Category: Are You Flippin’ Kidding?

Mac’n’Cheese Porn : Nevermind Jeans, Now Even Comfort Foods Are Sexed Up!

~ Tanja Buzzi Moriarty ~ Leave a comment

Sex in advertising is nothing new, but macaroni and cheese porn? Yesterday, midday, I looked up from reading as my husband was flipping between a race and football. There, dancing to Give a Little Bit (Shame on you, Supertramp!) were two, ah, well, amorous?? boxes of macaroni and cheese coming on to each other! Unbelievably, they slid in behind a toaster where we are to believe they are, ah, “making more pasta”…and four little containers of mac and cheese come pitter-pattering out after them!
Really? Do advertisers have to sex up everything? Not even comfort food is safe!
I hate to list the brand name of this company, and ones like it because it only does what they want. Push their brand and sell their products.
At risk of doing so, I have to rant about a leading jean company that goes WAY beyond imagination and decency in selling their red-tag-on-the-pocket jeans. The unconscionable company’s “Live in *****’s,Just Don’t Bore Them” campaign, does anything but bore. It makes me abhor the company. I happened to catch a lascivious ad recently. In a swift but indelible scene,a twenties-something man steps back from a woman who is bent backwards over a kitchen counter. He hoists up his jeans suggesting he’s been caught in the act or just finished with her.
Nothing left to the imagination. How do we explain something like this to young children? How do we protect our youth from what is broadcast as the norm? I was grateful that I was not watching with young children, teens, or really anyone besides my husband. I feel the same way as One Million Moms director Monica Cole in her post Levi’s Makes One Million Moms Mad With This Commercial.Check it out. What do you think? Is it OK, humorous, or inappropriate that we are subjected, (in some cases barraged by) overtly suggestive and sexual advertisements?

Politically Incorrect Girl Scout Songs of the 70s: Did We Have A Clue?

~ Tanja Buzzi Moriarty ~ 3 Comments

In 1975, I was ten and had no clue of what I was singing. Some of the songs we sang around the old campfire in Girl Scouts back then would get you burned, or maybe even a lawsuit today! Consider these lyrics: “Big red indian, beats upon his drum, rum tum-tum, rum, tum-tum. Woo-Woo-Woo!” There was an obnoxious hand gesture of hitting your lips in a war cry on the woo-woos!

Another song, which I didn’t get at the time, was about a man named Ruffus Rassius Johnston Brown not paying his rent on time. Another one that I thought was so funny was about Fried Ham, Fried Ham, Cheese and Baloney. Each of the four verses was sung in different ethnically-slurred accents! Gads!

The topper had to be “Just plant a watermelon right on my grave and let the juice slip through…Now Southern fried chicken might taste mighty fine, but nothin’ tastes better than a watermelon rind..”

A sign of the times. Don’t make it right.

I don’t mean to pick on the Girl Scouts. In fact, some of my best childhood memories are from Camp Higganumpus, a Girl Scout camp in Higganum.

We kids picked up politically insensitive lyrics on our transistor radios. At recess, we’d march across the playground belting out, “Half Breed” by Cher at the top of our prepubescent lungs.

It was around this time, thank goodness, of the advent of Archie Bunker and All In the Family. The creators did us a favor by holding up a mirror. Each episode was blaring hyperbole of how small-minded and racist we could be.

Do you remember thinking your older relatives “were just like Archie Bunker”?

There was still some of it going on in the 80s, though. Recall the movie Sixteen Candles by John Hughes starring Molly Ringwald? Whenever the international student staying at the main character’s house appeared in a scene, a gong would sound punctuating his obvious Asian background.

So what is my point? As decades are unfolding now, just rounding my fifth one, I have to believe we are a little less coarse and more sensitive as a society today. I am pretty sure the Girl Scouts of 2014 would only allow sanctioned ditties that are 100% PC as a matter of good conscience, and not fear of litigation.

What do you think? Are we politically correct enough today? Do you think we’ve gone overboard and are too overly PC?