Promises

I’m interested in the tag lines people choose for their companies, I ponder them as I drive around reading the backs of vehicles. I’m unimpressed with the ones that promise no more than what you’d expect from their service, like a courier van that says, “We deliver on time!” as if that’s a great achievement – if your only job is to deliver something, is it really that hard to do it on time? I don’t use couriers, but if I did I think I’d keep phoning around to find somewhere that took punctuality as a given and aimed for more, like “We deliver on time with a smile!” or something.

I saw a ute yesterday that had the line “Delivering more than you expect” under the company name, and I think I like that one. Kudos to them for aiming high, at least. It raises expectations before they’ve even started work, though, which means that now they not only have to deliver more than you’d have expected in the first place, they have to deliver more than you now expect having been told they’ll deliver more than you expected. In case that sentence lost you, here it is again in picture form:

Having a client say “This finished product is exactly what I expected“ suddenly becomes a negative response to the work.

If I owned a company I think I’d choose a line like, “We try hard!” or “We’ll do the very best we can!” which doesn’t get people too excited and also allows for horrible days (“Look, I know it’s not great, but this is the best I can do at this time. As promised”). My company would not last long, but at least I could say people were warned.

Fodder #2 (or Poo #2)

I was surprised to see this on the box of nappies I bought the other day:

“Bowel movement“? What happened to “poo”? Are we not allowed to say “poo” anymore? I thought bowel movements were something old people did (had? made?) while everyone else pooed, but apparently I was (or now am – have the rules changed? DID I MISS THE MEMO?!) wrong. And now I’m not sure if animals poo or do (have? make?) bowel movements…

Child: What’s that down there, next to the path?

Parent: That’s a dog’s bowel movement.

Child: And what’s that white, runny thing on the side of that car?

Parent: That, my dear, is the bowel movement of a bird.

Can we go back to “poo,” please? I like “poo” better.

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I’d have added these clips to the Poo post, if it hadn’t taken me OVER A YEAR to get the videos from my phone to my computer.

 (Just quietly, HOW CUTE WAS MO?!)

Fodder #1

Sometimes brands do things I don’t understand. On the upside, their silliness provides me with blog posts (see Exhibit A, Exhibit B, or Exhibit C for examples).

This is a Bonds easysuit, which was so called EITHER because the cheeky folk at Bonds thought it would be hilarious to mess with the minds of parents (plus “ridiculously difficult suit” is long and probably wouldn’t sell as well) OR Alan and I are putting it on totally wrong. If anyone from Bonds is reading (HEY!), I’ve come up with a-not-too-different-but-far-more-accurate alternative name:

You’re welcome.

Sexual objectification, advertising, and the effect daylight savings has on my ability to respond well to these things

Earlier this year I was whinging about gender stereotypes perpetuated in ads and wrote this:

Show me a heterosexual guy in a television advertisement getting... excited about making his house into a home that smells like flowers and I’ll show you a small but encouraging example of progress in our journey towards gender equality.

 Well. Last week I saw this ad for Harpic...

...and I reckon it qualifies. The Gruen Transfer once pointed out that it was advertisers who invented ’body odour’ and therefore the need to buy deodorant; if these people can sneakily reshape such massive ideas, it truly excites me to see them put a man on television talking about cleaning a toilet. (I’m not so excited that the drive behind this is most probably money- rather than equality-related, but ONE STEP AT A TIME, PEOPLE!)*

My celebrations were short-lived, however, because a couple of nights later I saw this ad, in which a couple of girls get out of bed early to go perve on a group of men training in tight pants. It seems that some people in Marketing Land have misdiagnosed the problem with “the sexual objectification of women,” deciding it’s the last part of the phrase rather than the first. Sexually objectifying someone means regarding them as an object for use for sexual pleasure, “with little or no regard for [that] person’s personality or sentience.” Doing this to men doesn’t mean that us women are suddenly even now and all is well, it means things are getting worse. 

I don’t want droves of men to discover how it feels to be judged on appearance alone, and question their worth once their tummies bulge and their hairlines start to recede. I don’t want men to have to wonder whether anyone will find them attractive if they don’t have washboard abs and a hairless chest. I don’t want men to one day know that millions of women are watching pornography in which men are consistently dominated, and that these images are conditioning viewers to believe that the pleasure or comfort of men in sex is unimportant as long as the women are enjoying themselves. I don’t want men to have to experience being harassed so often by women that they’re unable to tell the difference between someone who is an idiot and someone who is a danger**. And yes, I know that the consequences of sexually objectifying men may/will play out differently than it has for women - guys are generally physically stronger, the process has been going on for women for centuries, yadda yadda yadda, but I can’t be bothered processing it more deeply because I DON’T EVEN WANT TO HAVE TO BE THINKING ABOUT THIS and now I’m just annoyed that Libra made me do it. 

I’m going to go watch the Harpic ad again but this time pretend that I live in a world where men doing housework in ads is boringly normal.

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* I found this article on advertising while looking into the body odour stuff, and thought it was interesting!

** As Catherine Deveny writes in this article, “If women reported every drunk, creep, loony or f**kwit who hassled them the cops would have to multiply their numbers by a thousand and still be flat out.”