Monday, January 11, 1999

Spit-on-men the new media game

Candis Mclean
Alberta Report

To explain the preponderance of divorces filed by women; some blame the media for taking a toll on men's image over the past 40 years. Dagwood regressed to Homer Simpson, culminating in today's advertising which often reduces men to male bimbos. "My wife recently pointed out a billboard that made her angry," reports Michael Brady, Acting Research Director for Human Life International Canada. "It showed a mother, dog, kids and a case of cola in a boat, motoring away from shore, leaving dad behind. The slogan was, 'There's nothing more important than X cola.' Others point to television commercials such as the Eaton's man chained to the stove, or a woman saying, "I have two kids-three, counting my husband." A cosmetics company announces that its product was "not tested on animals, except men."

"Latent contempt for men has now given way to open hostility," writes Lysiane Gagnon in the September issue of EnRoute magazine. "Imagine the reaction," she says, "if a male journalist talked about women the way columnist Rosie DiManno talked about men recently in the Toronto Star. "Men are from another planet, sent here by spaceships to copulate with female earthlings and propagate the speciesa task for which science has rendered them all but redundant. We need keep only a handful of donors on a sperm farm for that purpose, where they can subsist on pizza and beer and Playboy magazine ...Men think with their ding-a-lings and screw up with their brains.'"

Copyright © 1999 United Western Communications Ltd.
All Rights Reserved.