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Comment by jcoffland | Hacker News Reader

> So I just don't see the reason to paint a picture of a paternalistic conspiracy against women here. It's rather sensible marketing to a massive audience.

Yeah, but try turning it around.

"Easy. For you to explain… for him to use."

I doubt they would have used this language for a male product. Either way, it sounds terribly patronizing.

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There's an ad on British TV at the moment showing a woman saying to a man that she got him a gym membership and patting him on the belly as she says so. It's incredibly patronising and I can't ever imagine the same ad with gender roles reversed being allowed on TV.

How is that argument against what he said? He is talking about back then and you are talking about now.

But when we switched to speaking about contemporary ads, Uber has one where woman wonders "how come he is always on time and able to find any place in city"? So women are still in ads in position of stupid people.

>>How is that argument against what he said?

Because he said he doubts someone would make an ad where someone talks down to a man. So I gave an example of exactly this happening right now on British TV. This is not me saying that portraying women as stupid is ok - far from it. Just that there are ads which are equally patronizing towards men too.

Gotcha, I see the point now. Agreed, it is good to point out exaggerations and such.

> Because he said he doubts someone would make an ad where someone talks down to a man.

Well actually I didn't say that and I didn't know that all replies on HN were required to be arguments against but it does make sense now that I think about it.

There are a fair few ads like this although they're now supposed to be banned. Unfortunately the enforcement of advertising rules in this country is more reactive than proactive and I doubt most people would feel strongly enough to complain.

https://adage.com/article/global-news/u-k-bands-gender-stere...

(Personally I'd feel pretty petty submitting a complaint about such an ad and I have far better things to be doing with my time)

Advertisements depict men as bumbling idiots all the time.

In the UK (at least) this seems to now be banned

https://www.asa.org.uk/news/harmful-gender-stereotypes-in-ad...

Edit: Wording

That slogan was actually marketing the pill towards men in 1964, not women.

So what you're actually comparing is how marketers appealed to men in 1964 vs how they would in 2019.

Sure I agree that like many things in the 60s that ad was patronizing, probably toward both genders.

What is probably most interesting about that comparison in my opinion is that a birth control ad targeting men in 2019 would probably appeal to their desire to protect themselves, not their partners...

There's a ton of advertising done that way. It sucks.

Some of the other examples were advertisements to doctors. Would you still feel this way if that were the case on this one?

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