Rip Van Winkle comes to the Super Bowl

Lots of folks are talking in the blogosphere and the mainstream media about the misogynistic tone of so many of the ads during this year’s Super Bowl broadcast. Since my family resisted a television until 1978, my football viewing memory goes back no farther than Super Bowl XIII — but I’ve seen most of the games since that Steelers-Cowboys epic, and agree that this year’s batch of ads were the most consistently sexist that we’ve ever seen.

The good news,of course, is that virtually every news outlet in the country pointed this out. The feminist blogosphere was not alone in decrying the orgy of woman-hating (and the concomitant celebration of the caveman myth) that went on during Sunday’s broadcast. When a staid entity like Time magazine exclaims “Super Bowl ad men really hate Super Bowl ad women this year, don’t they?”, we’re making real progress. So many of the ads were so unrelentingly puerile, so clumsy in their attempt to suggest that modern American men are just so many latter day pre-nap Rip Van Winkles, that even folks who don’t normally use words like “misogyny” found that that noun came quickly to their lips. To the extent that the overreach of these ads was so astounding that it forced even the mainstream media to criticize the relentless sexism, I think there’s a fairly substantial silver lining to what we saw on Sunday.

It’s also a golden teaching opportunity. Spring semester classes don’t get underway until February 22, and I’m not teaching at the moment, so I don’t have the chance to have a discussion this week about the ads with my students. I did note the sexism of the ads in a Facebook status update, and got a number of comments and messages in response from friends who don’t necessarily share my feminism, but did share my indignation at what we saw during the Super Bowl. For those who insist that sexism isn’t a problem any longer, who think that the feminist case that we live in a world which continues to hate women is whoppingly oversold, Sunday afternoon was a wake-up call. I’m excited about the implications.

I reference Rip Van Winkle for another reason. The story of Rip Van Winkle was written in 1819 by Washington Irving; it featured the basic plot line of half of this past Sunday’s Super Bowl commercials. An amiable man married to a woman who needles and nags him relentlessly, Rip takes a hike in the hills to escape his wife. He runs into an all-male group — the ghosts of Henry Hudson and his crew, male adventurers who came to America without women. They hand him a Budweiser (well, not quite, their magic liquor) and Rip gets very, very drunk. He falls asleep and wakes to discover that twenty years have passed and his wife has died.

Rip thus gets to be single (and the envy of other henpecked husbands) without ever having to confront his wife. He is rescued from the misery of marriage by bonding with a group of men who embody an ultra-masculine archetype, and that bond is cemented by drinking their special brand of alcohol. While drunk, his problems magically disappear and he reemerges into civilization liberated and free. If that isn’t a hefty part of the plot of most of what we saw two days ago, I don’t know what is.

The absurdity of the story is that Rip Van Winkle was written in an age when coverture was the law of the land — husbands had almost total legal control over their wives. Rip could beat his wife, divorce his wife, and abandon his wife with virtual impunity; his own unwillingness (which he probably falsely imagined as inability) to engage with his spouse is the source of his frustration. Just as so many men still do, Rip blames his unhappiness on what he imagines are the voracious and inexhaustible demands of a perennially dissatisfied woman. Plenty of men run away from intimacy and engagement to seek comfort in booze and masculine cameraderie. None in real life have the magical outcome that we see in Rip’s case. But the power of the story lies in its promise that alcohol and male bonding can make one’s troubles (always personified by a woman, either a wife or a mother) vanish.

Washington Irving ought to sue several Madison Avenue agencies for copyright infringement.