Berlin Has Banned Advertising That Includes Sexy Women or Smart Men
Source – The left wing government in Berlin is planning to roll out a citywide ban on “sexist” billboards, prohibiting firms from portraying women as “nurturing” or happy to do housework. …
A long list of criteria lays out material the leftist parties deem unacceptable such as adverts which portray women as being “sexual commodities”. Guidelines stating adverts in which female models are “barely dressed and smiling without reason while a man is comfortably clothed” are deemed to send out a message that “the sexes are not equal”.
The ban will also put a stop to billboards the jury believes would reinforce stereotypes. These include depictions of women as “nurturing, happy to do housework, beautiful, addicted to shopping” or men as “rational, aggressive, technologically gifted”, according to official documents concerning the ban.
Advertisements featuring children will also be affected by the crackdown on the “standardisation of gender roles”, the guidelines asserting that boys have been “stereotyped” as “liking sports, the colour blue, and playing with technology”. …
“When girls and women see images of heterosexual housewives, the consequence is that they cannot ‘imagine themselves outside this framework’,” the Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain district office’s homepage reads.
I suppose I should be apoplectic about this. Because it’s exactly the kind of wrongheaded, micromanaging, social engineering that treats adults like infants and governments have no legitimate business sticking their buttinski noses into other than to make themselves feel good. But in this particular instance, I’m not even mad. Because there’s another factor at play here. For lack of a better term, I’ll call it The Doctrine of At Least You’re Trying.
If there’s a city anywhere in the world that deserves a little slack for trying to dial back stereotypes in advertising, isn’t it Berlin? If you read “Unbroken,” you’ll remember the part about how after the 1936 Olympics, Ernie Zamperini stuck around town for a couple of days as a tourist. Which was just long enough for him to see all the signs come back out reminding Jews they weren’t welcome and the time for playing nice while the rest of the world was around was pretty much over. Hell, they used to put out the 1930s version of YouTube “How To” videos demonstrating the proper way to draw a Jew. Beginning with drawing a “6” and that’s his nose. I’m not making this up.
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From a historic/sociological point of view, that was like yesterday. Assuming the people who passed this law are my age, some of their parents were teenagers when this was going down. So it’s a little like getting Dan Snyder to change “Redskins.” You don’t have to agree with it. It won’t accomplish a damned thing. You’re not going to make women stop being nuturing (don’t know why you would), men to quit being aggressive and being attracted to attractive women (good luck with that) or generations of German boys to abandon soccer by tweaking billboards. But good job, good effort I guess.
With all that out of the way, this brings up something I’ve been saying for years. And that is, what if American men were really the assholes TV commercials make us out to be. When we’re not diving out of windows over beer, we’re jerking each other off over junk food at the drive through or breaking into an old lady’s house because she doesn’t have home security. I mean, I’m not mad about it. But after your typical NFL Sunday, if I sit through even half the ads I wonder how we managed to survive long enough to win wars, tame the wilderness, build railroads and get to the moon. The only difference is, I don’t demand the government make it stop. But then, Ich bin not ein Berliner.