Screenshot from Super Bowl 2010 Commercial
by Galit Goldstein
At halftime, after being riled by indulgently misogynistic ads for Dodge, Dockers, Budweiser, and Dove, I was ready to give up and go back to homework. Perhaps I am particularly sensitive to these commercials because they follow a week of unpleasant encounters with sexism, which seemed to pop up every time I turned on a television. The week started when I saw that clip of Rush Limbaugh “talking ladies” on Fox, (it’s a few posts down if you haven’t seen it yet), smugly quipping that the only kind of women’s movement he supports is the sort he watches while walking behind it.
By this point, it is a given that Rush’s statements are riddled with fallacies (a particularly irking one in this statement is his connection of liberalism to feminism; a broad concept such as feminism is not inherently ‘liberal’). It is an outworn truism that Limbaugh is a troll; instead of proving a point, his hate speech aims to antagonize the other side as much as possible. It is also old news that the promotion of Limbaugh’s gleeful anti-intellectualism, racism, and sexism tarnishes the images of the institutions that support him. However, it still hurt to see Fox label Rush’s interview as a “reaffirmation” of his “support” for women.
The controversy of the interview boils down to Limbaugh’s unashamed pride in his objectification of women. His quip appears to go over the head of interviewer Gretchen Carlson, who takes it with a blink and a blank face. Her lack of reaction is probably the most annoying part of the clip. As a judge for the Miss America competition, Limbaugh’s ‘women’s movement’ comment basically confirms the obvious: as a judge, he actively objectifies the contestants. This objectification is a direct insult to Carlson, a former Miss America winner: he has told her that in his eyes, her greatest value is her ass. It’s difficult for me to see how Carlson could graduate from Stanford and work her way to the position she occupies now solely on the qualifications of said ass, and if I were her, I would not have let Limbaugh get away with such a huge dismissal of my earned authority.
Just as we judge Limbaugh, we should judge those (presumably intelligent and self-sufficient) women like Carlson and the pageant contestants he judges for accepting his objectification without struggle. His offensive jokes are nothing new; qualms about Miss America’s sexism are also nothing new. The one good thing that came out of this interview is the knowledge that by allying itself with Limbaugh’s unabashed misogyny, the Miss America contest cannot pretend to be anything but indulgently sexist. The contest has made a very strong statement about how it views its contestants, and cannot hide under the superficial veneer of noble female empowerment it tries to cultivate by calling itself a “scholarship pageant.”
Limbaugh’s exaggerated and desperate attempt to assert his masculinity in the clip reflects the juvenility of this year’s offensive crop of Super Bowl advertisements. It’s very likely that many of the ads were constructed with the goal of gaining notoriety through creating controversy. These ads are following in Limbaugh’s footsteps by forcing themselves into the media spotlight through the vitriolic marginalization of women and the promotion of a one-dimensional caricature of the ‘manly’. Just as it is best to be wary of anything Limbaugh is associated with, until these corporations get their acts together and show a bit more respect towards the other half of their consumer bases, I’ll make it a point to avoid their products. At least the silver lining to this week is that my inability to buy a Dodge has been transformed into a good thing.
