by Jordan Kisner
“Advertising is based on one thing, happiness,” declares Don Draper, the advertising executive at the center of AMC’s hit drama Mad Men, “And you know what happiness is? It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams reassurance that whatever you are doing is okay. You are okay.”
It’s impossible to watch a show that so incisively explores the psychology of advertising and not turn a critical eye to the real advertisements that play in the breaks, which perhaps explains my developing fascination (and exasperation) with this commercial by Clorox:
Feminists have criticized and Sarah Haskins has mocked the way commercials imply that laundry is women’s work, but this ad genders laundry so enthusiastically it almost fools us into thinking we were wrong about this issue all along. Laundry isn’t a chore, Clorox tells women, it is an heirloom, a symbol of continuity and solidarity between women of different generations. Laundry is belonging, a way of connecting to and locating yourself within tradition. The fact that this tradition is ladies-only, with the amused-sounding exception of “maybe even a man or two”, sneakily inverts the notion that portraying laundry as women’s work is insulting and confining; instead, we are asked to think of the gendering of laundry as empowering because it celebrates an enduring, exclusively female domain.
It’s a smart ad, one that I can imagine Don Draper himself designing. It makes a plastic jug of bleach look like stability, continuity and romance. Except it’s completely ridiculous. The happiness being sold in this commercial is one that exploits a false nostalgia gripping America of late, a longing for an era –not unlike the era depicted in Mad Men—when things (read: gender roles) were simpler. This is the same longing driving national conversations about “family values” and inspiring New York Times articles about masses of educated, empowered women who really just want to be housewives. Of course, things weren’t simpler back then, just like laundry is not an illustrious tradition or a badge of sisterhood. In the past, for some women, it was a symbol of gender oppression. In the present, like in the past, it is a chore. And last time I checked, the thought of my great-grandmother doing the laundry for her family of nine didn’t make me feel better about bleaching my dirty socks.
