So, I was surfing around this hot new feminist gaming blog, New Game Plus, which lead me to a link to Game Politics but before I actually could read any of the content, I was confronted by the above ad.
Two obviously female lips, pressed up against each other, with the male-fantasy threesome buzzword “times two”. Excellent. The 3 in “3D gaming” doesn’t look so innocuous to me, either, given the context and the fact that gaming marketing is still largely aimed at adolescent males who are seen as being slaves to their overwhelming hormones.
This ad truly disugsts me, although it sadly doesn’t surprise me. My mother bought one of Alienware’s gaming PCs, for crying out loud! This shit demeans her, it demeans me, and it demeans women and men everywhere – gamers or not.
I find it hilarious. Using something that gamer-stereotype males will likely never have a chance to experience makes a great “gab at the hindbrain” method of advertising — associate something you want to sell with something people want, and even if the thing you’re sellig has nothing to do with what they want, they’ll buy anyway. On the one hand, “Look! You too can have two girls!” On the other hand, all it takes is a picture of two women’s mouths near one another to make gamers buy overpriced hardware. Then again, I don’t look at it from a feminist standpoint so much as from an “I love a good joke even if it’s sadistic” standpoint.
I like looking at the different kinds of ways people try to manipulate one another. You’ve got to appreciate the psychology behind it, even if capitalizing on that psychology perpetuates damaging perceptions of the sexes.
Jeez, I dunno, Darth, it doesn’t seem clever enough to qualify for “clever but evil” status.
Of course, it’s not really all that different from beer ads or car ads or whatever miserable sexist advertisement you happen to stumble across. Advertising is evil almost 100% of the time, and even when it’s not engaging in sexism/racism/other offensive isms, it still exists primarily as a manipulative tool to encourage gross overconsumption and runaway capitalism.
And besides, Alienware sucks anyhow. Roll your own PC or go Mac. Or, even better, do both.
Myca: I think advertising has to appeal to emotions, because the appeal to emotion rather than logic works much faster, and when you have short ad slots, you don’t have time to recite an essay of the virtues of your product. You can’t afford to not be “evil,” as you put it, because…well, most people don’t have the time to read a balanced and fair essay on a product they’re not even sure they want. People who read consumer reports are people who have already decided they want to buy something, and are not sure which brand they want; the appeal to emotion from a “punchy” ad is lost on them.
I guess so.