"My mom is annoyed by these Mother's Day ads"

New Weekly

2024-05-25 12:03Posted on the official account of Guangdong New Weekly

Watching the concept of advertising films launched by various brands on Mother's Day in recent years, you still can't help but hold your forehead.

There are thousands of ways to express love, but some advertisements can always be confusing. Last year, Taiwan's Pizza Hut launched a tear-jerking commercial on Mother's Day, using the trick of "bitter mother".

The cold refrigerator light and the dark house - it interprets the image of a mother who revolves around her children and eats leftovers every day - "only when you go home will your mother eat a big meal". The short film focuses on tear-jerking and warmth, but after watching it, many viewers only feel uncomfortable. They believe that deliberately depicting the bitterness of mothers is more like a kind of "mother-like kidnapping".

▲Taiwan Pizza Hut launched a commercial on Mother's Day

There is little emotion, wrapped in the shell of maternal love, and there is a familiar sense of bondage and mother's powerlessness - why does a mother want to have a good dinner, but she has to wait for the child to come home to achieve it? Obviously, my mother also has the right to enjoy it.

These advertisements use outdated routines to interpret the mother's hard work, perhaps just to express the goodwill of "more love for the mother". But today's audience has really changed, and they can no longer be distracted to thank their mothers for their self-sacrificing dedication, and it is difficult to be pleased by such praises anymore, and even begin to question the trickery behind this narrative. And the values of advertising are still in place.

Obsessed with praising mother's love, to a certain extent, puts pressure on children and kills mothers. Behind the dedication of motherhood is a crusade: on the one hand, it aggravates the guilt-based education of children; On the one hand, he pointed a double-edged sword at his mother, and in the name of noble duty, he seduced his mother's self-sacrifice.

Do women really need this kind of glorification?

▲ "82 Years of Kim Ji-young"

The common Mother's Day advertisement is inevitably tied to housework. This year, Blue Moon's advertising slogan is "Make mom's laundry more effortless", so it sparked a wave of controversy. Although the brand believes that giving better laundry detergent to the mother is a kind of filial piety and care for the mother's work, but the words are not appropriate;

But whether it is buying laundry detergent, sending aprons, or sending kitchen utensils, the final point is that pots and pans must be cleaned by their mothers. It didn't liberate mom.

▲ "82 Years of Kim Ji-young"

Mother's Day advertisements are always creating a "happy family", but they can't see that behind the happiness is the clean, tidy and warm support of women's invisible labor. Even though many short films today have the concept of "returning freedom to mothers", the freedom and relaxation that can be presented are still inseparable from housework.

In the Chivas massage chair advertisement, tired mothers want to relax, but the premise is not that they are too tired to play, but that they are strained by taking care of their children and bending over to sweep the floor. The line wants to express a better life experience for the family, but this is more like some kind of guilt compensation.

▲Chivas advertisement

There are too many such stereotypes, and it is not entirely to blame the lack of novelty of the advertising concept, but it actually reflects from the side that in reality, the history of women as the main domestic workers is too old to be recognized, so that more often than not, it is impossible to recognize the hidden female discipline.

After becoming mothers, women seem to have an extra rule called "should". They are like busy dolls screwed up, doing laundry, cooking, and tossing and turning for decades, until they get used to being responsible for everything in the family and for their children.

▲ "82 Years of Kim Ji-young"

Describing women's housework plight, the Italian female scholar Silvia Federici famously said, "They say it's love, we say it's unpaid work." "Mother's love has become an excuse for packaging, and family members, except for mother, seem to have good reasons to ignore housework.

▲ "Eternal Excuse"

There is a movie in Japan "Forever Excuse", the male protagonist Kei Tsumura enjoyed his wife's giving for the first half of his life, until the other party died suddenly, and his life fell into a state of confusion.

He didn't know anything about children's allergies, not even school hours. The hectic chaos of child-rearing, life, and housework caused him to lose his soul all of a sudden, and he broke out hysterically when he remembered his wife's "goodbye".

