Good Insurance For A Man

This is an insurance ad from 2005. I actually laughed out loud when i read it and realized it was real because i thought it was a joke! This ad strongly implies, almost directly states, that the only services a wife contributes to a household are easily measured in monetary value. What's more, it hints at the idea that a sum of money could just totally fill the hole left in a family should something happen to the wife. That is completely absurd! This ad takes the stance of pity for the husband, not because his wife, his lover, his partner, passed away, but because now he has to do her jobs! This is one of the most blatantly sexist advertisements i have ever seen! And they didn't even need a lightly clothed woman to accomplish that.

On top of that, look at the targeted
audience. In the second paragraph the ad refers to "her" as his spouse, as if trying to hide behind some sort of genderless label for the situation. But look back at the title, the picture, and the rest of the ad in general. It is not in any way genderless. It shows a man's job being to provide life insurance for his family. It enforces stereotypical gender roles of the woman and household and children related duties. It shows how "hard" his life will be now that he must care for his child and feed his child and take his kid around. It totally implies that he does none of that while the wife is alive! This idea of sexism is counteracted by the sentence in the second paragraph, "Then consider any income your spouse might earn..." This sentence is the oddity of the ad, since there is such an attempt to make it sound genderless and applicable to either family member of a two income marrage, but this is just a feeble attempt to appear slightly less sexist than the ad already is. The rest of the ad clearly details "her" duties as the stereotypical woman's duties, not earning money, or God forbid, having a career! This poor attempt at silencing the sexism of this ad was overwhelmed by the raging disparity between men and women the rest of the ad desperately tries to instill.

It should also be noted how the young boy and father appear. To have just lost their wife and mother, they seem overly composed, not crying, not unkempt, just clean and happy as ever. There is no mourning, no depressed mess left behind by a man who has just lost all that was dear to him, just a happy, normal man and his son. It shows the feebleness of women and the strength of men, as well as the financial dominance of men and the duties of a woman. After all, that's what makes great life insurance.