Adverts that make women look like morons..

I rather like "the cleaner you are the dirtier you get".

By all means do teach teenage boys that the way to be attractive to women is not to spray on lots of body spray but to actually wash.

It's true, lack of washing will reduce your chances of sex.

I still get/got suckered in though HandDivedScallopsrgreat, especially when there's an electronic gadget being shown which promises to be all encompassingly amazing :)

On bladder weakness - just thought of one ad they had for that for men. I quite liked it actually cos it made me laugh - it was a little blue letter P shouting 'need to pee' and jumping up and down on his windscreen washer etc. :)

I think that is a very healthy way to deal with their ridiculousness Bibi .

LostInTrans - agree about Tena. Also hate dulcoease ones. Isn't it odd how anything to do with bowel movements is solely aimed at women. They don't have the equivalent for men . Men clearly don't get constipation or bladder weakness (although they don't have babies which probably causes women the most amount of problems with bladders!).

but but but - surely, the sheer pleasure of eating the perle de whatsit made you more beautiful StayingDavidTennantsGirl?

I love pisstaking adverts, can't help it, my beloved granny trained me to do it from a very young age :)

The Tena advert just reminded me of the previous one (or maybe this bit is still the same, don't know)

The ad would start with a woman twirling around a dancefloor with a partner, looking into the camera and asking 'what's the first thing you notice about me'

At which point I'm afraid I always used to reply 'that you smell of stale urine'?

What about the new Tena advert where the woman gets her dress stuck in the lift door and blushes and dimples next to the not particularly good looking man next to her. Later at the water cooler she describes her embarrassment to her friend and laughs so hard she pees herself with a theatrical 'oops' towards the camera.

Ok it isn't the most patronising ad out there (also hate the perl du lait one, the pebbly air freshener one, pretty much any perfume or makeup one) but there is just something about it that makes me grind my teeth.

I ate a Perle De Lait yoghurt, and am still homely and overweight, and utterly un-surrounded by admiring friends. I am at a loss to understand this.

Agree about the Perle De Lait adverts. Quite apart from them marketing it as a beauty product, I can't imagine any of my friends being too impressed with me handing over tiny pots of yoghurt as dessert.

They'd be like......where's the fecking cake!!!!

And don't get me started on the hair dye adverts. Group of friends bring round a packet of hair dye for you to do your roots before you're allowed out.

I do absolutely believe, though, that if I buy my pet insurance through compare the market, two actual meerkats will turn up on my doorstep and give me a cuddly toy. In fact, I shall be most upset if they don't!!

at GarlicButter!!!!

If you're a feminist, you shouldn't really watch TV if you can help it because it'll just raise your blood pressure to dangerous levels .

If I ever do watch anything, I watch it online so I get fewer ads and can ignore them more easily by muting the computer and opening another browser window to do something else e.g. surf mumsnet's feminist threads....

Perle De Lait

pleasure makes you beautiful...

fucking hell fire

that Perl de Lait (Sp) ad is the most irritating at the moment. The suggestion that you will be beautiful if you eat it...grrrrrr....I won't be buying it again, which is a shame as it's actually quite tasty

Wouldn't it be simpler and quicker to say that the vast majority of adverts are patronising shite? I can think of some that are funny or witty, but can't think of any that make me feel that the advertiser actually respects their target audience.

Loads of my colleagues eat yoghurt for pudding, or yoghurty type things, and when you look at the ingredients/nutritional info, you might as well just sit there munching on a big bar of galaxy. But no - if it's pot-shaped and tastes even mildly of yoghurt, it must be both slimming and orgasmic. Half of them are made with cream FFS.

Much better to just eat feckloads of good old fashioned junk like I do

Possibly OT, but I'm going to weigh in - ha! - to defend the Diet Chef ads, because I think the woman is very attractive, as well as being bigger than you normally see on TV. Even by the ad of the ad, she's not especially skinny, but is shown as happy and attractive.

The yoghurt, Feminax and pretty much any household products ad are awful though.

yoghurt ads

I can't bear that Feminax ad in which the woman pulls a lever on her sofa and ejects the bloke sitting next to her out the window. Tagline: "if only all pains were as easy to get rid of" or similar.

I think it's actually quite offensive to men. If the situation were reversed and the man did that to the woman, it would probably be banned.

Obviously there are loads of ads that are sexist towards women - many of which are mentioned upthread - but I just think sexism generally is unhelpful whomever it's aimed at.

KFC - "Mum's night off"

I love the old spice advert!!

My new pet hate is all the anti bacterial adverts aimed at women. Why on earth do we need to living in germ fear. I think it's getting ridiculous now they are selling us vanish to get rid of the germs on your clothes!! I would also never design an air freshener as the smell of the things knock me sick. I'd rather open an window.

BWITGG, I don't think you're nutty for suspecting a fashion conspiracy to keep women starved and hungry! It happens to be a pet topic of mine, and loads of fashion/beauty editors agree with you; even some of the big British model agents do.

Unfortunately, whenever I mention it somebody posts a link to a 'documentary' of fashion adverts that seem to celebrate mutilation and death. The project was an entry for a fashion photography competition, made by students - the competition's theme was "Death". There are plenty of scary examples around for real, we don't need to repackage an art project as a documentary.

I agree with whoever said she loved the old Sophie Dahl perfume advert- and with you about the Glade commercials! From the second the voiceover tells me I would design an air freshener just like that (er, no I wouldn't) to the vomit-inducing end, I fucking hate them! And does anyone have a clue why perfume makes you suddenly find yourself having sex?

I don't mind cheesy aftershave commercials, though. They're either ironic or aimed at 14-year-old boys, whose urge for sex exceeds their knowledge (or anything else much, really.) Thinking of ironic: I love the Old Spice ads and the actor

Gotta go, I must clean and polish every inch of this house while looking astonishingly well-groomed, then build a shed using my husband's tools (casting him an affectionately exasperated glance) before checking that my whites look whiter than they did yesterday and driving to my high-powered job in my small, ergonomic, easy to park, new car. Of course my briefcase is full of anti-constipation, anti-diarrhoea, antihistamine, pain-relieving tablets as well as several totally essential skin products made with caffeine. I simply couldn't bear it if anyone thought I was tired or something!
Perhaps we could meet up for a reduced-fat, aspartame-loaded, bio yoghurt later? Don't eat it all, mind! Ciao ciao!

Adverts are the number one reason we stopped watching tv, life is so much nicer without that sexist crap and a few weeks ago ds, 7, commented that he'd been trying to think what to get for Christmas and couldn't think of anything, a big contrast to his advert exposed self who always had a mental list of things to want.