intheweeds said:
It's not a 'little sexist' in that way, it's completely sexist and not harmless at all. It's the whole 'men should be in the power position' mentality. The more society encourages men to want to be in the 'power position' when next to a woman, the less equal everyone becomes.
It suggests men should be embarrassed for allowing a woman the position of driving the vehicle, suggesting that men should make fun of each other for allowing themselves to be in the weaker position. Hey guys, use peer pressure to make sure your fellow men aren't turning into stupid weak ladies! Whatever that means, the whole point of what I'm saying is that it enforces the fact that one side is weaker than the other when in fact, who is sitting where on a motorcycle is completely irrelevant..
Arguably true, but I think the context as an ad justifies it. Ads rely on entertainment value and in a completely egalitarian society there is no allowance for gender based jokes, which is a large segment of comedy, so ads have to fall back on supposed gender roles to be entertaining and gain brand awareness through being recognizable as those guys with the funny ads. I think taking the ad to be depicting a man on a scooter as a "stupid weak lady" is a bit much, but the point is still relevant, namely that we are meant to see the man as less manly for his situation. Still though, I don't think the ad is about the relationship between women and men and is certainly not encouraging the denigration of women, it's more playing off the relationship between men, that whole "Bro' thing which, while sexist, still can be considered inoffensive as while gender roles can be considered outdated they do really help the individual form their own identity and grow into a responsible person, so the encouragement of gender roles can be allowed, as long as we understand the context outside of the advertisement, namely that the whole men do men things and women do women things is allowable when used in a simplistic manner but is not relevant to modern society.
Simply put, we see the sexism in the ad, laugh at it because it is sexist, then exit that mentality into the real world where, while pressure to conform to those roles exists, we are all still completely in agreement that such ideas of acceptable roles and the ideas of who wears the pants in a relationship are no longer as relevant as they were.
The interesting thing to remember is that this is a food ad. If the product was so inherently "MANLY", as it claims to be, then only men could eat it. Since I assume women also partake of the product, the ideas of masculinity of the product are refuted every time someone with ovaries has one.
