A local Burlington organization (I’ll leave names out of it, as it is not my intent to embarrass or harangue, merely to point out an instance of a sadly all-too-commonplace phenomenon) recently ran a radio ad, the “punchline” of which is a little boy telling his dad that “you throw like a girl.” The “joke” is that his dad is a poor athlete. You know, like all girls are.

[Insert sarcastic tone while reading.]
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You’d think that it would take a massive amount of hubris to demean an entire gender and think that nothing bad will come of it. But this sort of thing has become so acceptable that it unthinkingly ends up in a family-centered ad. How does this happen? Imagine, for instance, an ad that made a “joke” like “you throw like a Jew.” Apart from being a strange sort of non-sequitur, wouldn’t that phrase make you at the very least uncomfortable, if not angry? And yet “you throw like a girl,” in our culture, is perfectly (and unfortunately) acceptable as a humorous remark by most standards.

Women: Media Hate You

In these overall decreasingly derogatory times, ads featuring blatant racism or other broadly demeaning tactics are thankfully rare. (Of course, election season is fast approaching in the U.S., bringing with it an undoubtedly full complement of hate-filled TV spots; but at least the hate there is focused generally by politicians on other politicians. I’m personally okay with that sort of hate.) And yet ridicule by feminization is still a mainstay in our culture and media.

I challenge you to keep count during an evening of television-watching of how many times a character uses feminization to ridicule another character. Keep your ear tuned for phrases such as “cry like a little girl” (it’s never “cry like a little boy”, of course), or a joke about a weak male character who should “take off his dress”, or some offhand remark about someone being a “girly man”. Once you start paying attention to these sorts of comments, you’ll be struck by them many times a day. And after a few days of being struck by them, hopefully you’ll grow tired of hearing them. And hopefully if enough of us grow tired of hearing them, they will fade from our vernacular.

Marketing Without the Hatred

At Marketing Partners, we do our utmost to steer clear of serving companies that promote socially irresponsible values. But, though laudable, that’s really in a way the easy part of a mission of socially responsible marketing. The more difficult task is to steer clear of using socially ingrained and somehow acceptable evils like the “you throw like a girl” turn of phrase. Using phrases that ridicule by feminization, even in the service of marketing a good cause or company, is no less evil than marketing an evil company by using laudable phrases, even if your intentions are good.

There’s a practical reason, also, for avoiding ridicule by feminization. No matter what the social acceptability of a derogatory phrase, and no matter your personal tastes on such matters, a derogatory phrase is, well, derogatory. The organization that ran the “throw like a girl” ad ran the obvious and easily avoidable risk of alienating (and more than alienating, insulting) half of their potential business. Besides being bad for society, that’s just bad business.

Angry Rottweiler