Thankfully, The Girls seemed to disappear from our screens so maybe we were in for a whole new world of 21st-century womanhood (bearing in mind how long it takes the ad world to catch up with life as we know it and live it) where presumably financially independent women didn’t behave as if their brains had been replaced by hair mousse.
Well think again, suckers! Yes, women have major wealth muscles – we have jobs and thoughts and opinions and we can vote and everything! – that they might like to flex, but the world of television commercials, in its blood-pumping need to render us down to one simple characteristic, has decided that it can sell us anything – shampoo, cancer fund-raising events, out-size clothes – if only women are shown dancing.
Yes, dancing. Not in a club, where it wouldn’t be weird, where in fact it would be required. But at home, for no particular reason, just for the sheer joy of being a woman with a head full of waffles and an intellect that died of shame. It makes the days of The Girls seem like Camelot.
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Go on, count the ads where an empty-eyed woman gets home and does a little dance for no particular reason. Have you ever done that? Perhaps, if you were drunk and you didn’t have to go to work the next day. But not just because you are a woman and that’s what women do because this is Ad World, where stereotypes sell.
In the worst of these ads a woman tries a new shampoo that’s so spectacularly successful she does a little dance then – God help us all – rewards herself with a cupcake. I ask you, a cupcake, that signifier of all things supposedly feminine, something that now defines women in general when it comes to selling things. You are a woman, therefore you must love cupcakes!
In another ad, this time for a very good charity fund-raising cause, the whole thing is torpedoed by the usual gaggle of gurning, giggling women who get together presumably to gossip (because that’s what women do, obviously) and some of them do little dances for no discernible reason. Then there’s the smiling woman selling clothes to the over-50s. She dances too, but rather desperately, as if someone’s going to Taser her the second she stops.
In a world where the programmes that fill the gaps between ad breaks are documentaries fronted by clever women, and dramas with women characters who are capable of thinking about more than their latest fix of sugar and carbohydrate, Ad World needs to catch up. Fast.
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And STOP DANCING!
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