Latest in Sexist Advertising Fail
Ok, so have you all seen this new Verizon ad? The one where the mother and daughter walk into a Verizon store crying, because the daughter is moving out? Here’s the first version of the ad:
This is the first version. In a later version, they upped the distance the daughter was moving away to 15 miles, you know, to make it more “realistic” that she might get lost.
So, let’s count the sexist tropes, shall we?
1. Women are over-emotional. They’re so emotional that you can’t understand them, and need subtitles.
2. Mothers and daughters can’t bear the thought of being separated, and need to Skype daily lest the grief of separation be too much.
3. Women have no sense of direction and will get lost with 4.2 or 15 miles of their home. So they need a phone with GPS. They also are so obsessed by being separated from their mothers that they will measure the distance in tenths of a mile.
4. Emotional women should be fled from, seeing how fast the salesguy runs to the back.
Um, yeah… So, Verizon, I know you were attempting humor.
FAIL.
Because women leaving home is never a cause of celebration, both for them and their parents. Because women are never excellent drivers who can find their way around neighborhoods THEY’VE LIVED IN FOR YEARS, IF NOT THEIR ENTIRE LIVES! Because women who may be feeling sad or overwhelmed for any reason are never able to maintain in public long enough to do something they need to do.
Ok, seriously, assholes. I want you to go to a mall and tell me how many women you see walking around clutching each other and sobbing uncontrollably who are over the age of seven. Because my ass was just at the mall on Monday, and I can tell you how many sobbing women I saw. ZERO. Not even in front of the swimsuit store. And you want to know why? Say it with me, “Because women are people just like men, and go about their daily lives doing all the things men do, like driving distances more than five miles, holding their shit together while at work, and feeling nothing but relief at the thought of getting their own place and moving out of their parents’ basement.”
Why do advertising guys hate my blood pressure?
Polimicks 
Thank you, I knew there was a reason I hated this commercial. You just wrote what I was feeling. :O)
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I stream my shows and so I’ve gotten the “privilege” of seeing this piece of shit commercial like 100 times now. It irks the living piss out of me EVERY SINGLE TIME! Oddly, I thought to myself at least 50 of those times “wonder what Mickey would say?” Now,I know.
I left home pregnant at 16 to marry a shifty sailor who turned out to be psychotic and my mom didn’t cry that fricking much. Guns got cleaned during “talks” with said sailor, but not so much with the crying.
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Ha – I moved 200 miles away to go to college; lived 15 miles from my parents for my first post-college job; and then moved 600 miles away a few years later. While my mother expressed regret and sadness I wouldn’t be around, she never did this in front of me or even behind my back that I heard of.
Then again, as much as I love Mayhem from the Allstate ads, I hate HATE the one where he’s a teenage girl in a pink SUV hitting things left and right because he’s emotional on the phone. PLEASE. If I’d so much as scratched another vehicle when I was 17, my mother would have snatched me baldheaded.
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these are all the reasons that the ad bothered me in the first place.
I am still flabbergasted that they REMADE THE DAMNABLE THING!
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Yeah, because having her move FIFTEEN WHOLE MILES AWAY TOTALLY MEANS SHE MIGHT GET LOST!!!!!!!
I fucking hate… everything.
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I’m reasonably sure that was some douchebag ad exec’s response to, “Really? She might get lost four miles from home?”
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