I stopped caring about the much-lauded but in-reality-questionable entertainment value of Super Bowl ads after the year I saw a beer commercial featuring horses farting on a woman (hilarious!), but this year the blogosphere went up in a explosion of righteous feminist WTF after several mind-bogglingly sexist commercials aired, so I took notice. By which I mean I thought to myself “huh, it seems like people are really unhappy about the Super Bowl ads this year.” I didn’t bother watching the YouTubed versions of the commercials intelligent folks like Cat Valente critiqued because, again, after seeing those horses fart on that woman, what really was there for me to be annoyed by?

Well, a lot, it seems. After noticing that the A.V. Club posted a feminist video response to the now-notorious Dodge Charger ad that aired during the Super Bowl, I watched the original (holy fucking shit) and the gender-bending one (nicely done). Ugh, ugh, ugh. I am so very glad my TV broke years ago and now I watch shows I care about on Hulu or on DVD, years after everyone else. It’s less depressing that way.

Cat Valente was not exaggerating when she described the world alleged by these commercials as “hell.” It really is. And it makes me feel like I’m insane, because I like men. And there are men who like me. We like hanging out with each other despite the differences in our chromosomes. I do not find their presence infuriating and they do not find my presence to be soul-crushingly emasculating. Maybe it’s just that most of the men I know (hetero and homosexual) like to read stuff and talk and make food and eat that food and sit around and watch movies and argue intelligently about things like genre or politics or racism or whether Reign of Fire was a good dragon movie or whether or not we should go see The Wolfman even though the reviews are shit. Most of the men I know think it’s fair to split chores so that no one works a second shift, and most of them also think it’s fair to trade off movies or activities so both people get to do stuff they like if there are dramatic differences in taste with their female friends/girlfriends/wives. They do not feel such things as carrying lip balm or wiping down the sink after they shave or eating fruit (?) to be the  equivalent of having their balls hacked off by a knife shaped like a vagina.

I dunno. Maybe I just hang out with a bunch of queerbos in disguise? I guess advertisers think so. That’s why I broke up with TV a while ago. . . and it seems pretty obvious we’re not getting back together anytime soon.