The American Crapper

Soap Scum, Gender, and the Quest For Freshness

Thanks to cutting-edge hipster Tony Patti for alerting me to this St. Louis Post-Dispatch article about the trend toward what he calls "jerky male advertising." The Post's critique isn't super-trenchant (author Diane Toroian Keaggy has no problem "celebrating American guyness--the lust for beer-fueled good times and busty women," and besides, she is writing for the P-D, that Midwestern arbiter of the lowest common denominator), but I love when people make any observations at all about commercials--especially when they mock Foghat in the process--because TV ads are an overwatched, under-fucked-with tool of The Man.

Diane correctly points out that the pretty young men in these jerky male commericals are "mean." Her examples include the Levi's ad where the asshole boyfriend cons his ex into thinking they're getting back together just so he can get his jeans back, and the Heineken commercial where the asshole boyfriend tells his sleeping girlfriend "I love you" so she'll free up his beer-drinking hand.

Jeans, beer, and stupid chicks. Three of Boo-Ya Nation's most crucial accoûtrements.

Diane also singles out one of my Most Detested spots, the one with the albino doofus-dad who cuts his hot wife down to size by waxing manly and ejaculatory over the "hammy" engine in his Dodge Durango.

The doofus-dad ads are the jerky male flipside of the in-yer-face asshole boyfriend spots. That the doofuses are always married to smart, hot women who in real life wouldn't be caught dead in the same zip code as these losers is sort of insulting. But even worse is the underlying pathology, that patronizing, tongue-in-cheek "we know who's really wearing the pants" crap that feeds a popular patriarchal myth: that even though the world may look male-centric on the face of it, it's those wily women who really have all the power.

What a load.

As is evidenced by the rest of TV advertising, the innumerable ads showing women in ecstasy over housework. Happy women with mops. Ha, good one. Charwoman Power!

Which brings me to my hypothesis: You can tell who wields the real power in a society by looking at the cultural janitorial narrative. Where is this narrative archived? In TV commercials, that's where. Look to TV to see who should sprawl on the couch eating pizza and watching football, and who should clean the toilets.

Other than that dapper lavatory mariner of yore, the Ty-D-Bol Man, I have never seen a toilet product ad with a Y-chromosome anywhere near it. Men appear in TV commercial bathrooms only to advertise x-schtreme shaving gear. These commercials double as gay porn.

There was that one spot where hubby reaches into toilet to retrieve wife's dropped earring, which pretty groundbreakingly featured a guy and a commode, but that turned out to be an ad for an electric shaver.* Men occasionally make non-shaving appearances in the bathroom when the product is repair-oriented rather than janitorial, like for drain de-clogger. But most of the time their manly clogs are confined to the kitchen, where an obstructed pipe is a metaphor for, oh, I don't know, frigidity?

The crapper-as-germ-infested-stink-zone is strictly a woman's purview. In America, men--straight ones, anyway--don't hang around toilets in rubber gloves chatting amiably with scrubbing bubbles. Any ad script containing the phrase "soap scum" indicates a non-sexy female spokesmodel. Currently there is a series of toilet-verité spots where homely barefooted homemakers--that's right, barefooted-- go absolutely apeshit for a disposable toilet brush. It taxes the imagination to the utmost to picture a man huddled over a toilet in his bare feet expressing unbridled joy over a toilet brush. Whence cometh this perceived affinity between barefoot women and toilets?

From the jerky males who write the commercials, that's where. And nothing can stop them. They've got nothing to lose. They already know they're going to hell; they're in advertising.

____________________
* Some may point out that there is also a commercial for a swiffer broom where an incredulous hubby busts in on his wife's shower to show her all the gross crud the broom has picked up, but it is clear he has been sweeping in a non-bathroom (i.e. male-safe) area. Also, his apparent fascination for, and amazement at, the yukky dirt stuck to his broom infantalizes the male character in a variation of the doofus-dad model. This is not, in other words, a guy who does much housework.