Superfail.

In celebration of what is arguably the most salient demonstration of the gendered popularity of athletics (I'm guessing the Superbowl had just a few more viewers than, say, the National Figure Skating Championships), I thought these two things were really interesting:

Groupon produced three "Save the Money" ads that have been massively unpopular, classified as offensive by news sources and the Twitterverse alike. Each ad "appealed" to a social issue- Tibetan social unrest, deforestation, and the plight of whales- before ultimately using it as a (strange, consumerist) joke. The Tibetan ad has been the most widely criticized, and environmentalists have denounced the irresponsibility of the Save-the-Whale-Fail. But the other ad was this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z206ipPhuFQ&feature=player_embedded

and, as you can see, it contains the themes of childish hairlessness we talked about in class the other day. This ad, contrastingly, has received very few specific criticisms, generating instead a delightful array of insightful YouTube comments like "I'd like to wax her bush" and "Who WOULDN'T find this funny?"

I feel like it speaks to people's total immersion in misogynist ideals that their unshakable belief in hair removal, and the presence of a pretty woman, is enough to prevent them from noticing that the ad is every bit as flippant as the others. Are female grooming expectations so "right" that their questionable ad is no longer wrong?

And here, I don't even know where to start...

http://theweek.com/section/cartoon/0/211862/all-cartoons