Mr Jender sent me a link to this stunningly blatant sexist coffee commercial (message: make your man Folger’s or he’ll withdraw his affection and pay too much attention to the ‘girls’ in the office):
And I started wondering how far we’ve REALLY come. Sure, you’d never see a commercial like that, which is good. But now think about the way that many pundits blamed Elliot Spitzer’s wife for the fact that he was hiring prostitutes– obviously she wasn’t making him feel “like a hero”, so of course his loyalties wandered. (And, like any hero, he wanted unprotected sex with prostitutes.) It’s not all about coffee now (and if it was, it surely wouldn’t be Folgers Crystals!), but what the husband does is still the wife’s fault.
It also happens in the workplace!
What a great parallel-not to mention too, that in each scenario the woman/women are ‘properly’ fulfilling the female role–the “office girls” making coffee (which is clearly better than the kind ‘the wife’ makes) vs. the sex from the prostitute that was ‘better’ than what ‘the wife’ gave–think of all the articles written that spoke of all the sex stuff the prostitute would do for Spitzer that his wife ‘wouldn’t’ (and do we actually know she wouldn’t? I think that’s just what’s assumed), not to mention one article I read that argued that prostitutes are better at sex (b/c doing it more I suppose makes you better at it?) so who would blame a man for hiring one!
It gives the idea that the ‘function’ women provide is ‘interchangeable’