Poor you: Super Bowl ads featured henpecked males feeling a little too sorry for themselves

Henpecked men were a fave theme of Super Bowl ads

NEW YORK — So you’re a guy? Poor you!

You get slapped on your bottom at birth, then spend the rest of your life being shoved around by wives and girlfriends who make you mow the lawn, listen to their friends, return their phone calls, eat fruit at breakfast, shop for lingerie instead of watching the game, put your underwear in the basket and put the toilet seat down.

Such was the state of affairs between Mars and Venus depicted in some of this year’s Super Bowl ads. And in marked contrast to the fairytale that unfolded with the New Orleans Saints’ thrilling victory, what a sorry state it was.

In one ad, our hero was spineless. Literally. “As you can see, his girlfriend has removed his spine, rendering him incapable of watching the game,” the announcer said of the hapless Jason, lingerie-shopping with his girlfriend, a red bra slung over his shoulder. “C’mon, silly!” the girlfriend said, leading him along. The solution? A Flo TV mobile television, so Jason could watch the game while he considered cup sizes.

As went Jason’s life, so went the rest of the night. An ad for Dove skin cream portrayed, in song, a litany of life’s indignities for the male, from that first insulting slap on the buttocks in the birthing room through high school and on to parenthood, where witnessing childbirth makes you faint (because it’s SO painful for the man — but we digress) and life is a series of chores.

But with age came some self-actualizion, to a point. “Now that you’re comfortable with who you are, isn’t it time for comfortable skin?” the narrator asked.

The most striking in the henpecked male category, though, was a Dodge Charger ad, which featured a depressing view of a man’s life as he talked to his invisible partner, listing all the sacrifices and concessions he’d made.

“I will get up and walk the dog at 6:30,” the man said. “I will eat fruit with my breakfast. I will say yes when you want me to say yes. I will be quiet when you want me to say no. I will take your call. I will listen to your friends’ opinions of my friends. I will be civil to your mother. I will put the seat down. I will put my underwear in the basket.”

“And because I do this,” the man concluded, “I will drive the car I want to drive.”

“Charger,” the ad declared. “Man’s last stand.”

Geez. This champion complainer was almost enough to make Jay Leno and David Letterman seem mature — let’s ponder that for a moment — in their whiny promo for Letterman’s “Late Show,” where the two feuding TV stars had to be mothered by an exasperated Oprah Winfrey.

The whole thing was confounding for brand expert Kelly O’Keefe. “There sure were a lot of emasculated males last night,” says O’Keefe, managing director of the Brand Center at Virginia Commonwealth University. “It was loser night. A parade of people you just want to slap!”

Super Bowl ads have always sought to appeal to men, of course, and offering them a chance to vent, even subconsciously, about their perceived struggles is one way of doing that. But it’s a shortsighted tactic, says O’Keefe, because Super Bowl audiences are now just about evenly split between men and women.

But creative teams at ad agencies? They may not be evenly split, says O’Keefe. (Indeed, some of the ads might lead one to think they were created by Sterling Cooper, the fictional 1960s-era ad agency of “Mad Men.”)

But is there something deeper at play? O’Keefe and others speculate that in a troubled economy, these commercials are expressing a feeling many people have of losing control of the circumstances of their lives. That would also explain the unhappy-office-worker theme of a number of Sunday’s ads.

The downturn may also be reflected in the sense that people seek out slapstick humor and escapism in times of economic stress. And it may be more comforting for men sitting home on their couches eating chips to watch other men doing, well, the same thing. “These ads go overboard to appeal to the slobs on the couches,” quips Laura Ries, president of the Ries & Ries brand strategy firm in Atlanta.

But whatever the economic climate, Super Bowl ads have always gone for traditional sources of humor because they’re tried and true, and the Mars-Venus divide, specifically with the henpecked-male stereotype, is one of the most basic, notes Ries. And with so much money at stake — Super Bowl ads cost from $2.5 million to more than $3 million for 30 seconds this year — it’s hard to stray from what works.

Of course, not all Sunday’s ads fell into the category of henpecked males. One ad seen by many as hugely successful was Google’s first ever Super Bowl ad, which simply and deftly used its search technique to tell a charming story of love blooming in Paris.

O’Keefe thinks there will be a backlash against some of Sunday’s ads. “I don’t think we’ll be seeing as much of this next year,” he said. And already, some women’s groups were complaining.

Clare Giesen, executive director of the National Women’s Political Caucus, told the Politico Web site that she was “always surprised that Madison Avenue considers the old stereotype of bad, nagging women to be real a motivator for product purchase.”

Though it didn’t contain a nagging woman, some women were particularly offended by an ad for Bridgestone tires, in which a group of shady post-apocalyptic thugs stop a car and say, “Here’s the deal. Your Bridgestone tires, or your life.”

A woman is then kicked out of the car.

“I said life, not wife,” the ringleader says.

Luckily, it was a pleasure to watch the actual game and see not just a thrilling Super Bowl but, at the end, a scene to warm the heart of any woman (or evolved man): Saints quarterback Drew Brees, tears in his eyes, holding up his adorable one-year-old son, Baylen, kissing him, and saying something that looked very much like: “I love you, little man.”

It was enough to forget any silly images of spineless men being dragged around a lingerie store with red bras slung over their shoulders.