Social Commentary

The other day, the TV was on the Disney Channel, and I caught the following public service announcement with the characters from Phineas and Ferb about online safety.



Well, it’s a good start to get kids more aware about Internet safety and what you should and shouldn’t post on the Internet. But it falls short in a couple of ways—first off, the examples used aren’t really all that convincing and don’t look like they’ll leave much of an impact on the kids viewing the announcement. They’re light-hearted, and they don’t show any real consequences of failing to understand that what you post on the Internet is (a) public, and (b) difficult to remove. Granted, a lot of the consequences are difficult to convey to the kids (who don’t really think about future employment prospects, for example, and don’t think much about their long-lasting reputations), but the examples still could have been handled in a better way. The “embarrassing” videos weren’t really all that embarrassing, and, even though the giant robot comes by to take the CD, you don’t see what he could do with it. It might be some heavier topics to deal with, but, if you’re trying to emphasize online safety, it shouldn’t just be brushed off as light-hearted humor.

Another huge criticism I had of the announcement was the last part—”Because nothing beats spending time with real friends!” Okay, I do agree that, if you’re cooped up in your room all day watching Youtube videos or doing something solitary, then, yeah, it’s a good idea to go out and spend time with friends.

But if you’re doing something social with online friends? That sparks my rant. I have to emphasize this, because people too often don’t get it: Online friends are real friends.

It’s a topic that’s bugged me for ages. First off, I hate the “online” and “in real life” binary. Because, you know what? Online stuff is a part of real life. What happens online is not divorced from reality; it’s a part of reality. It makes up what’s real to you. So whenever I’m forced to make the distinction, I prefer using the binary “online” vs. “offline”.

That said, my online friends are my real friends. And yes, I do have online friends—a good number of them. And no, I don’t know what some of my online friends look like. One of these friends, who I’ve known for four years and still don’t even know what her hair color or skin color is, helped me through one of my toughest emotional times. She answered one of my calls in the middle of one of her classes and stepped out to talk to me and calm me down when I was basically hysterical. When I was in a really depressed state, alone in my room at night and seriously considering hurting myself in some way, she called the housing department at my school to get someone to drop by and make sure I wasn’t doing anything. If not for her, I don’t even know if I’d be in the happier, healthier state I’m in now, or if I’d even be around.

And I don’t know anything about her other than her name, the sound of her voice, and a vague idea of where she’s going to school. I’m not sure how old she is. I don’t know for certain what race she is. I don’t really know what she does in her spare time. But I know that she cares enough about me to make sure that I didn’t do anything stupid and to support me when I really needed it.

I have another online friend who I’ve known for almost ten years, and I’ve never spent a single minute with her in person. We met online when we were about eleven or twelve or so, and now both of us are about nineteen. For comparison, I only have a couple or few friends from elementary school, about that same age, that I’m still friends with.

Many of my online friends know stuff about me and know about my struggles more deeply and more intimately than I would ever share with any of my offline friends. Many of my offline friends who I’ve known for five years or more don’t even have an idea of what I’ve struggled with and gone through, especially over the last year. But many of my online friends know and have cared enough to support me when I really needed it. It’s often easier for a number of reasons for me to express myself and convey my deeper thoughts and emotions online than orally with offline friends, hence why many of my online friends know stuff about me that my offline friends would never even dream of knowing.

So don’t tell me that my online friends aren’t “real” friends. They are people who have supported me in my creative endeavors throughout the years, many of which I’ve only recently started sharing with my other friends and the general public. They are people with whom I’ve had friendships that have lasted longer than many of my offline friendships. They are people who know my deepest, darkest secrets, thoughts, and fears, and are still by my side without any judgement of me and helping me grow, supporting me when I’m struggling.

They are real.

They are my friends.

They are real friends.

The Internet’s reach is expanding daily. It’s time to stop stigmatizing online friendships. Just because you never met someone offline doesn’t mean that they can’t be a real friend. Furthermore, with the expansion of Facebook, which connects you to your friends who have scattered all across the globe, the line between online friends and offline friends is blurring. Your best friend in elementary school now lives 3,000 miles away from you, and the only communication you now sustain is via Facebook, e-mail, and IM. All interaction between you and that friend offline/in person has ceased.

Is that friend not now an online friend?

You meet friends offline doing activities that interest both of you; you can now meet friends online through online communities centered around activities that interest both of you. You spend time with both doing what you like to do together.

What’s the difference?

I no longer feel a need to hide the fact that some of my friends are people that I’ve met online and only online. I have online friends; I’ve had an online relationship; my current relationship has been sustained via the Internet with brief meetings every few months for almost two years now.

I have online friends, and they are some of the best, real friends I could ever ask for.

So, I spent most of today fiddling with this WordPress blog and having the TV on in the background.  The Food Channel was on for an obnoxious amount of time, and then I switched to, I think, We TV, where there was, apparently, a Golden Girls marathon going on.  In the course of all this TV viewing, I caught a lot of commercials.  Most of these commercials were for household products (cleaning and cooking) and for baby products (diapers, formula, etc.).  And I noticed an interesting trend: The primary figures in the commercials are all women.

So I decided to do some really informal research to see if this was indeed the case.  I’m focusing on just cleaning commercials and baby product commercials; I can leave the cooking commercials for another time.  Anyway, I went on Youtube and pulled up a number of Swiffer commercials, which you can find under the “Read more…” cut.  Of the eight commercials that I’ve included, none of them have men in a position where they are actively cleaning; in fact, if men are even involved in the commercials at all, they’re on the side of the brooms, mops, feather dusters, etc. that are portrayed as being obsolete as compared to the Swiffer, meaning that they aren’t cleaning.  The only instance where I could find a male in the active role of cleaning was on the Swiffer website, which includes an advice section from Patrick Brown on how to maintain wood furniture (which can be found here).

