More Snickers stuff: Let's just try to silence the debate on this

Snickers has released a statement about their Super Bowl ad, not apologising, that you can read more here. Here's a bit:

“As with all of our Snickers advertising, our goal was to capture the attention of our core Snickers consumer, primarily 18-to-24-year-old adult males,” said a spokeswoman for Masterfoods, Alice Nathanson. “Feedback from our target consumers has been positive, and many media and Web site commentators on this year’s Super Bowl lineup ranked the commercial among this year’s best.”

“We know that humor is highly subjective and we understand that some consumers have found the commercial offensive,” Ms. Nathanson said, adding: “Clearly that was not our intent. We do not plan to continue the ad on television or on our Web site.”

I completely agree with humor being "highly subjective". All texts are highly subjective - theater, literature, television, music - in that people will interpret them differently based on the values and experiences they have while viewing. Even reality itself can become such a text. That's why witnesses to a crime are interviewed separately: to keep each interpretation of reality from mixing based on who among them has the strongest personality.

Of course, that's not what the Snickers company meant. What they meant was It's highly subjective, but some viewpoints are more subjective than others. Notice that the statement implies that the focus groups were not subjective, that Snickers' intent was objectively clear (i.e. anyone who doesn't agree that that was their intent is stupid), and that "some" consumers found offensive (marginalizing us in the democracy of public opinion). As John Aravosis said today, the statement "hardly reeks of 'I get it'".

So considering all that, Outsports.com has this commentary up about the advertisements. Quote:

The sophisticated message seemed to be that the overreaction of "straight" men to homosexual contact is completely irrational, and, in the case of the proposed threesome, maybe that contact is not entirely shunned.

This is a possible interpretation, especially of the ad that aired on TV. The others, I don't know, hitting someone who just did something one thinks is gay with metal objects doesn't seem to me like a "sophisticated message" that makes fun of the bashers. To a lot of GLBT people it had an air of "well, that's what you gotta do sometimes".

He goes on to criticise Aravosis' interpretation of the players' reactions with:

Aravosis seems to be saying that not only are people not allowed to be uncomfortable watching something, but certainly no one can show that discomfort.

Yes, yes, the ultimate goal of anyone who disagrees with a high-production value, significantly edited recording of hired athletes' responses to a commercial is to be a fascist and silence free speech in their autocratic rule of the world. Please. No one's saying that people aren't allowed to feel uncomfortable anywhere, just that a major company shouldn't use it to sell candy bars.

The column closes with:

And if I were Mars Inc., which produces Snickers, I wouldn't worry too much about the boycott that Aravosis is threatening: Containing a high fat content and more calories than you could burn running a 5k, Snickers bars don't get eaten by gay men anyway.

HA HA! All gay men are always dieting! And they would never actually run the five kilometers necessary to burn those calories because they're sissies! YUK YUK! And lesbians don't exist! HA HA!

Oh, I suppose his humor is "highly subjective" as well.

Oh! That's how you sell candy bars! Gay-bashing!

Oh my, you have to see this. A friend sent me the link last night during the Superbowl, and let's say it's not pretty. (UPDATE: Snickers has since taken down the ad from their site, but here it is from YouTube. Expect that to be taken down soon.)



Snickers had a vaguely homophobic ad during the game, in which two men were working on under the hood of a car, one takes out a Snickers bar and holds it in his mouth, the other starts to eat on the other end (I guess that candy bar is that good), they eat from each end like in Lady and the Tramp, their mouths meet, they jump back (I watched it several times last night and wondered how the candy bar breaks apart that easily, but that's not the point), and they do something "manly": pulling out their chest hair. Alternate versions of the commercial showed the guys beating each other up with a wrench and the hood of the car (because beating up gays is funny) and the guys drinking anti-freeze and motor oil (because it's better to commit suicide already than to be gay).

The worst part was that you could watch football player reactions to the commercials, where they say "That ain't right" and visibly react with disgust. Apparently when they hired the football players, instead of giving them a candy bar and having them say how much they like - like a normal endorsement - they had the football players just comment on male homosexuality. The only ways this could have worked in a Snickers ad producers head was:

1. People want to see football players make fun of gay people, so they put that up to keep people on the site.

2. People identify with homophobic companies more, so they'll want to buy more from the ones that are obviously so.

3. They want the image of Snickers to be anti-gay, so homophobic people will be more likely to want to buy Snickers (wink, wink, real straight men eat Snickers).

4. They want to shock people, and people are more shocked when others are shocked as well.

Any way they intended it, this is not an accident. They tried to make it look like a candid reaction from the players, but when you have all those lights up and cameras going, it obviously wasn't candid, and, more importantly, they didn't have to put it up.

I don't see why they had to take a happy and exciting event like this and ruin it for some people.

AmericaBlog, Pam's House Blend, and TowleRoad have more. The HRC responds.

UPDATE: Since they just took down the ads from their site, they're going to probably be saying soon that it was an accident, but we're going to see right through that.