I didn’t watch the Super Bowl. I didn’t even watch the Puppy Bowl, which is what the kids were watching. I sat in the kitchen and ate so much hot spinach artichoke dip that I didn’t even have room for the main dish, which was bacon. Bacon, do you hear me?
Okay, I had a few pieces. But I didn’t have room!
Anyway, I guess I missed the main point of the Super Bowl, which was the commercials. Sounds like I didn’t miss much. I know that they’re often trashy and offensive, and everyone says they were also stupid and annoying this year. And . . . violent? Here’s what DoubleX Factor’s Marjorie Valbrun had to say:
Aside from being sexist, several ads . . . seemed surprisingly violent, including those focused on men. I had not watched a Super Bowl game in several years, so perhaps the level of violence is not that unusual to regular watchers. But they still seemed aggressively physical. . . Do the commercials really have to be just as physical as the game to hold our attention?
I have a really hard time seeing the problem with aggressively physical commercials aired during a game which is about trying to kill each other. I guess the bloggers just bored with being outraged about sexism, which I can understand — it must be exhausting, especially for poor, frail females! Tee hee.
In case you are not familiar with the Double X Blog, it’s from the liberal but contrarian Slate magazine, and has the montrsously inaccurate tagline, “What women really think.” This is kind of like a bag of salt having the tagline, “What slugs really want.” Nevertheless, I read the dreadful thing to keep in touch with the kind of women who (and this really happened once) see me coming down with the sidewalk with my kids and say, “Eek!” and run away.
Most of the writers are run-of-the-mill, perpetually outraged feminists. Amanda Marcotte stands out for her near-epileptic, flecks-of-spittle style of journalism, which recently and notably led her to blame pro-lifers for the grisly horrors committed by Kermit Gosnell. Even her fellow bloggers took her to task for that bizarre accusation. I can’t even worry too much about the damage she can do with that point of view, because you’d have to be so far down nutso creek to take her seriously, there’s no turning back.
Okay, fine, so back to the Super Bowl: the women didn’t like the violence, they didn’t like the sexism, they didn’t like the stupidity. But then the blogger had this to say:
It felt as if advertisers went for cheap laughs this year at the expense of imagination or wit. I almost expected the Marx Brothers to show up.
Ohhh, no.
No, no, no.
Humorless feminist, you have gone too far. The Marx Brothers signify a dearth of imagination and wit? What is this, backwards day?
I desperately hope she simply has never seen a Marx Brothers movie, and only knows that they’re those black-and-white guys in the window of Poster Barn at the mall. And this is a crying shame. If you look up “imagination and wit” in the dictionary, you will see a picture of Harpo Marx giving his leg to a blonde debutante. If you Google “imagination and wit, ” you will hear Groucho telling Margaret Dumont, “Those are my principles! And if you don’t like them . . . well, I have others.” And if it’s sexism you like, here’s Groucho as Captain Spaulding, the African Explorer: “We took some pictures of the native girls, but they weren’t developed yet. But we’re going back again in a couple of weeks!”
We’re doing our part to innoculate our kids against creeping radical feminism: we’re having a Marx Brothers festival. So far we’ve seen A Night at the Opera, Duck Soup, Horse Feathers, and even A Night in Casablanca, which was much funnier than I remembered.
Well, Marjorie Valbrun, why don’t you bore a hole in yourself and let the sap run out. Normal humans: what’s your favorite Marx Brothers line?