Clorox Wipes commercials can be a little harder to decipher.  The ones featuring a new design don’t have people using the product; however, the narrator is female, and the hands that pull out the wipes are feminine.  The commercial featuring kids also doesn’t explicitly show a woman cleaning as a central role, although the viewer can make out a feminine form cleaning up.  Additionally, the mermaid commercial (which has awesome music, by the way) doesn’t show any cleaning, but, again, narration is with a female voice and the only characters in the commercial are girls and women.  The Greenworks and toothbrush commercial, though, fall more into the pattern of the usual cleaning product commercial and show a woman wiping away at a mess.

Even Mr. Clean commercials don’t have a man scrubbing away hard at any messes, despite the male mascot.  Both commercials that I found on Youtube followed pretty much the same formula as the ones above.  I won’t inundate you with more cleaning commercials; I think it’s fairly clear from the ones I’ve gathered and from your own experience that the vast majority of them hardly even contain men, nevermind men actually cleaning something.

There are some occasional exceptions to this, though.  I did find a Windex commercial where a man was wiping at a window.  But that’s about it.

Now, onto baby product commercials.  The majority of these kinds of commercials have a mother lovingly bonding with her infant.  I’m pretty tired of watching commercials at this point, so I’m just going to include a few commercials by Huggies.  A lot of them are actually not from the US (for some reason, a user on Youtube compiled a playlist of Huggies commercials, so I drew from there—I didn’t include videos where the only characters were babies, as they weren’t relevant).  The first three ads (Cantonese, American English, and the first ad in Spanish) included typical mother-infant bonding.  I was very surprised to see a dad at all in the ad from New Zealand, although the “bonding” in that video isn’t quite the intimate bonding that’s typical of other commercials; same for the second ad in Spanish.  I also found it interesting that the Huggies commercials in Spanish had a male narrator, which I don’t think I’ve noticed in American commercials.  I also did find one Huggies commercial—the most famous one, apparently—where it was a man trying to control a baby who was just peeing geysers.  (Not even kidding; check the videos section.)  While the main character was a guy—very surprising—the commercial was still done in a light, humorous tone, absent of intimate bonding.

It’s a bit difficult to find commercials for baby products on Youtube, as Youtube is more geared towards amusing commercials, and the baby commercials are fairly straightforward.  Maybe somebody who wants to do more in-depth research can go and scout out the commercials I’m thinking of, where the mom is blowing raspberries on the baby’s stomach or doing some other close bonding activity.

Am I surprised by any of these findings?  Hell no.  I feel that the American social structure is still very much grounded in predefined gender roles, and these commercials are just confirming that.

But am I disappointed?  Yes.  (The following comments are going to apply to the mainstream, heteronormative married/long-term cohabitating partnerships that are predominant in American culture and that these commercials appeal to.)  I’m disappointed that we don’t portray men cleaning in commercials and that these commercials reinforce the idea of cleaning and housework being the woman’s role when it could easily be shared between the spouses, especially when the trend nowadays is that men and women both work and both have equally as busy schedules; women don’t really have the time to devote to housekeeping 24/7, and, if both partners have tight schedules, then I’d find it only logical that the workload is shared equally.

I’m further disappointed that fathers aren’t portrayed as loving their children in the same way that mothers do.  Fathers are just as important as mothers, I feel, in the childrearing process, and fathers are just as capable of that kind of close, intimate love.  Reinforcing this idea that childrearing is women’s business seems, to me, to just distance fathers from the whole process when they’re actually integral.  And the same comments from the cleaning bit apply—mothers are starting to work more and to have tight schedules, and to expect a mom to both work a regular 9–5 job and spend hours upon hours caring for her kids (while the dad is just expected to work 9–5) seems to be demanding superhuman ability and to be unfair and unequal.  Why not show dads taking on some of that work and responsibility?

Why not portray to boys, teens, and men the image of men cleaning and caring for children as something normal and positive so that there’s less of a stigma on it?  (By which I mean, I’m sure there’s a segment of the male population that is very hesitant to do housework because they view it as the woman’s job and, therefore, a threat to their masculinity, should they be caught cleaning.)  Why not show men having healthy and positive relationships with infants and children instead of fostering this culture that says that a man in the company of children is immediately bad company, a pedophile?

Honestly, I see nothing but good coming out of having gender roles that are more lenient.  It would certainly be much more egalitarian, and it would really reduce a lot of stress on the woman’s behalf.  I really don’t see any real threats to masculinity or femininity from making gender roles less strict (and if a pair does want to stick to gender roles and it works for them and both parties are happy with the setup, then, by all means, go for it).

As I said, this was a really informal study that I did out of my own curiosity.  I’m not even properly citing the Youtube videos or anything, and Youtube’s not the best source, as it doesn’t catalogue all the commercials that are aired.  My commentary is just from my own speculation, and I don’t have much to ground it on, and it’s essentially an opinion.  But if anybody does have links to scholarly articles that have studied this, I’d definitely be interested in reading them.  Drop a link in the comments or something.

Thanks for reading this!  Click the “Read more…” link for links to the Youtube videos.

EDIT: My friend Sean has provided me with a link to a meta-analysis of a number of empirical studies on this exact topic: Eisend, Martin.  “A meta-analysis of gender roles in advertising.” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science Online First (2009): n. pag.  Web.  26 Nov. 2009.  <http://www.springerlink.com/content/k760037878221477/fulltext.html>  Thanks so much!  I’m excited to read it.

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