FYI: Raging Dave posted the exact same comment to at least one of Ampersand's threads.
I am bemused by the whole Cheerios commercial rant. I mean, it's generally a given that commercials for food like cereal (as opposed to beer or Doritos) are targeted toward women, women being the ones who supposedly do the shopping for the household.
So what kind of tone and scenario have folx on Madison Avenue decided (and/or found) to be appealing to the kind of woman who does the grocery shopping? How about, 'You know that the health of your family is in your hands, and between us girls, it's just as well, because he lived like a lout before he met you.' That is, play up the consumer's power in/over her household, so that the consumer will feel good about her role and connect it to you. And if there's any latent resentment about the fact that she *always* has to do the shopping, or the cleaning, or whatever, well, then this commercial plays up to that too. But at no point does du Toit (or probably many men at all) directly enter into that conversation between marketer and target market.
When du Toit starts complaining about the fact that practically every bloody laundry soap commercial and floor cleaning commercial and window washing commercial etc. are targeted toward women I'll have more sympathy with his discovery that cereal is too. If anything, one could argue that the cereal commercial reinforces the man's traditional role as patriarch who doesn't need to concern himself with how or what he eats because the woman will deal with all of that.
On another note, Dagwood was portrayed as a bumbling slacker through the whole series, from the movies to the cartoon. And "Hi and Lois" has the 'honey do' list that never gets done, and anyone who can't see that Helga wears the pants in the "Hagar the Horrible" family is just flat blind. And all of these (to pull just a couple of pop references off the top of my head) were buffooning men way before the current 'declension.'
I thought people who were still interested in the issues raised by this thread might like to know of one positive step being taken against school bullying:
New Film Kicks Off National School Violence Campaign
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