We get a little further from perfection each year on the road

As a teenager, I had a habit of pretending that I didn't like talking about gender issues, sexism, or feminism. In reality, that was a huge lie. Just as most football players enjoy talking about sports and most English majors love disparaging Twilight as literary poison, I believe that most women are interested in thinking and talking about their own place in the world, and that includes me. My adolescent self avoided the subject merely out of fear that I'd sound cliche or ill-informed. (Naturally, by avoiding this one topic, I succeeded in being an otherwise utterly original and omniscient teen.)

Now that I'm older (and legitimately a bit better-informed), I'm still conscious of being "that female who always talks about being female," and I become concerned about ignoring equally pressing issues like race or poverty--but I'm less likely to let it stop me from talking. At this point I prefer to operate under the assumption that if I find something interesting, maybe other people will, too.

You can probably see where this is going.

Today GR showed me an article from The Atlantic entitled "Are TV Ads Getting More Sexist?" He and I have had several conversations over the last few years on the very topic of sexism and commercials, so the headline immediately interested both of us.

In the article, Presumed-Feminist and Man-Author Derek Thompson declares it his mission to uncover how sexism in advertising has "changed its tone in the last 50 years" in response to feminist action. He describes the "jaw-dropping" and "heinous" sexism present in commercials from the 1950s, and notes that things got better in the 1970s thanks to the woman's liberation movement. In fact, women and men are pretty much equals now. But in the last decade, Thompson sighs, we've backslid in terms of commercial representations. He cites 9/11 (which resulted in a "machoization of American culture") and the recent recession (which "emasculated" men by depriving them of their ability to support their families) as events that incited a recent upsurge of sexism in advertising.

Unlike racism, Thompson says, sexism in mainstream media can still be seen as funny, which goes a long way to explain why it's still abundant. He identifies two types of contemporary sexism--"Winking Sexism" and "Boomerang Sexism"--and provides a thoughtful and enlightening analysis for how current commercials use each to get away with funny-sexist advertising. Current ads, like Bud Light's "Yoga" commercial and Flo TV's "Spineless" commercial, are rightfully highlighted as some of the worst offenders. Finally, Thompson draws three conclusions: 1) advertisers knowingly utilize sexism, 2) commercials have become increasingly concerned with masculinity, 3) but still, it has gotten better since the 1950s (which makes sense, given that women have overcome "marginalization" and "achieved parity in the labor force" since then).

Thompson's article leaves a bad taste in my mouth--which is sad, because I believe that he's trying so hard to present a pro-feminist perspective. When so many male writers are busy complaining that video games have all but literally castrated millennial men (and that it's the worst crisis ever), I feel like I should be grateful that Thompson is tackling this subject at all, that he attends to how the media portrays women. But what I want is a real feminist attitude, not just a writer who knows how to use his feminist goggles. I've read a lot of articles by people like Thompson, who seem to be missing the critical point.

My red flag tends to go up at lines like this one:

"[Today's ads] are not the sexist ads of the 1950s. They don't portray women as second-class citizens, failures, or helpless victims of male superiority. Having lost the argument that women are incompetent, American advertising has had to settle on the argument that women are attractive. The latter point certainly stands up to scrutiny better than its alternative."

This statement is incredibly troubling to me, because the contemporary ads to which Thompson refers are ones that depict women as either sex objects or shallow, gibbering, shopaholics. They present women as brainless annoyances that wise, patient men learn to endure, like sexualized monks. Sure, we would no longer see a man berating a woman for making a bad sandwich in a commercial for Subway, but we do see a man bravely announcing that he will suffer through listening to his wife have a conversation with her friends (and will bear the brunt of whatever psychological damage ensues) in a commercial for Dodge.

Thompson wants us to believe that such commercials "don't portray women as second-class citizens." That they don't promote "male superiority." That they don't label women as "incompetent." Did we watch the same commercials? Is "being so insufferable that hearing us talk requires Herculean strength" somehow demonstrative of competence?

Thompson's halfway-feminist argument doesn't cut it. We shouldn't be calling it a "victory" that ads haven't gotten "more sexist." We should be demanding that commercials be devoid of sexism. We shouldn't be pointing out, as he does, that "more women than men [are] in the workforce" and use it as convincing evidence that women and men have "achieved parity." We should pay attention to the fact that only 18 of the 500 companies on the Fortune 500 list have female CEOs. It's not acceptable to acknowledge that sexism exists in advertising, as if in a vacuum, and deny that it exists anywhere else.

I don't want to be too hard on Thompson here. I welcome him as a fellow feminist-in-training and am glad that he's raising these issues. But even as articles like this one work to raise consciousness about sexism in the media, they subtly confirm the fallacy that real-life sexism has been vanquished--an illusion that, like my teenage belief in my own omniscience, is just as tantalizing as it is false.