Advertising Hasn't Really Changed that Much

Advertisers are still finding unique ways to insult us and dinegrate us to sell a product. For years my complaints were about the way that African-American women in the media were portrayed but I now realize that everyone is fair game. For example I finally figured out what they were saying in that Taco Bell commercial with the two women in the club, and the one has a bacon chalupa and I have to admit it is very disrespectful. In fact I'm not surprised feminists aren't all over this. The message is very similar to that of the Hardee's commercial where the girl says that she just really loves meat, you know the one where she wants a Philly Steak hamburger and the guy is like "that's a lot of meat" and she giggles and is like "yeah, ... I just like a lot of meat".

Where are your censors when you need them? Yet that pales in comparison to the more sophisticated ads by companies such as McDonalds; for example they had this one ad that shows a Black woman working in a high-rise office doing anything and everything to sabatoge and humiliate her White male co-worker, for no particular reason whatsoever. It wasn't clear if the message was that a Black woman will do anything over food, if food was a metaphor for something else entirely or simply to suggest that a Black woman will resort to desperate measures to get ahead in the workplace. I mean she was really letting him have it, for no apparent reason. The commercial ran for quite some time.

Of course that pales in comparison to an old Calvin Klein ad I saw in the Source years back that featured a Black male wearing all red, looking angry, and a White male on the next page, dressed in all White. Of course by that time Calvin Klein was getting desperate and trying really hard to compete with the Benetton ads, which made his stuff look lame by comparison. It could have been my imagination, but I swore I remember like red horns and a halo thrown in for extra effort.