Twitter Talks Back to Sexist Super Bowl Ads

Fiat's "Seduction" drags out a tired car commercial cliché: automobile = sexy woman.

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The Super Bowl is more than a game—it’s a chance to see some of the most expensive, over-hyped, and, yes, sexist commercials on television. But not everyone cheers when bikini-clad women fawn over nerdy office workers. This year, when advertisers used stereotypes and sex to hawk cars, flowers, and candy, viewers came up with a Twitter hashtag to broadcast their disgust: #NotBuyingIt.

According to Miss Representation, the organization that launched the hashtag, women make up about half of the Super Bowl’s audience and they’re more likely than men to tune in for the ads, rather than the game. Miss Representation notes that while they wield more household purchasing power than their male partners, 90 percent of women think advertisers don’t understand them. Super Bowl ads do an especially good job of missing the point by acting as though dudes are the only ones watching.

Thankfully, Twitter provides a place to talk back. Jenn Pozner, founder and executive director of Women In Media & News and author of Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV, says social media has “really changed the game” when it comes to challenging sexist advertising. “Last night, feminist media critics with a combined reach of literally hundreds of thousands replaced ‘mindless entertainment’ with active sharing of critical feedback and commentary,” she told me.

Shelby Knox, women’s rights organizer at Change.org, urged pissed-off viewers to create an online petition to take it beyond the Twitter-verse. “If enough voices object to an ad, then its makers will get the message that it’s not welcome on TV and it didn’t resonate with consumers,” she wrote on the site. The five ads below managed to outrage a lot of tweeps who are totally #NotBuyingIt.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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