Personal Reflection- 2009 Super Bowl Ads

Every year I am as excited about the Super Bowl commericals as I am the actual game. This is not exactly news considering I think most women feel that way, and some men...but they just don't want to sound immasculine by saying it. ( kind of joking) I started thinking about the masculine and femine role that women feel like they must play, whether in life or on television--and this is especially true for advertisements. That brought me to think about a couple of the ads that I saw, that as funny as some were, they were still gender skewed. The first was the Doritos commercial, The Power of the Crunch.The first scene in the commercial is of a man eating a Doritos chip and the crunch seemed to blow the women's clothes off of her body. While it was entertaining to some extent, and these messages are obviously geared towards men because it is the Super Bowl, it has to make one wonder what that even has to do with eating Doritos. We all know that if you eat Doritos chips that women's clothes are going to come flying off, nor money burst out from an ATM machine at you, or turn police men into monkeys. This commercial cheapens womens to the products of a man's desires and to the lowest extent the crunch of a chip. The second commercial I thought about was the GoDaddy.com commercial in which the women are talking about "enhancements" meaning and even as far as to even explicitly define at the end of the commercial that they were talking about womens breast sizes. While one of the four women clarifies that she is talking about enhancing her image with a domain name and web address from GoDaddy.com. This is not the point though. The point is that the women were being prosecuted on the grounds of "enhancement" and most of the women's answers to the judges questions are far from intelligent. Plus, you could even see gender roles in the actual character's roles as the women are objects of sex and some sort outlaws, while the men are the lawyers and judges. I don't want to sound like this over bearing feminist because I am not, but I think it is important to look at the reasons behind why these commercials are designed to place men in certain positions and women as some what of a lower opposing role.