new thread
Hi,
I was really upset to see a male chauvinist ad on TV.
The company whose concerned (Mauritius Commercial Bank) depicts a (short-f******-haired) guy whose is speaking on the phone to his foreign girlfriend, who happens to be a pretty blonde girl. Apparently something goes wrong and he ends up looking for her at the airport.
Suddenly he sees her (by the back) and when he goes to talk to her...surprise it`s a blonde long haired guy (effeminate) with the mustache.
Here in Mauritius, they depict long haired men as being automatically effeminate.
This attitude enrages especially when you know that those who depict us like that, are totally stupid. It`s a long story but Mauritius aint no utopia.
Dude, I sent you an email through your site about this problem. Hang in man. Josh
The simple minded, who have been taught by their communities not to use critical thinking skills, need simple and biased examples to re-enforce their simplified world view so that it seems to make sense. Too many choices makes their heads hurt...
but sometimes those choices allows one of them to wake up and bloom.
Hail the internet!
They never seem to portray us right.
Sometimes it's "girly" and other times it very "butch". Why can't they just have us be the way we are?: Normal! Longhairs are normal people. What gives us special treatment because of the length of our hair?
- Brian
It seems to me that the ad is portraying part of the variety in long haired men. Because they are normal there will be people that fall into the so called "girly" or "butch" range.
Now that school is out I have been wallowing in cable television for a week and have seen a lot of men with long hair on TV. I think the portrayals have been evenhanded for the most part. That really does not matter though, people recognize that television is not real life and those that conclude otherwise, particularly stereotypes, are not to be blamed on commercials but on themselves.
Elizabeth
Hi, i guess most people will disagree with this but i dont think the advert sounds offensive. A lot of people have mistaken my gender from behind. Hell, i think id even mistake myself now its down to mid-back. I just laugh with them when they realise they made a mistake. Doesnt really sound as if the advert was showing long hair guys in bad light, hard to be sure cos ive not seen it. but to be honest it sounds kind of amusing...
Hey Tarikh, crazy coincidence, I happen to be half-Mauritian, on my mother's side. My dad's American and I live and have lived in the states all my life. Still, it's pretty cool to see another Mauritian on the board.
Al
I have a friend, well, more of an aquaintence, whose hair used to be mid-back, but some salonist freaked on him, cut off most of it, and sent it to Locks of Love, sorry, I'm rambling, but at one point he had dyed it blond, and from the back we kept mistaking him for a cheerleader we all knew. When we finally brought it up to him, he just laughed, threw off a cheer and a kick, and then, because he's just like that, flipped us off. The point is, it's going to happen, and you just have to take it in stride. And people are going to stereotype it. This acquaintance, Phillip, realized that a while ago, and he milks it for every bit it's worth. He does the butch thing, the effeminite thing, and just loves every minute of people's reactions.
Oh, and in case you're wondering, he took the whole salonist-gone-mad thing in stride as well. He just altered the cut a bit, and declared he was going to dye it blue, go as James to an anime convention, and then let it grow out again. Great guy.
Long ago, I used to work with a girl who had identical hair to mine. Not only that, but we both had business suits in the same ghastly shade of beigey brown (hers had a skirt!). There was a photo of the workplace including a rear view of someone showing just a head and shoulders, and even I couldn't even tell if I was looking at me or her.
I haven't see the commercial. Because I quit watching commercial TV years ago, it's very unlikely that I will see the commercial.
It seems upsetting to me that people are still watching TV.
I think that some of the Americans on this board missed the point that this was not on American TV but rather on TV in another country where the social climate is much different.
