Super Bowl Ads: Sexy or Sexist?

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?)