12 May 2009

Think! before you kill your husband by talking

Has anyone seen the new Think! advice advert? It's one of those helpful ads that warn us docile members of the general public not to do stupid things which might result in our own deaths. My FAVE new ad is this Think! ad that warns against the perils of using mobile phones in the car.

For those of you can't be bothered to watch the video below, here's the storyline:
The screen is split down the middle, with the man on the phone in his mancar at night on one side talking to the woman on phone in kitchen on the other. "How did it go?" she asks, "It went really well," he replies "Blah blah I'm a man, and I'm on my way back now. I'll tell you about it when I get home." "OK, well, the dinner's on and the kids are in bed," she says, just before he crashes the car, gets covered in blood and so on.

Tagline: You don't have to be in a car to cause a car crash. As soon as you know they're driving, kill the conversation. (Instead of them, geddit?)

Well, thanks Think! for pointing out that it was the woman's fault for blathering on while the poor man was driving. Who called who, huh? Before she killed him, he was probably just about to say something like "Don't you know it's dangerous to talk to me when I'm on the phone in my car? I have to go to abide by the law and good sense." To which she would reply "I'm so alone! Please, don't hang up." To which he would reply "I know that, as a woman, you have no faculty of Reason (cf. Kant) but can't you trust in my superior masculine understanding and concede to my judgement?" The subtext, no dammit, the hypertext of this advert clearly demonstrates that he's trying to get rid of her, and she's all "How did it go sweetie?" just enforces the unfortunate notions that women:

a) talk too much
b) have no common sense
c) are so homicidaly bored that they would rather risk the lives of their loved ones than put up with another moment's emptiness and silence between the last kid falling asleep and hubbie coming home with his tales from 'the outside'.

Mobile phones and cars are a fatal mix, of course, but please, there is such a thing as personal responsibility of the driver for switching the damned thing off or, my lord, not answering! I think we all know who the douchebag is in this infomercial, and I hope I'm not alone in being glad he ends up dead. Whoops!

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