Emasculation on Super Bowl Sunday

by Nick Cox

Super Bowl Sunday always features some of the most extravagantly produced TV commercials of the year.  It is also an event whose audience is predominantly male—these high-budget commercials are therefore targeted squarely at men.  Knowing as we do that advertisers are the savviest mass-psychologists in the world, what can we learn from this year’s Super Bowl commercials about the state of the collective male psyche in 2010?

This much is clear: all is not well in man-dom.  Nearly every commercial, in some way or another, screamed emasculation.  This theme was probably expressed most directly in last night’s addition to the infamous Dockers “WEAR THE PANTS” ad campaign.

While the Dockers manifesto urged men to resist the wave of “metro” effeminacy that, “latte by foamy non-fat latte,” was eroding our manliness, last night’s Dockers commercial revealed the true threat to masculinity today: not effeminacy but pathetic emasculation.  Instead of lattes and salad bars we had a pack of flabby, sweaty, unkempt men, wearing tighty-whities—one of our society’s most powerful icons of male buffoonery—jogging through a field singing some sort of sea shanty about how they “wear no pants.”  The closing admonition to “wear the pants” was an afterthought.  The point was just to laugh at a bunch of pathetic-looking guys running around with no pants on, the irony being that ones laughing—the guys watching the Super Bowl—were the very ones being made into buffoons.  One wonders how many of us recognized ourselves on the screen.  Other similarly blunt representations of emasculation included a skinny guy getting tackled by a sumo wrestler and a suitor getting smacked by his potential stepson.

This sense of emasculation was also expressed powerfully in the “Clydesdale Fence” Budweiser commercial, a charmingly old-fashioned parable about a horse and a bull.  I mean “parable” as opposed to “allegory,” because the story does not have any clear, single, point-for-point meaning—it is simply an expression of the feeling of being fenced in, which is so often associated with emasculation.  This commercial, though, like so many others last night, also had a hidden content.

We were meant to feel a sense of exhilaration on behalf of the bull when he finally breaks out of the fence, but this leaves out an important fact: the horse is hitched to a carriage.  The freedom that the bull wants so desperately is just another cage, another kind of servitude.  In trying to gratify symbolically the male desire to escape the confines of whatever cage encloses them—family, marriage, job, society, whatever—it just ends up revealing the futility of this dream.  One imagines that the bull will inevitably get roped back into the pasture, and the farmer will probably put up an electric fence.  Even as a parable about animals, this male dream is still structurally impossible.

And who is guilty of emasculating men?  The answer, as always, is: women!  And men, it seems, are not faring well in the battle of the sexes.  The men depicted in this year’s commercials, while they resent more than ever the authority that women have over them, seem at the same time to be more and more resigned to it.  Take, for instance, the FLO TV commercial in which the narrator reports that Jason’s girlfriend “has removed his spine, rendering him incapable of watching the game”—she is dragging him around a department store, and he doesn’t even seem to mind.  The narrator urges Jason to get a FLO TV mobile television viewer—”It’s live mobile TV,” he says, “so now, live sports goes where you go.”

The commercial fails to acknowledge, though, that he is still letting his girlfriend drag him around a department store, FLO TV or no.  Most guys, if pressed, would probably admit that watching sports is mainly just an excuse to get together with your buds and drink some beers—the true emasculation here consists in being denied not the game, but the bro time for which the game is a pretext.  A FLO TV is not a victory over the authoritarian girlfriend but merely an impotent gesture that only emasculates the man even further—as if seeing the girlfriend as an authority figure were not emasculating enough to begin with.

And guys, it seems, do indeed find their girlfriends quite authoritarian, and their desperate desire to escape sometimes drives them to astonishing heights of passive-aggressive rebellion, such as the man who fakes his own death, and presumably is willing to be buried alive, in order to be able to lie in a coffin watching football and eating Doritos.  He is unusually courageous, though—for most guys the dominant mode seemed to be impotent resignation underlaid with simmering resentment, as in “Man’s Last Stand,” an embarrassingly desperate litany of expectations, all perfectly reasonable, that these supposedly authoritarian girlfriends have for their guys.  The guys’ faces range from wistful sadness to barely-suppressed rage.  The commercial makes a subtle but infinitely telling move: of the four men whose inner monologues are delivered by the narrator, only three are directed toward the authoritarian girlfriend—the second man is clearly meant to be thinking about his boss.  The transition from girlfriend to boss and back to girlfriend is seamless, as though the distinction between the two were all but irrelevant.

