The world is in a sorry state when it is not possible to flog a few teabags without insulting half the human race. I refer to the television advert for Lyons's "pyramid" teabags, the one with the man twittering on about "hydrodynamics" and the secret of the shape residing in the "geometric effect", while his female partner makes the tea and very sensibly points out that it's just that "more space gives it more flavour".
In the end, the man comes round to her way of thinking: more space gives the tea more flavour, he declares. "You're a genius", she says. Cue laughter and applause.
I assume the "point" of this "joke" is something like this: the man, incapable of boiling a kettle, is as ridiculous as he is incapable, while the woman, solid and sensible, makes the tea and gets to the heart of the matter.
The trouble is that it was mostly men who, for what it is worth, developed the tetrahedral teabag. (If you think this a minor achievement, let me tell you that Lyons's bumf reveals that "the 3D shape of the pyramid means that the tea within the bag has up to 50 per cent more room to move, more closely mirroring the brewing action of loose leaf tea in a teapot. Additionally, the bag floats just below the surface of the water rather than on the top, this speeds up the brewing process as the liquid can circulate inside the bag much faster. An independent view was obtained from the Imperial College in London, whose thermo fluid section carried out tests on the new shape alongside flat, square and round bags. Their tests confirmed that the brewing action which takes place inside the tetrahedral bag is much closer to that of loose leaf in a teapot.")
The "hook" used in this advert is a standard technique in about 30 to 40 per cent of television advertising: take a middle-aged, straight, white male, put him with a woman, any woman, and make him look stupid/ignorant/incompetent. If you can dress him in a ridiculous apron, so much the better.
Obviously, given that this technique is employed to sell everything from sausages to cars, it has been found to work. This tells us a lot about the advertisers, the "creative" minds behind the adverts and the people they seek to sell their products to. (A friend close to the industry points out that the vast majority of marketing managers in industry are women in their 30s.)
People in the industry, when they admit to having noticed the phenomenon at all, seek to argue that it is happening by way of counterbalancing an earlier type of advert which was offensive to women. But when challenged to name a television advert which insulted females as much as, say, the current SuperValu ad insults adult white males, they have no answer.
If you know the advert, forgive the blow-by-blow summary. Two women are sitting in the cafe of a SuperValu outlet, drinking coffee and eating cake. One is speaking on her mobile telephone to a man, clearly her husband/partner, and the father of her children. "It's not exactly a piece of cake here either," she smirks, as she shovels, yes, cake into her mouth.
Cut to adult straight white male in the midst of utter bedlam at home, surrounded by bawling children, clearly unable to cope. He says something which we are unable to hear. "I have my hands full here too, you know," replies the woman, grinning at her companion. The adult straight white male asks to be brought home a packet of razor blades, and the woman rings off. "Swivel-heads to you too," she says, and the two women collapse in paroxysms of mirth.
Imagine the ad with the gender roles reversed and, instead of "swivel-heads", insert some personal item related to female hygiene. Not nice? No, I didn't think you'd like it much, any more than you might like the corollary of the current advert for Renault cars featuring the charming lady with the steel tape measure and the slogan "Size Matters". It might well be worth submitting a few complaints about this kind of thing were it not for the fact that the relevant body, the Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland, appears to have an in-built blind spot with regard to sexism against males. The authority's rules about standards in advertising are very specific with regard to what is termed "sexism and stereotyping", but it does not appear to have occurred to anyone that these phenomena can work both ways.
The relevant section starts off promisingly enough: "Advertising should respect the principle of the equality of men and women and the dignity of all persons". But then it goes on: "Advertisements should recognise and reflect women's role in society and should avoid stereotyping". It is clear that "equality" in this context means "equality for women", with the virtual certainty that "stereotyping" will be evaluated from the same perspective.
There is a veneer of neutrality in the assertion that "Men and women perform and share household management and domestic tasks", but such injunctions, as the above-mentioned adverts show, have no practical effect.
When pinned down on the subject, advertising people offer two arguments by way of defence: one, that most of the "creative" people in advertising are men, to which the obvious answer is that quislings are not a new phenomenon; and two, that such portrayals of men have no effect. But if this is the case, why do people bother to advertise at all? Why should advertising be less effective in disseminating stereotypes than in promoting commercial messages?
Standards in advertising are, it is to be presumed, formulated for good reasons. For example, when the Code of the Advertising Standards Authority sets forth that advertising should respect the dignity of persons "vulnerable by reason of age or other condition or circumstance", it may be presumed that there are dangers attached to a failure to enforce such standards.
Similarly, when it says that advertising should not undermine the confidence of vulnerable persons, or that it should "avoid stereotyping or other insensitive approaches which could promote negative images or prove hurtful or distressing to such persons or their families", or that adverts should not subject such persons to "ridicule or offensive humour", it is reasonable to assume that if such things are not avoided, the consequences are likely to be inimical to human dignity or well-being.
We might all be able to laugh at ridiculous males were it not for the fact that we have a family law system in place which deprives children of the care and protection of their fathers as the end result of precisely the kind of stereotyping favoured by advertising agencies and their clients. We could all have a giggle at the adult straight white male were it not for the fact that young men on the verge of this condition are opting in ever-increasing numbers not to go on, a circumstance which almost certainly has much to do with the culture of denigration surrounding straight white manhood.