
Andros
Kraken
- Joined
- Jan 14, 2020
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Automakers didn't invent sexism, but they sure have made use of it over the years.
Women buy 62 percent of all new cars in the U.S. But you wouldn’t be able to tell that by watching the average car ad.
For nearly as long as there have been automobiles, automakers have considered men their primary market — even as the wins of the feminism movement put more and more women in charge of their own checkbooks. And the rhetoric these ads use isn’t just designed to target men. It’s using the worst aspects of toxic masculinity’s prevalence our culture to manipulate men, as well as people of any gender who buy into toxic masculine culture — and those attitudes spill out of the car-buying realm and into driving culture itself.
Car ads weren’t always stuffed with macho messaging and images of rugged males climbing up mountainsides in their motor chariots. The earliest automotive commercials emphasized the practical benefits of making the switch from horseback to horsepower:

Streetsblog 101: Car Culture is a Toxic Masculinity Problem — Streetsblog USA
Our primer on how car ads created the very idea of macho — and why it's killing us.


@Pietrosiek