Feminists vs. The Super Bowl Commercials

Generally we don’t have a lot to say here about the Super Bowl itself, and today won’t be any different. If you want a great wrap up of the game itself, you’ll sadly have to go somewhere else.

I didn’t have a rooting interest at all in this Super Bowl, so I was mainly watching for the spectacle. However, many people watched for a completely different reason. There was a whole group of alleged feminists who fired up their computers and got excited about the Super Bowl because they were really looking forward to… tweeting about which commercials offended them. They came up with a hashtag, #notbuyingit, which told these naughty companies that they weren’t going to be buying their products due to their “offensive” ads.

Right off the bat, the taking offense brigade got offended at what might have been the first in-game comercial, the Snickers ad with Willem Dafoe. I don’t think it was a particularly great ad, but there’s no accounting for taste:

In addition to not being especially funny, however, this ad was apparently “transphobic.”

.@SNICKERS, what was up w that commercial? Transphobic & implies women OK w being objectified as long as they have snacks #NotBuyingIt #SB50

— NARAL (@NARAL) February 7, 2016

Not sure why this is “transphobic,” other than that it showed a guy playing a feminine role in a humorous manner. I don’t know why last year’s Snickers commercial with Danny Trejo that basically pulled off the exact same gag (only better), was

not transphobic under this exact same analysis:

But I am not a trained professional at being offended, so I will take NARAL’s word for it. Maybe no ad got the feminists more riled up than the Hyundai ad, which perpetuated the highly offensive notion that dads are protective of their daughters:

What’s wrong with this? Well, apparently parents are no longer allowed a say in their underage daughters’ dating life, because that is “sexist.”

Hey, @Hyundai – taking away your daughter’s autonomy and stalking her on a date isn’t funny. #NotBuyingIt #SB50 — NARAL (@NARAL) February 7, 2016

What’s extra creepy about the Hyundai ad is that the daughter seemed to actually want to kiss the guy, but Daddy said no… #NotBuyingIt

— Elizabeth (@MissCherryPi) February 7, 2016

Normal, well adjusted people don’t find this “creepy.” They find it “funny.” The most bizarre offense anyone took at a Super Bowl ad was the offense NARAL took at the first half Doritos ad, which might have been the best commercial of the whole Super Bowl:

Now, you might be wondering what could possibly be wrong with this ad, but don’t worry, NARAL is here to tell you:

#NotBuyingIt – that @Doritos ad using #antichoice tactic of humanizing fetuses & sexist tropes of dads as clueless & moms as uptight. #SB50

— NARAL (@NARAL) February 8, 2016

NARAL hates unborn babies so much that they don’t want one being shown on ultrasound even when the couple in question wants to keep their own baby.

More to the point, we didn’t used to have this cottage industry of people who participated in a given event (watching the Super Bowl, in this case) for the sole purpose of being offended. But now, we’re a sick society that is less concerned with putting our nose to the grindstone and creating our own success than we are in complaining about how unfair life has been to us. We won’t be the greatest nation in the world much longer if we keep going like this.