Need I Remind You That It's 2010?

Need I remind you that the year is 2010? It's not 1952, it's not 1950-anything. It's 2010. So why do cleaning commercials--all of them--use the same visual material as was used in the 1950's? The beautiful women we see in commercials today, who are so rabid to get the stains out of their husbands' shirts and ties, who are so accommodating of the disastrous messes made by their lawless children, look and behave almost identically to their more-than-half-a-century-ago counterparts. The same placid smile, the same trim figure, the same cheerfully-exasperated shake of the head as her husband comes in with a new domestic clean-up job (him shrugging in a dopey way, grinning sheepishly), or as her children stampede through her sparkling living room in full soccer gear, covered with mud. The only thing that's changed is the wardrobe. ("Moms" in commercials don't wear dresses anymore after all--that would be too obvious.)

This is a problem. For so many reasons.

Most are obvious, and I will skim through them. The main problem here is the fact that, in the year 2010, women are still considered synonymous with domesticity. Despite the fact that the numbers of stay-at-home-dads and career-women are higher than ever before, Clorox and company still want us to think that women are queen of one thing only....the domicile.

Also, to bat for the men, it implies that men are utterly incapable of taking care of themselves. This implication is a double-edged sword: it skewers women by placing them in the eternal role of caretaker and mother (even to their husbands), and it characterizes men as little more than big, dumb, dirty babies. Lose-lose, right?

Additionally, these commercials are problematic in the way that they not only characterize women's roles, but women's behavior. Some (me) would call this hegemonic, but I'll keep it simple since I said I'd skim. This characterization of housewives (aka women as a whole) presents women as passive, placid, emotionless fembots who exist only to clean up after their husbands and children. It provides an illusion of power--the "super-mom" motif, you know what I'm talking about: super-mom coming to the "rescue" of her kitchen counter with the help of Brawny paper towels (her male leader....sorry, had to say it)--while also implying that the only place where women are powerful is the home.

But that's all obvious. Or it should be. The real reason these cleaning commercials and their stark similarity to 1950's commercials are so problematic is this:

If any other group of people--Blacks, Jews, Latinos, etc.--were subject to the same representation in the media as they were 60 years ago, there would be public outcry. The racist (that is, blatantly racist, because we all know most commercials depicting minorities often still have racially offensive elements) depiction of Black people, for example, has been forced to shift out of social necessity. It is unacceptable for commercials to depict Blacks using stereotypical language, dressed in stereotypical garb, etc.

Long story short, if any group were depicted now, in 2010, as they were in 1950, there would be a outcry, bans, boycotts. Yet in today's commercials, women are shown delivering almost identical lines with almost identical facial expressions, performing identical tasks, as they were in commercials 60 years ago. And I rarely hear a peep. The neglect of the stereotyping of women in America is an outrage: it shows not only a lack of awareness of female issues, but a lack of concern.

To quote a friend of mine, a college student named Julia: "They might as well just cut their costs and start showing commercials from the 50s and 60s. It's the same godd**m thing."