It’s been an intense few days around here, hasn’t it? Time for a change of pace. Sarah Haskins is a 29 year old comedian whose ‘Target Women’ videos make fun of the ways consumer products are marketed to women. Episode 1: Yoghurt commercials.
The Daily Beast has this background on Sarah:
Since the segment’s inception last year, the 29-year-old Haskins has
skewered everything from Botox to birth control to the cougar
phenomenon with her trademark dry humor.
Haskins describes her humor as the “irreverent, feminist, funny take on
things,” and her videos have quickly gone viral, becoming a favorite of
women-focused blogs.
Haskins has always had a mind for comedy—after graduating from
Harvard, she moved back to her native Chicago, where she toured with
the improv group Second City (which launched Tina Fey’s career) and
auditioned unsuccessfully for commercials, including one for Laughing
Cow cheese (she says she will feature the cheese ads in an upcoming
segment). “I’m not a mom and I’m not pretty enough to sell most things,
so I’m in that vast world of normal where you don’t want to buy shit
from me,” she says.
Haskins later moved to Los Angeles (a city that she notes “is not the world of The Hills”)
to take a job writing for Current TV, and started watching a lot of
television for the first time in her life. Haskins says that she began
to notice how annoyingly retro the commercials for women were: Ads for
birth control pills that would only mention regulating your period (not
your sex life), other commercials touted milk as a miracle cure for a
princess plagued with PMS, Barbie dolls and their myriad careers.
“Women can go outside the home and hearth, and work and get a job,”
says Haskins. “Instead of acknowledging the complexity of that choice,
marketers are asking you to be the perfect woman: to keep the house
neat and clean and be the perfect wife and be thin. That’s where I get
a lot of the humor from.” Not that she’s hoping gender stereotypes
disappear overnight. “I hope it doesn’t get any better—because it’s
helpful for my job,” she laughs.
Top Comments
Erm, why?
Yoghurt is not all that good for you, even the live ones. Humans were never meant to consume milk from another species, not even in the form of 'yogurt'.
In fact, adult humans even less so. Milk is designed purely for the young of that species.
Much better to eat a well balanced diet (lots of fruit and veggies), and lay off the animal fats and milk.
If it makes more women eat yoghurt, then it will be beneficial. The most worrying part of this ad is that men will stop eating it because they think it emasculates them.
They will think that there's no point eating yoghurt unless you are female and will miss out on the digestive and other health benefits of yoghurt.