I watched the clip of the fantasy heterosexual marriage in which a bride keeps running into physical obstacles as she attempts to follow her father down the aisle where her beaming husband-to-be awaits. The columnist asks whether the feminist-minded should see this ad as 1) a satire 2) a call for assimilation into (white)* hetero-normativity. One commenter claimed that "when messages are constructed to appeal to certain demographics, that it creates constricting identity categories for the people it purports to target and that in itself, the message is a form of structural violence."
After reading this heavily structured partial sentence a few times, I still had to ask myself: structural violence? Then you have to go through your head all those definitions for the individual and combination of that phrase...exhausting. I'd rather look at it from the other end. What's so bad in the ad?
I'm all for fluidity. I'm all for meeting your audience where they are. I'm all about flipping the white heterosexual patriarchal structure on its head (is there a quicker way to say all that yet?-if we made it easier to say, maybe it would be easier to do?).
Side note: I'm often (maybe just sometimes) criticized by my girlfriend for not being entirely sensitive to the gender dynamics and implications in all situations.
The ad doesn't make the average straighty-one-eighty look away. The woman and her dress is beautiful, the music stirring, the suspense mounting as she approaches the groom.
That is until a killer tag-team composed of a tackling flower girl and a senior citizen woman with a cane brutally take her down feet away from the altar. The wedding party even keeps the would be new guardian of her chastity from helping her up.
Luckily for most same-sex couples, marriage prevention begins much earlier than the actual wedding procession, and such horrible scenes are avoided. If anyone should be angry about anything, maybe it should be the horrible metaphors for the obstacles that same-sex couples face as they navigate a U.S. of A. of states with their own defense of marriage legislations, e.g. stepping through a crowded parking lot.
What would be the ideal ad? A dyke wedding? A tranny in a white dress? (Options offered by other feministing-ers.) A wedding that completely rejects the entire heterosexual paradigm represented by the ad in present form? I think it would be wrong to even say what that is. Isn't that what rejecting paradigms is all about? Not inserting ones, but leaving room for imagination?
Instead, if ad-makers really wanted to pull the heart strings of the 'intended' demographic (heterosexual and indifferent), they should display the first say 25 to 30 years of a 'normal' heterosexual's journey of sexual discovery and having parents, the church, friends, teachers, politicians, and the media telling him or her "NO, THAT'S WRONG!!!!!" every step of the way.
But I think we can all agree that that would just be seen as wrong. (Straight people, much like white people, don't like to have their attention called to any form oppression, lest they must entertain the idea that they themselves are participating in it. Oh dear!)
In other words, I think it would be hard to construct the 'perfect' commercial.
Instead, I say, why don't we just take what we can get? We can all nitpick the faults, but at least there's a commercial on t.v. telling (and showing) straight people to give a flip about 'the gays.' Right on.
*The family actual appears to be 'brown.' I say 'brown' because I don't know if Hispanic would be a fair assumption to make on someone based on skin color. Or maybe just because they were really just Spanish and I didn't know.
No comments:
Post a Comment