thank God for McDonald’s and a real American option”.

I get where she’s going–the idea of authenticity and all–but I assume the ad was being planned well before Palin was named the VP candidate, so that seemed a bit of a sketchy assertion, but the discussion of the anti-intellectualism is pretty accurate, I think.

McDonald’s has also created a website as part of this campaign, Unsnobby Coffee (I can’t tell if it’s a general McDonald’s site; at the bottom it says McDonald’s of Western Washington). It has a mad-libs style “intervention” page where you can insert phrases into the spaces in a pre-written letter to a friend, asking them to give up their “snobby iced espresso.” The words available for you to drag into the spaces include:

hoity-toity
trust fund
highfalutin
snooty
oh-my-geez
snobby

After filling it out, you can send it to a friend.

This could be used for discussions of gender (”real” vs. inauthentic masculinity and femininity) as well as attitudes toward “intellectual” pursuits and the way that things like reading books and knowing where Paraguay is are often linked to an idea of upper-class snobbery so that being a “real,” authentic, non-pretentious person requires you to reject reading in favor of TV and films in favor of sports. While this message makes fun of hipsters, it’s also painting a pretty negative portrait of “normal” people–as non-reading, non-thinking, and superficial. You could also use it as an example of the commodification of authenticity.