
'Distracted boyfriend meme' is sexist, rules Swedish advertising watchdog - rustcharm
https://www.thelocal.se/20180925/distracted-boyfriend-meme-is-sexist-rules-swedens-advertising-ombudsman
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talltimtom
It’s not sexist neither against men or against women. There are tons of cases
of both men and woman having extra marital affairs or cheating. Depicting a
situation which is realistic to occur does not have to imply that all woman or
all men are anything. If I take a picture of my SO making a sandwich I’m not
somehow trying to make implicit assertions about the maternal patriarchy. If
that was the case every single picture of overweight men or overweight woman
would be “sexist” because they somehow imply everyone of that gender is
overweight.

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bkor
> extra marital affairs or cheating

That's not a situation shown in the picture.

I find it annoying that it pretends that man are solely focussed on
appearance, as if there's no mind or thought in men.

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manicdee
I find it annoying that people pretend the image is about men and not just one
man who is about to get a clip over the ear.

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dtujmer
People get upset about relatively unimportant things. I'm pretty sure sexism
exists and is bad, but this is just... not it. It's a dumb meme, that's all.

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onion2k
It's not really up to you or me to dictate what other people think though, or
what they feel is important to them, so the fact you think it's a dumb meme
isn't relevant. That's why we have courts.

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sdinsn
Courts shouldn't be wasting their time on this. If courts spent time on every
single thing people complained about, nothing important would get done.

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onion2k
That's why we have levels of courts and people whose job it is to decide
whether or not a case has merit based on arguments brought by interested
parties. We can't say something is a waste of time just by looking at it. We
can't see the nuance at the heart of every matter.

Again, it's not for you or me to dictate what is _actually_ important. Not
important _to you_ is not the same as being objectively unimportant.

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iopq
Courts shouldn't have so many resources that they should be looking at things
like that

for one thing, a use of a meme doesn't infringe on anyone's rights

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qubax
Watchdog groups should only exist for a short period of time and for a
specific purpose. If it is open ended, it will inevitable arrive at an
extreme.

In a sexist society, if I was paying you to find sexism against women, you'd
be able to find obvious examples of it. But as society changes and societal
sexism against women disappears, what are you left to do? You still have to
find examples of sexism to justify your job. Imagine in your quarterly report,
you tell your boss there is no more sexism. Well then, your boss might think,
well why is your position need any more? But you like your job and the easy
paycheck. So you are now incentivized to see sexism where none exists.

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minork
If you have not been in war for 200+ years, you can focus on real serious
things...

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DarkWiiPlayer
Well, in a way, the fact that this is a _problem_ in 2018 really shows how
good our lives are, that we can focus on that kind of ridiculous non-issue.

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_Codemonkeyism
Hurray, this is such a sexist meme against men, glad they recognize that.

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DarkWiiPlayer
Except they didn't (I guess you forgot to add /S ^^)

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_Codemonkeyism
Oh sorry, didn't read the article and jumped to conclusions :-(

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bryanlarsen
The meme may or may not be sexist on it's own, there are good arguments on
both side.

When used as part of a job ad? Very different consideration.

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hanoz
I'm pleased to see that what the people are really concerned about, as defined
by this page's popular articles section, is: Swedish road covered in herring
after elk accident

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baud147258
This story is what, one week old now? Why are talking about it again?

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TomMarius
Yeah it is, but against men, what the hell?

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DarkWiiPlayer
Why am I not surprised that they somehow managed to turn it around to be
sexist towards women? I'm honestly surprised that it was even considered to
also be sexist towards men. Either way, this seems like an overreaction. I
don't know anybody who I believe would be offended by that meme, so I don't
see a need to make a big deal out of that.

EDIT: I wrote the above after reading just the first paragraph. After reading
just two more, I have to correct myself: I am disgusted at what the article
paints as the most common reaction, that the meme is mostly sexist towards
women.

B __ __ __t! There 's so many ways in which that's just a grotesque
misrepresentation, most importantly that the man is clearly the "bad guy" in
the situation.

EDIT 2:

The article quotes the company in question:

"Everyone who follows the internet and meme culture knows how the meme is used
and interpreted. [Whether someone is a] man, woman or neutral gender is often
irrelevant in this context. We are an internet company and are conversant in
this, as are those who would look for a job with us, so we turned to that
target group [...] If we should be punished for anything, it's for using an
old and tired meme."

It's interesting to see their perspective on things. The sentiment that in the
internet it gender is "irrelevant" is ironically the less sexist view of the
two, and the fact that they used the chance to state that they are interested
in employing people who share that idea was probably a really good idea. It
seems like they are showing a giant middle finger to both those who attack
them for made up reasons and actual sexists. Brilliant. (Though arguable, the
accusations that the meme is sexist towards women is also rather sexist, in
that it completely ignores/accepts the image that men are dumb and only act
based on their sex drive, have no respect at all for their partners and are
the gender that is more likely to cheat)

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wutbrodo
This is pretty unsurprising, as we're talking about Sweden here. This is the
country that stopped gender quotas got universities once they reached 60%
women and started getting sued by women who were rejected by programs in favor
of ostensibly equally-qualified men. Though it doesn't mesh well with my
personal ethics/philosophy, I'm not a die-hard opponent of identity-based
tweaks to merit-based systems and think that support in some situations is at
least defensible. But Ive seen little to indicate that there's any pretense of
intellectual honesty or moral consistency in Sweden's approach to gender
politics, beyond simply a special interest group throwing their weight around.

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DarkWiiPlayer
It makes me wonder though, what is this even about? Nobody can possibly profit
from this directly, so is it to show how much political power _a certain
movement_ has?

Regardless of what it is, this is just mean and unjust. People are being
essentially punished for crimes they didn't commit.

