Super Bowl Ads: Sexy or Sexist?

Posted by Em & Lo , Daily Bedpost at 11:02 AM on February 6, 2008.

We were all pumped to play a game of "Super Bowl Ads: Sexy or Sexist," but we gotta say the commercials that aired during the big football championship were surprisingly tame in their misogyny and/or gratuitous female nudity/sexuality (as opposed to previous years). Even the Victoria's Secret commercial was reserved in the cleavage department -- at least for Victoria's Secret -- and had a fairly decent message: That working on a good sex life is more important than sports (though we'd posit that dressing your girlfriend or wife in cheap and tacky thongs is not the first nor the best step on that noble journey)...

We Tivo-skimmed through all 16 hours of the pre-game show as well as the game itself (by the way, who won?), and besides a truly offensive song-and-dance charade by Paula Abdul, a shameful lip-synching of the National Anthem by Jordin Sparks (easier to spot on a big-screen HD TV than on YouTube), a characteristically dumb Carmen Electra vehicle, the unsurprisingly offensive Carlos Mencia/Bud Light ad, and only one, almost accidental shot of cheerleaders dressed in what can only be described as underwear, we found very little to wag our fingers at.

The worst of the bunch was from GoDaddy.com. They can always be relied upon for the shameless use of the stripper stereotype to sell its product, and the spot that ran yesterday did just that: Fans at a Super bowl party abandon the game to check out the banned ad starring race car driver Danica Patrick on the computer. We see that it's called "Exposure" and features Patrick seductively unzipping her jacket in that typical porn-fantasy come-hither look. Ugh. Must we turn all successful female athletes into mere sex objects? (Or rather, must they all turn themselves into sex objects? Is it for fear of being pegged as butch lesbians or what?)

However, when we watched the "Fox-rejected" GoDaddy ad online fully expecting to roll our eyes, we actually found it pretty damn funny. Maybe we're letting our inner outraged feminists get lazy, but the paparazzi guy questioning "Is that a beaver?" totally cracked us up. We went to NOW's Super Bowl AdWatch page and discovered the majority of their critical viewers were not happy with quite a few of the ads. Was the Planters ad really that offensive? They should have made her more impossibly ugly (we didn't think she was that hideous), but riffing on the irrational effect of pheromones was quite clever, we thought. And we dare you not to giggle a little at the Amp energy drink commercial. Violence against men? Hardly.

What did you think? Did any ads get your goat? And what were your faves? We thought the sexiest ad was for GMC's Yukon Hybrid, what with the naked male tushy in it! (How'd that get past the censors?) And though it has absolutely nothing to do with sex or relationships, our absolute favorite, hands down, was Tide's "Talking Stain" bit. Sheer genius.

Tagged as: sexism, feminism, ads, football, gender

Em & Lo, more formally known as Emma Taylor and Lorelei Sharkey, are the self-proclaimed Emily Posts of the modern bedroom.