John Lewis and it’s ‘gender relaxed’ ad

First time I've ever made a complaint about an advert. I mentioned the depiction of aggression towards a female character and a home environment.

Can you not kick your football about inside the house / You've broken the lamp and this is the secone time you've been warned" would be a perfectly normal thing for my SIL to say to her kids. Naughty, yes, but not spectacularly unusual.

This is in no way comparable.

A child with a football wants to be playing football. The pleasure they are getting from the playing. The lamp being broken is because they were playing football in an inappropriate area. Not because they were deliberately throwing their sister's paints on the floor.

merrymouse

I think that JL will be welcoming people coming in to feed their kids on their display furniture from now on.

And to do craft on the coffee tables to really test them out, and if some craft stuff gets on their display stock, well, insurance right.

And if my kid wants to jump from table to table and pose… that is par for the course.

Let them kids be!!!!

And we shouldn’t be so hateful to stifle that dramatic performance.

I'm sure there will have been meetings this morning to brief staff on the new rules. I would guess that at this time of year the entrances will be full of both Halloween supplies and fragile gifts, which should be fun, but they must have insurance.

The paints are deliberately tipped onto the floor as he pauses in his 'dance' and flips them from the desk to the carpet upside down.

I really hope lots of families with children visit John Lewis today and take this message to heart in the soft furnishing section, which in my local John Lewis is next to the toy department. Lots of craft supplies on sale.

“Our advert is a dramatic, fictional story showing our main character getting carried away and dancing to his favourite song,” said a John Lewis spokeswoman,

Well. We are obviously missing the point then. This behaviour is the new normal in the eyes of this spokesperson.

And we shouldn’t be so hateful to stifle that dramatic performance. Or point out that JL turns a blind eye to sexism and to sexualised behaviour in children.

JL’s message is clear.

“Our advert is a dramatic, fictional story showing our main character getting carried away and dancing to his favourite song,” said a John Lewis spokeswoman,

The paints are deliberately tipped onto the floor as he pauses in his 'dance' and flips them from the desk to the carpet upside down.

I can only assume that JL have discovered that shock adverts get more attention and more business. But they won't be getting mine.

I am still surprised at how many adults do not recognise sexualised behaviour in children. Or who hand wave it away in some way.

"Can you not kick your football about inside the house / You've broken the lamp and this is the secone time you've been warned" would be a perfectly normal thing for my SIL to say to her kids. Naughty, yes, but not spectacularly unusual.

Except according to the Ad your SIL needs to just ‘let life happen’ and not interfere.

However, do you not see the difference between kicking a football around and deliberately tipping over paint that somebody is quietly using for an art project?

A 3 year old might just be unclear about boundaries, but a 9 year old is way past the age when they would know the behaviour is wrong.

‘Let life happen’ here means ‘Put up with what men do, stay quiet’.

For me, the sex of the child and the fact that he’s wearing clothing associated with the opposite sex is largely irrelevant.

I hate anything that sexualises children. I find beauty pageants for young girls just as tasteless as I find drag for young boys. I would find it equally grim if it was a girl acting the same way.

The main problem is that he isn’t getting carried away and not noticing he’s making a mess (as I believe was the case with the earlier advert). It’s very clear that making the mess is his entire point. He’s reveling in destruction.

Indeed I think one of the major problems with some modern parenting is the failure to understand the difference between activity that results in accidental breakages which should be dealt with as being thoughtless behaviour they will likely grow out of (having fun with a football inside and dancing or climbing on things would come under this heading) and deliberately destructive behaviour, which is very different from thoughtlessness and which, if left unchecked, is likely to result in criminality.

Both behaviours should be kept in check, but there’s a major difference between lack of foresight and lack of respect.

Actually, the main terrible message is that females have to let males behave however they wish, 'just let it happen', and repair the damage afterwards.

Absolutely awful. What on earth were there ad development people thinking.

Wrong messages on just about every level.

Makes me quite disgusted about shopping there.

Still think you're reaching and then some to call the way the kid is dancing 'sexualised'. Looks to me like a kid posing like they've seen someone famous do on TV/in a film, not a safeguarding concern.

