large and in charge
12 01 2007This is not the parody I was looking for, but at least this very obviously calculated-to-provoke-youtube-responses fan ‘ad’ features women. I’m proudly reading very much against the grain here, but as much as I love cheap and nasty, the PS3 is way, way, sexier. Go Karaoke:
Yeah, like the young people say, we don’t need feminism anymore, right? And beyond gender, is this what ‘play’ has been reduced to? Jesus.
YouTubeFanBoyFanVideo prediction: PC and PS3 fall in love.
I don’t really think your reading is that much of a push; surely the piece plays with the very common “sympathy-for-the-beleagured-PC” reading of the Mac/PC ads. This time, however, instead of a smug Mac that we can read against the grain, we get a strangely eroticised variation on the stock denigration of cute Nintendos as being the antithesis of masculinity: the Wii-bimbo, as opposed to the usual, asexually feminised Wii-baby. I used to work on the Xbox advertising account for Microsoft, and we were explicitly told by the overlords in Seattle to create an animated trailer in which the macho Xbox robot crushes the flower-picking princess and her Mario-alike friends. “Pansies,” he says. (The irony was that everyone who worked on that trailer actually preferred Nintendo’s aesthetics.)
yeah, I wondered the same thing after posting - whether it does play on the “stop picking on PC, you smug bastard” thing. And I do think it has a sweet kind of humour too, on a second reading.
But still, I do like to notice the obvious in my texts as well - it’s not only the Wii-bimbo vs. Wii-baby; it is also the sexualised Wii-bimbo vs the fat geek grrrl. I just don’t find faux-pornstar sexiness sexy at all, and I suppose I’m not meant to…
“Opposing” the Wii-bimbo and Wii-baby was a bad choice of words — I actually meant that the figure of the “Wii-bimbo” provocatively *ups the ante* on the popular portrayal of Nintendo gear as feminised and “kidified” (oh dear, vocabulary missing today). I mean, it’s very telling when the dismissal of something that’s fun and playful goes from its characterisation as “kid’s stuff” to being “airhead sluts”. And this does definitely come into play in the more obvious tension of the piece — like the madonna/whore dichotomy, I think we’re being invited into another misogynistic binarism here…
“it’s very telling when the dismissal of something that’s fun and playful goes from its characterisation as “kid’s stuff†to being “airhead slutsâ€.”
Yes, of course!
“like the madonna/whore dichotomy, I think we’re being invited into another misogynistic binarism here”
And yes again, I think. But my post-feminism just doesn’t stretch far enough for me not to have a very strong desire to hit the airhead. [shrugs]