{"id":610,"date":"2008-04-09T08:32:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-09T13:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2008\/04\/09\/real-mens-cars-are-mean\/"},"modified":"2009-11-28T19:36:11","modified_gmt":"2009-11-29T00:36:11","slug":"real-mens-cars-are-mean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2008\/04\/09\/real-mens-cars-are-mean\/","title":{"rendered":"Real Men\u2019s Cars Are Mean"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

The last line says, “Then we engineered in a mean streak a mile wide.” Can you imagine such a marketing campaign for a Honda Civic or a VW Passat? This is a man’s car–it takes up more space, and it’s mean–characteristics we allow (some) men, but not women, to have.<\/p>\n

Note: I like the commenters’ points that this intersects with class more (as well?)–see the comments. They did a better job with the analysis on this one than me.<\/p>\n

NEW<\/span>:<\/p>\n

This ad (found here<\/a>) plays up the fact that some cars are designed to look “mean,” so the Jaguar is actually afraid of the BMW:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Compare the ads above to these two that link a car and beauty. The first one seems to be portraying the car as a beautiful but bossy woman (“…can tell you exactly what to do”):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s an interesting contrast–these three cars all look very similar, and yet one is mean\/masculine and the other two are beautiful\/feminine. I like to show comparisons like these in class to make it clear to students that advertisers have many different motifs and meanings to draw from when creating marketing strategies, and that the ones they pick are just that–CHOICES among many, many different ways you could advertise a product, none of which are necessarily more “obvious” or “natural” than others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The last line says, “Then we engineered in a mean streak a mile wide.” Can you imagine such a marketing campaign for a Honda Civic or a VW Passat? This is a man’s car–it takes up more space, and it’s mean–characteristics we allow (some) men, but not women, to have. Note: I like the commenters’ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[55,2087,221],"class_list":["post-610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gender","tag-gender-masculinity","tag-cars"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16926,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610\/revisions\/16926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}