And unless I happen to know the worst-behaved children in the world, chucking stuff about and is (unpleasant but) fairly normal, even at 8 or 9 - "Can you not kick your football about inside the house / You've broken the lamp and this is the secone time you've been warned" would be a perfectly normal thing for my SIL to say to her kids. Naughty, yes, but not spectacularly unusual.

I get the comment about 'to that degree' but because it's TV, scenarios are often exaggerated. Like how using a particular brand of tampon doesn't make you strut everywhere for the rest of the day like you're on a catwalk and like people don't walk around exaggeratedly sniffing their clothes and sighing happily when they use fabric softener, adverts often show exaggerated or stylised versions of actual things for visual impact. Take a thing, turn it up to 11. No, I can't imagine a kid would go on a rampage through a house flinging shoes about and flicking photos on the wall and chucking glitter all in one go - but one of those things wouldn't be bizarre or unusual behaviour (or at least in myself and cousins at that age, and in my niblings/other kids I know), it's just that it's being exaggerated for TV.

Don't think I need to be a child behaviourist to be able to have an opinion on any of those things and I happen to think you're wrong on some of them. The nice thing about a public forum is that you're allowed to share your views, and it's broadly assumed that you can mentally add the words "...in my opinion!" to the end of the vast majority of posts - including mine, and yours.

I think that is a good point. I can imagine they had the idea and conceived of a little child having a tantrum. But then they thought let's be fashionable and bring in drag. No one wanted to say no, as that's transphobic and they ended up with this dogs dinner.

A younger child in the 2-5 age range would work better - that boy is obviously old enough to know he's trashing the place. Toddlers going mad - unintentional damage - fine, would be fun to watch.

But maybe JL thought the pouting and posing that they clearly wanted for some reason would be too obviously creepy in that age group?

Scarpa it honestly just sounds like you know very little about children. You can't accurately guess this child's age, you can't recognise this sexualised behaviour as off and you can't see that willfully breaking stuff is not typical to this degree or by this age. Why have you waded into something you so clearly know nothing about?

I'm not saying it's a good advert, I'm just baffled at some of the absolutely wild interpretations of it on this thread. Some posters seem to think that they're showing a child doing something so out of the realms of normal that it's sinister - my argument is that (whether covered by JL insurance or not), plenty of children do stupid destructive things at times.

patriarchal control of five year olds

He is not a 5 year old. He is I understand 8 or 9. Is there anything which hasn't sailed over your head?

More point missing.

Actually the ad is saying exactly what you say it isn't. The whole point of the ad is one doesn’t need to worry about such brattish behaviour because it's covered by insurance.

I'm not by the way "gender- critical". My objections to this advert is I'm expected to celebrate brattish, destructive, bullying behaviour as expressing the child's identity and something to be joyful about.

If you want to argue the ad is showing poor behaviour from a child in a positive light, fine. I've no argument there.

What I think is utterly bizarre is people acting as though this child (in a clearly stylised, exaggerated advert designed to show the messy unexpected stuff that happens in your home, hence the need for insurance) is somehow a symbol of: bullying, patriarchal control of five year olds over their cowering mothers, wildly unusual behaviour for a small child, pro-trans allegories, anti-trans allegories, sexualising of children, or anything else.

Not, as you'd assume from this thread, that wilful criminal damage by your bullying and overly sexualised (?) child should be tolerated and that everyone lives in fear of their five year old boys and you should insure yourself lest their terrorise your homes.

Response from John Lewis.

Disappointed the conspiracy theories aren't true and it's just boring, predictable misogyny.

I chopped my sister's Barbie hair off once cos she annoyed me. She coloured in Robbie Williams' eyes on my Take That diary. It wasn't bullying, it was just thoughtless, mean kid behaviour.

So why is it depicted in the ad as joyful and just a child 'just expressing themselves', something to celebrate?

If either of my kids ever did any of the stuff that kid is doing, especially at 8 or 9 years old ffs, they would be in seriously deep shit.