Quiz 2 "Patriarchy Gets Funky"

With the beginning of the 20^th century came extreme movements concerning race, gender and sexuality. This could largely be seen in advertisements of corporations such as Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, Benetton, the Gap and Diesel (Klein 112).

Klein mentions how the Gen-Xers compared to the boomers, who valued individualism, valued ‘diversity as a key fact of life’ (Klein 111). The Gen-Xers believe that if the typecast images and loaded languages changed in magazines, in books and on television that they would hopefully change in reality too. Corporations caught up on this and so started to portray racial, gender and sexual statements in their adds.

I will be showing two videos below that are clearly representing what Klein mentions about the portrayal of racial, gender and sexuality statements that are shown within their adds.

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The above add portrays a chocolate M&M and a pretzel. As they continue to talk about putting the pretzel inside the chocolate their statements are clearly representing the idea of sex. As the M&M states at the beginning of the add, “I don’t care if I am the new official spokes candy for the new pretzel M&M’s, there is no way that you are putting a GIANT pretzel inside me. The pretzel then replies and says, “Listen buddy I’m not too thrilled about this either. Next the commercial transitions to the M&M looking inside him with x-ray vision. The camera transitions back to an image of both the pretzel and the M&M’s back facing the camera. As they are both looking at the paper showing an arrow from the pretzel to the M&M, the pretzel cracks his fingers and says, “Alright lets just get this over with”. This commercial represents not only the portrayal of different races through the portrayal of a “pretzel” and “chocolate”, it also represents the gender and sexuality that is being played out through their statements made back and forth between one another, each referring to the idea of putting this GIANT object inside the chocolate M&M.

The above add of the PSP advertisement opens up with a love song playing in the background about “carrying our love together” as it fades in the background the camera shows a male going to the bathroom and another one walking in. The male that walks in goes up to the stall next to the other male. As the other male looks over at the male who just walked in he says, “Can I play with it…. when you are done?” the male just smirks back at him and the other male rolls his eyes and walks away. The commercial finishes singing “just you and I” and flashes to an image of the PSP that reads, “Love at First Sight”.

Although the PSP add is very similar to the M&M add it is also very different. The PSP commercial is very similar to the M&M add with the way it uses sexual statements as well as gay gender to portray sexual ideas for the viewer. However it is different from the M&M add with how it connects both gender and sexuality together along with music. This add uses music and language to make its connection with gay gender and sexuality, whereas the M&M’s commercial does not use any music. PSP implements love music with their add to help create an overall connection of the PSP and the experience of, “Love at first sight.” Making connections between the music, images and language with this add represents what Klein discusses about images, music, and loaded languages that are structured in a way we can recognize the coding.