‘Tis the season for misogny

**As we get ready to open our advent calendars, the Christmas adverts are in full swing on our televisions. Facebook has been flooded with its annual Coca Cola advert statuses, and we have all swooned over the John Lewis extravanganza. However, in the midst of all these festive gems, there is one advert that really gets my blood boiling.**

“Behind every great Christmas, there’s mum” is the strapline behind Asda’s ad, which features an attractive blonde mother who organises Christmas. Kids in tow, she rushes around the supermarket buying food and presents, cleans and decorates the house from top to bottom, wraps all the presents and cooks dinner. She perches on a small bean bag next to the table as everyone else has taken the chairs.

The father’s only involvement is to move the Christmas tree and to ask his tired wife what’s for tea.

The sexism here is ridiculous. The female fulfils her traditional gender role as a woman by cleaning, cooking and looking after the children and house, whilst the male conforms to his gender stereotype by having no involvement in the Christmas preparations (presumably he’s working to provide for his family) apart from moving the Christmas tree, a physically demanding job that the female was too weak to do. Is Asda still living in the fifties?

{{quote Not all fathers are so thoughtless, and not all mothers would accept this passively }}

I also find the father’s “What’s for tea love” after the mother has finally sat down to relax absolutely obscene. Not all fathers are so thoughtless, and not all mothers would accept this passively.

I do acknowledge that in many homes around the country, parents will conform to more traditional gender roles, and there is nothing wrong with that. Perhaps the mums in these homes appreciate the Asda advert for granting recognition of all the hard work they do. However, plenty of other families have fathers that cook and mothers that lift, and thousands of others do not conform to a traditional nuclear family. Same-sex couples and single-parent families may not have a ‘mum’ who organises Christmas. The number of stay-at-home dads has also risen to about 1.4 million men, and these men probably contribute to the running of Christmas. These families are likely to find the Asda advert highly offensive.

In a society which prides itself on equality, advertising should promote equal gender roles, not stereotypes that lead to negative, sexist beliefs. Asda’s advert promotes the latter and excludes parents with equal gender roles, stay-at-home dads and same-sex parents. Grow up, Asda: it’s 2012, not 1952.