So, guys, if life with a woman is too restrictive for your perennially-adolescent disposition, why don’t you do something about it?  Why don’t you walk out on her tonight and finally go on that crazy cross-country road trip that you and your buddies have always talked about taking?  The one group of bros that did manage to do this, who somehow ended up with a killer whale in their car, could only justify such manly excess because one of them was about to get married—the greatest breaches of adult responsibility, it seems, must immediately be paid for with the greatest commitments.  As for the rest of the poor, oppressed guys, we learn what makes them want to keep a girl around in this Snickers commercial.  The admission of emasculation here is not the hunger that reduces a strapping young man to an old lady—it is not foregrounded.  It is, rather, the fact that, while the guy is playing football with his friends, his girlfriend is sitting on the bleachers so she can give him a Snickers bar if he gets hungry.  In other words, she is a surrogate mother—if he walks out on her, who will take care of him?  This sort of impotence is the flip side of the wanton plunge into immaturity that constitutes the substance of male fantasies these days.

That’s right: it seems the desire for freedom from the authoritarian girlfriend has actually overtaken sex as the dominant male fantasy.  In this post-apocalyptic Bridgestone commercial, the Mad Max-style roadside bandit demands “your Bridgestone tires, or your life!”—and when an exquisitely attractive woman is forcibly ejected from the passenger seat, he says, with a disappointed scowl, “I said ‘life,’ not ‘wife’!”  The hot woman, traditionally the quintessential fetish item of male-targeted commercials, is here portrayed as the wife that guys want to get rid of—even if it takes an apocalyptic disaster to give them the courage to do so.  And even the commercials that did orient themselves toward the fulfillment of more traditional male fantasies—the GoDaddy.com commercials—did so in ways that were, by today’s standards, almost shockingly restrained.

Both commercials, including the dizzyingly self-referential one in which a TV news panel discusses the question of whether GoDaddy.com commercials are “too hot for TV,” end just as the blonde is beginning to take her clothes off.  We are then informed that we may “see more” at GoDaddy.com, with the tantalizing promise that the web content is “unrated.”  If you look at this “unrated” web content for yourself, you will find that it is not even remotely “too hot for TV”—in both, the blonde just dances around a bit in a tank-top and short shorts while the brunette makes lame one-line jokes.  Any erotic excitement one might glean from these commercials will come solely from the promise of “more,” in the privacy of the Internet and away from the prying eyes of the authoritarian girlfriend—in other words, yet another impotent little escape from domineering femininity.

Last night’s most ludicrously fetishized items were probably Bud Light and Doritos, both of which are icons of the “guy space” that these men all crave so desperately.  But, ironically, the commercials themselves undercut the masculine freedom that Bud Light supposedly represents: it often turns out that the girlfriend, not unlike the one that gave her man a Snickers, was actually the one who bought the beer—and, as further demonstration of how far attractive women have fallen out of favor, T-Pain just asks a star-struck female admirer, with his trademark Auto-Tuned croon, to “pass the guacamo-o-o-o-le.”  In another, the guy cares so much about Bud Light that he actually gives up meeting his friends at “the game” and crashes his girlfriend’s book group when he sees a bucket of brews on the coffee table.  In other words, he wants Bud Light so badly that he is willing to forgo the very bro-time of which it is the symbol, and also enter the veritable lions’ den of femininity—the book group—in order to get it.  This is a perfect demonstration of just how confused masculinity has become: Bud Light is a fetish item because it is an emblem of bro-time, but this guy gives up bro-time in order to get Bud Light.

There is hope, though, and it shone through most clearly in the aptly-titled “Be Comfortable in Your Own Skin,” an ad for a new line of men’s soaps from Dove.  This commercial may actually be a significant turning point in the representation of masculinity in mainstream TV advertising: it constitutes an attempt to incorporate some degree of what might traditionally be thought of as effeminacy, exemplified by Dove soap, into masculinity.

It accomplishes this so well by transcending the notion of masculinity as pathetic immaturity, without trying to deny that being immature is sometimes part of being a man.  The point, ultimately, is this: masculinity is just feeling comfortable in your own skin, and if that involves washing with somewhat effeminate-looking Dove soap—as opposed to, say, ridiculously “masculine” AXE—well then, more power to you.  “Now that you’re comfortable with who you are,” says the narrator, as though this comfort were inevitable; I hope it is, although just about all the other commercials I saw last night suggested otherwise.