I have a confession to make. When I watched the Audi “green police” commercial, I was hoping that the man in the Audi – you know who I mean, the creep who made it through the ecofascist roadblock – would, shortly thereafter, swerve off the road, hit a tree, and cease to exist (hopefully in a ball of flame).

If you get all your information from the media (not that you should), there appear to be only a few versions of the male species left on our planet.

1. Dumb boors, a la your average beer commercial

2. Lost-at-sea dolts, a la your average banking commercial

3. Insipid metrosexuals, a la the Audi spot and, alas, countless others, ranging from designer coffee to credit cards to computers. (Especially computers – look at the Microsoft vs. Apple campaign; aren’t both guys, though in very different ways, losers?)

Now I yield to no man (sic) in my admiration for the feminist movement and the important social advances it has wrought. Having spent most of my career in the ad business, I have long since seen women rise to important positions. I am no male chauvinist, no throwback to the age of Don Draper (though seriously, now, isn’t he great?). Women’s lib? I’m in, okay?

But where did all the men go?

Why is it so necessary to portray men as either crude and stupid, or nice but clueless, or smart but gentle to the point of emasculate?

Mind you, this has been a trend that’s being going on for a long time – particularly in commercials. It must be thirty or more years ago that I saw “Harriet, the Ajax turned blue!” Anybody remember that one? It opens on a squeaky male voice shouting, “Harriet, the Ajax turned blue!” Then the husband appears on camera, wearing nothing but a bath towel. He explains, in a quavering voice, to his wife, Harriet, that he poured some Ajax cleanser on to the bath tub and…oh my God…it turned blue! Harriet, dressed so as to make the Pleasantville wife look like a slattern, gives the jerk an oh-so-condescending smile, and says, “Of course, dear, it’s the new formula blah blah blah.” Then she smiles – there, there, there, dear – and tells him to get dressed.

I immediately switched to Comet.

Now I’m not suggesting we convert back to a world in which life consisted of John Wayne giving one woman after another the vapors, but…

Well, wouldn’t John Wayne look good, once in a while, today?

How about John Wayne in Stagecoach?  How about John Wayne driving a stagecoach?
How about John Wayne driving it straight at that guy in the Audi?

I can dream…

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