Mama love.

Anybody watched television lately?  I know a lot of you don't and hats off to you.  I have been struggling with whether we should get rid of the thing for ages.  My biggest complaint is not necessarily that much of what is presented as entertainment is truly boring but that commercials are so focused on making one feel inadequate (are my teeth bright enough? is my house clean enough?).  It's got to rub off over time.  It's got to wear you down.  And the only way we'll buy their crappy, unnecessary products is if we are needy.  So, so.

However, just recently, I have been noticing a trend toward treating mommy nicely.  Mommy Days and Mommy Appreciation and isn't mommy the BEST EVER.  Sounds nice, huh?

It's not.  It's so not.  It's actually a step backward.  The deification of the mother goes hand in hand with dumping on her.  Back in the day when women stayed at home and men went out to work, Mommy was a Saint but, also, at the absolute bottom of the pecking order.  Her status as martyr (and who really wants that?) was her only reward.  And this is, apparently, is what we're going back to despite some great strides forward. 

Women still tend to get paid less for a full day's work, then come home and do the lion's share of the work around the house.  No wonder all those irritating and insulting cleaning product ads are directed at women.  The only positive thing these ads do is inspire debate and discussion in our house.  Why, oh why, are these ads NOT directed at least half the time at men? Well, women are, on average, doing 70% of the housework.  I know lots of families in which this is not true.  Lots.  But 70% is a national figure and anecdotal evidence cannot apply. 

But it brings us back to the television.  Cleaning product ads are directed at women because women are currently in charge of most of the household chores whether they are working or not.   We may or may not want that statistic to change but the messages we are getting dozens of times a night every night is that women do the housework and they are saints for it.  Huh?  If that is sainthood, you can keep it.

Companies selling cleaning products do not care about social righteousness nor fairness.  They do not care if we move forward as a culture.  Or that we are trying to create a society in which all folks are sharing the load and have a chance to work at what they do best.  Nope.  They want to sell disposable dusters (those aren't cheap, by the way!).  That's all they care about is selling disposable dusters. And they are going to try to appeal to the largest percentage of folks who do the cleaning in order to sell lots and lots of dusters.  They care about the 70%.

We let advertising dominate our livingrooms every day, our precious family time.  Our televisions, the modern day campfire.  But stories told around campfires used to be entertaining and often edifying, often helping us imagine a better way to live.  Television ads cannot tell us where we are going; what we are capable of; it cannot support our goals and aspirations.  Television can only reflect back to us what we are because somebody has analysed the data as has built a whole marketing campaign around it.  

And these messages and images are shaping the ideas, feelings, and opinions of a generation coming forward.  Adveritising messages are the ones that get repeated over and over and over.  These are the messages that are driven home.  The ideas in the shows are secondary, really, to the irritating ads that tell us the same thing over and over and over again.  I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation is more sexist than this one.  Not surprised at all.  And on all the other issues?  Over materialism, too many cars...?   I expect a lot of that will get worse.  Because, as everybody knows, we are not perfect beings.  What we see over and over and over again, we start to repeat.  We start to think it.

I am happy to report that, in our family, we all muck in on cleaning day.  And I am hoping that my husband's example will, eventually, be a stronger example than all the advertising in the world for my sweet daughter.    But it doesn't clear up my basic feeling that advertising execs should stop deifying me and pick up a bloody broom.  Or a disposable duster, for that matter.