If the 2023 Super Bowl goes down in history as the “Superwoke Bowl” or the “Supersexist Bowl,” it will have earned its title. Some examples:
An ad for the TV show “Friday Night SmackDown” opens with a young woman in an office approaching an unaware youngish man from behind. Although unprovoked, the woman smacks him down fiercely with a large wooden chair and then throws him on a table. Since he’s still moving, someone leaps off the balcony from the floor above and lands directly on him. Had someone at SmackDown even proposed an ad of a man virtually attacking a female office colleague, that person may well have been dismissed for the mere suggestion.
Michelob Ultra beer introduces us to the basic woke dichotomy. We’re taken to a golf course where an old white male competes against a young, beautiful black woman. His potbelly and disastrous shots inform us that his confidence is arrogance. In contrast, the beautiful black woman’s putt places her ball at the very edge of the cup, as if it’s yearning for just a breath of air to bring it home.
Voila! Michelob Ultra beer to the rescue. When opened, its freshness shakes the air, moving the golf ball just enough to sink the black woman’s putt. She’s a winner; the grey-haired, potbellied, arrogant old white man is a loser. It’s clear to the mostly male audience that Michelob Ultra is aligned with black women and not old, white men.
Could the problem be with those loser men that they’re still alive? If so, Google Pixel phones have a way of erasing white men completely. Google illustrates its phone’s capacity for erasing unwanted portions of a photo. We watch Amy Schumer relish the discovery that her new phone can erase all her exes. And what’s the name of this old flame? Erased. The ad’s sole portrayal of a guy erasing something is of a man erasing “This guy loves to fart” from his shirt.
The message? The only thing men need to erase is their own disgusting habits. In total, the ad illustrates the Google Pixel phone camera as erasing only three things: white men, strange dogs, and even one white boy.
How, though, do we erase white men who are frugal? An ad for a Wi-Fi company opens with a man and woman amorously cuddling up on a couch while watching a movie. As she looks desirously at him, the TV screen freezes and he exclaims, “Oh, no signal,” explaining, “I don’t have home internet.”
The woman’s amorous demeanor is suddenly replaced with worry: “No Wi-Fi is a red flag.” To affirm her suspicion that a Wi-Fi-less man is a loser, the camera refocuses on the wall, replete with pictures of the young man’s mother, who looks like her. The man exclaims, “Yeah, a couple of hotties!” He, still preoccupied with the Wi-Fi signal, asks from another room if she’s finally getting a good signal. She’s clear: “No, I’m not.” Although women now often out-earn men, the ad warns them to reject men with fewer resources. No Wi-Fi, no love. Erased.
Now to dads. Kia portrays an exhausted family with an infant finally arriving at a hotel to check in. But wait, dad has forgotten the infant’s pacifier, or binky. When informed, he’s seen as a hero for making a long trip home to get the infant’s binky. But the infant spits out the binky. Clueless dad got the wrong binky: the green one, not the blue one.
The message? Even a well-meaning dad just can’t get it right. Would Kia feature a female executive as well-meaning but so clueless that she can never get it right? Claiming that biology is women’s destiny is sexist; portraying biology as men’s destiny is woke.
The NFL itself asserted its wokeness in conscious and also, ironically, unconscious ways. On a conscious level, it let viewers know it plans to donate $500 million to community impact organizations. Good. On the unconsciously sexist level, it portrayed Mexican flag football star Diana Flores plus a black woman and a white woman playing flag football, with a banner heralding, “To the women pushing football forward, we can’t wait to see where you take this game.”
The woke part is the creation of a role in football for women. Good. The sexist part is portraying flag football as a female-only sport. The problem? The NFL has been successfully sponsoring flag football in hundreds of high schools as an alternative to concussions for both sexes. Flag football has about 90 percent of the brilliance of tackle football with only about 10 percent of the injuries.
In its ad, the NFL’s woke desire to support only women blinded it to the contribution it could have made by promoting flag football to millions of high school boys as a way to enjoy the benefits of the sport while damaging neither their bodies nor their minds.
Perhaps the deeper message, however, is the confidence of advertisers that, in a game watched by more men than women, men can be ridiculed and abused both physically and psychologically and that they'll respond by laughing at themselves and moving on.
Yes, men are the “game face” sex. But beware. We’re also the suicide sex.
