A sense of humor
I’ve been watching with some interest the comments on this post from Sociological Images. With just an embedded video of a Superbowl ad and two sentences of summary, they seem to have triggered some real anger from their readers. One vowed never to read the blog again. Why?
To some extent, this is what happens when a website gains popularity. Nearly every post on the Photoshop Disasters blog is covered with comments crying foul (“That’s not a disaster! Women really do look like that!” and so on). Everyone’s a critic. Occasionally there is the case of a shirt sleeve blending in with the wallpaper and leaving what looks at first like a hand without an owner, but that is very rare. Now that Sociological Images is gaining a larger readership, beyond the professors looking for examples to show their classes during lecture, they have to contend with this sort of thing. “That’s not sexism!” they say, or “That’s not racism!” In other words, that’s not representative of a sociological phenomenon. It’s just a funny joke; why don’t you have a sense of humor?
These people are missing the entire point. I suspect it’s because they’re reading Sociological Images for things that are shocking and outrageous, or at least good for a laugh. Their goals aren’t intellectual ones. If they were, they’d realize that commercials like this one are examples of jokes that fall inside the set of what our society considers acceptable. That makes it worth studying. Obviously there are differences between men and women (or between any two groups within society, but I’ll stick with men and women for now). Which differences that we perceive are real, and which ones are made up? Which ones are okay to talk about, and which ones are taboo? Which ones can be made into jokes? That’s what this ad demonstrates.
Pointing out that this ad is humorous to you is a particularly ineffective tactic, since that’s exactly why it’s there. It’s pretty indisputably based on a common stereotype (nagging wives). There are enough people out there who think that this stereotype is realistic and amusing to make it profitable to write an advertisement catering to their mindset. In other words, if it wasn’t funny to anyone, it wouldn’t be an ad. Sociologists then ask: why is it funny? And sometimes: is it fair that it is funny?
I hope that some professors writing at or reading Sociological Images use the comment threads as part of their lectures, too. Now that more readers there are simply people going online to look at something interesting, without a particular academic goal in mind, they’re collecting people’s uninhibited reactions to the images posted. There’s certainly a lot of material ripe for sociological analysis.
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