▲ "Eternal Excuse"

This is not a romance movie, but a sad story about the wife as a "labor machine". The collapse of the husband is only due to the collapse of trivial matters. In another film, "Ripple", it more vividly reflects the mentality of the traditional family structure that is used to shirking family affairs to women.

From the beginning of the film, Mariko Tsutsui plays Izuko Sudo, who is sorting clothes, cooking, and taking care of her sick grandfather, and her daily life is like a definition of her role, as a wife, mother, and reluctant caregiver. In contrast to Sudo Iko's housework, her son who lies on the sofa and plays with his mobile phone, and her laid-back husband who watches the TV news.

▲ "Ripple"

In order to balance her peaceful life, Sudo Iko must work hard to maintain the family's turnover. Under the pressure of housework, her temper gradually became irritable, but these symptoms caused by excessive fatigue made her described as "the strangest person in the family".

▲ "Ripple"

It is not a bad thing to promote mother's love, but if we blindly praise the sacrifice and compromise of mother's love, and praise the mother's labor and the relaxation that can be easily obtained by relying on some rewards alone, then the swaying, collapse and sharpness of the mother's heart will be hidden and become less important.

A world where only moms do housework is not normal. The new generation of viewers has obviously begun to disenchant the "sacred" of motherhood. The first step in dismantling stereotypes is to start untying mom from the kitchen.

▲ "Shingo Mother", played by Shingo Katori masquerading as a woman, was once a popular variety show character in Japan, photo source "サタ☆スマ"

In 2020, FamilyMart's cooked food brand "Mama's Canteen" was involved in a controversy because of its name. At the time, female high school girls who initiated the name change initiative argued that it was a traditional prejudice to associate women with the kitchen, and that such names not only reinforced the notion that "meals are made by women", but also further divided gender roles between men and women.

▲ The poster of the cooked food brand "Mother Canteen" under FamilyMart

They launched a name change and signature campaign on social platforms. Although some spectators ridiculed their "cautious eyes", believing that it was a provocation and a provocation to the traditional family view; But in the voice of public opinion, in the end, the family decided to officially change the name to "Famimar", and replaced the image endorsement of "Shingo's mother" in the advertisement.

▲ Mother's canteen was renamed, the source of the picture is "テレ Dynasty News"

Behind the dissatisfaction of female audiences is actually the progress of East Asian women's gender concepts in the past ten years. Social platforms have been discussing what kind of ads are comfortable Mother's Day ads. Perhaps, the first thing is to remove the identity label for them, and no longer be subject to the "mother" template.

A few years ago, Japan released a soft short film "Mother with Dreams", in which 59-year-old actress Mariko Tsutsui played the role of a mother waiting to pick up her daughter home, and the stereo in the car suddenly sounded the OP song "Full of Dreams" of "Cherry Maruko", and the mother forgot the time for a while, and couldn't help but sing aloud, even ignoring her daughter's call.

▲ "Mother with Dreams"

The middle-aged woman and the second dimension seem to be in a relationship that cannot be played together. But in the flashback of memory, the audience only sees the moment when a mother is no longer just a mother, and she has a girlish heart that is no different from that of an 18-year-old girl.

She broke into the world single-handedly, loved the cartoons her daughter loved to watch, and picked up cats on the way to buy groceries; She likes to dress up, run, enjoy afternoon tea, and laugh out loud with her friends. Even if a woman becomes a mother, she does not have to lose all her love for life.

▲ "Mother with Dreams"

The director's passage showing the mother is restrained, and what can't be suppressed is the cuteness hidden in the heart of a middle-aged woman. The vividness of the actress's singing is different from the gray tone, tiredness and decadence at the beginning of the short film. It presents that I hope you can thank your mother, but the object of the gift is no longer "mother", but a beautiful, self-contained woman.

Don't let the advertisements in the name of maternal love, which are actually misogynistic, kill mothers.

Author: Feng Baika

Editor: Felicia

Typesetting: Yang Panpan

Title picture: "Kim Ji-young in '82"

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