The domestic manliness crisis in the Super Bowl ads

Image by ian_ransley via Flickr

I drove out to central PA to watch the Super Bowl with my father. Since my childhood, he and I spent many an hour in mutual frustration watching the Philadelphia Eagles do this or that. During the Super Bowl yesterday, he asked me what I’d been doing lately, and I mentioned an interview with Christopher Dickey and our talk about the poetry and fiction of his father, James Dickey. 

Which got me to thinking about various themes of masculinity in Deliverance, (novel, not the movie), which made me wonder just what kind of manliness crisis is going on in America as depicted in several Super Bowl commercials, all of which can be seen at CBS Sports.com.

Right after the best ad of all — the “Casual Friday’s” ad — came a Dockers commercial in which a group of men are wandering in a field singing the Poxy Boggards song, “I wear no pants! I wear no pants!” with the concluding voice-over declaring, “Calling all men — it’s time to wear the pants.”

The obvious suggestion is that someone else is wearing the pants, or, worse, has taken the men’s pants and put them on (is it something to do with so many men out of work, while their wives still have jobs; or the 6:4 women-to-men ratio in college attendance?). Perhaps the implication of the commercial is that if you wear Dockers, you will always have pants because no one else wants them. 

Then there was an ad for the Dodge Charger titled “Man’s Last Stand.” The commercial depicts exhausted-looking, exasperated men staring into the camera, not speaking, while voice-over narration describes their bedraggled  lives, summed up thusly: “I eat and do what she tells me to do and eat, and I work all day at a job that kills me and I come home and watch the stupid shows she wants to watch and keep my mouth shut and because I do all that this is the car I drive.” Vvvvrrrrooooooommm.

So, the Dodge Charger: A. Restores and liberates lost, downgraded, or suppressed masculinity. B. Grants masculinity where it never was before. C. Makes married-and-mortgaged men crazy enough to quit their jobs and start their own small businesses. 

Late in the game, as the Saints began to make their case for victory, came a commercial, “Removed Spine,” for a hand-held, wireless TV service called FloTV (does the iPad help with Flo?). In the drama of the commercial, some poor schlub, Jason, is shopping with a girlfriend who has removed his spine, “rendering him incapable of watching the game.”

In fact, I was amazed Jason even has a girlfriend. Yet the fellow has a red bra draped over his shoulder, is carrying bags, and he appears partly sedated. At one point his girlfriend grabs him and says, “C’mon, silly,” while the poor guy was trying to get a glimpse of a game on a store television while he and GF were heading to the next women’s section.

CBS Sportscaster Jim Nantz is the on-screen narrator of this commercial, and kicks it off by saying “There’s an injury report,” i.e., the guy losing his spine. The implication is that if you’re going to get stuck helping your GF shop for clothes, you should at least be able to watch the Three Stooges, something Nantz might do given his recent divorce and revelations about a girlfriend. (Maybe he chose this endorsement for this very reason.)

In commercials other than these, a very young kid slaps his mother’s new boyfriend and warns him, “Keep your hands off my momma, keep your hands off my Doritos.” A skinny geek whose wireless isn’t fast enough gets clobbered by a Sumo wrestler. Russell Crowe appears as a pudgy, bloodied, dirty Robin Hood, while Benicio Del Toro is dirtier and hairier as the Wolfman. And most of the guys in the Bud Lite commercials shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a Dodge Charger or anything sharp.

There’s no way any of these commercial messages are to be taken seriously (right?), but the cumulative message of these three particular, wholly-masculine themed commercials is this: Once I have pants (Dockers), a hand-held TV, and a new American hot rod, I will have tipped worldly power away from women/girlfriend/wife and back into my favor as an American man, and — bonus! — will also have reasserted myself in the face of the corporate state.

What’s the real crisis of masculinity as I’ve seen it lately? Fourth-quarter interceptions.*

What’s the opposite? Standing on the field as Super Bowl MVP holding your 1-year-old son in your arms. 

*For the record, I was rooting for the Saints, but I would have been happy to see Manning win his second Super Bowl. And then he pulls a Favre. I want that to enter the lexicon — “I pulled a Favre” — when you force something you know you shouldn’t even try in the first place and the whole situation collapses on your head.