Are Men Really This Stupid?

For a whole 24 hours, I was determined to ignore the Super Bowl ad controversy.

Then I sat down Monday to watch the evening news and saw another ad. Suddenly, I was seized by revelation:

Men, advertisers think you are: Stu. Pid. Seriously. In ad after ad, you look as clueless as the elderly mother who insists her bachelor son's longtime partner is just a nice roommate who happens to be named Honey.

The Monday night ad that gave birth to this epiphany was yet another promo for that little pill destined to spawn a generation of babies with fathers on Medicare. The ads for erectile dysfunction don't mention that part. Instead, they focus on those moments when a middle-aged man and a woman with a smile line or two are cutting vegetables or raking the yard and suddenly realize they might want to have sex in the next eight hours.

This particular ad started with the couple painting a room. He's on a ladder. She looks up at him, and you just know she's not thinking about flat versus semigloss. But it's not so clear what's on his mind. All that meandering. The lollygagging. It takes this guy forever to get from the ladder to the yard to the wide-open spaces where they finally — holy moly — sit naked in separate bathtubs with no plumbing.

My Lord.

What the camera doesn't show are birds laughing their feathers off as the poor woman raises her palms to the sky and mouths, "What the —?"

Guys, whose fantasy is this? If it's yours, don't tell me. In fact, don't tell anyone if you want to have another date in this lifetime.

So now I'm thinking about all the Stupid Men ads during the Super Bowl. Take the first quarter: A dog hooked a no-bark collar around a guy's neck and left him wriggling on the ground. A little boy smacked his mother's date silly after the fool ogled his mom and his chips. A leggy blonde threw over a room full of men in tuxes for a beaver who played the fiddle. Oh, and that Heisman Trophy winner? He tackled his mother to the ground after she called him her miracle baby.

I've got house ferns smarter than these guys.

Then there was the second-quarter theme: It's Important To Be a Man, Which You Ain't.

A mob of manly men wearing no pants and unfortunate underwear marched through a field singing, "I wear, I wear, I wear no pants." Just in case any male viewers were missing the point, the ad ended with another man's voice declaring, "Calling all men: It's time to wear the pants."

Then there was the dazed Jason, standing in a lingerie shop with a pushup bra draped over the shoulder of his flannel shirt like a dead squirrel.

In a voice dripping with disgust, the man sneered, "Change out of that skirt, Jason."

There was also the sports dude who crashed the women's book club and, when asked whether he liked "Little Women," scratched himself and said, "Yeah, I'm not too picky." He was followed by the dense driver dude who, when asked to surrender his tires or his life, opened the car door and tossed out his wife.

Finally, there was "Man's Last Stand," featuring a montage of weary, broken-down husbands as a trembling male voice rattled off a litany of their sacrifices for us, the demanding wives. This list included putting down the toilet seat, taking our calls, shaving, eating fruit for breakfast and carrying our lip balm.

On behalf of Everyman, the voice growled:

Because I do this.

I will drive the car.

I want to drive.

It's a Dodge Charger. And dude, how's this for coincidence? That's the same car I drive every week to the grocery. Drive it to get my hair highlighted, too.

Yeah. I kno-o-o-o-o-w.

But hey: You da man.

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House, "Life Happens" and "... and His Lovely Wife." She is a featured contributor in a recently released book by Bloomsbury, "The Speech: Race and Barack Obama's 'A More Perfect Union.'" To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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