Posted by Possom on October 14th, 2024

Clip source: (3) The Most Self-Sabotaging Political Ad Ever?

https://www.racket.news/p/the-most-self-sabotaging-political

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The comments are worth a read.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLzYPbtklGs

Sample:

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The Most Self-Sabotaging Political Ad Ever?

Jimmy Kimmel writer and Substacker Jacob Reed may have just elected Donald Trump by clowning men in the new Mount Everest of unintentional comedy

Matt Taibbi

Oct 15, 2024

∙ Paid

There are so many fakes and parodies on the Internet that I had to approach "Man Enough," an ad ostensibly targeting male voters for the Kamala Harris/Tim Walz campaign, on mental tiptoe. I heard the premise before watching and was certain it had to be a meta prank of the Andy Kaufman school. Nobody could be that stupid.

It’s no prank. Written and directed by Jimmy Kimmel writer and Jacob All Trades Substack contributor Jacob Reed, "Man Enough" is a sincere attempt to win votes for Kamala Harris. It was made for Creatives for Harris and reposted by Vote Save America. Unless Reed’s entire career is performance art, which I can’t rule out, it’s both the most self-sabotaging political messaging campaign ever and a devastating satire of the progressive Un-Man archetype that could have been titled, "Sorry I Have One." It willwin the election for Donald Trump if enough men (or women for that matter) see it. Recapping:

The ad starts with three caricatured "masculine" images: Dude in cowboy hat feeding chickens, shaven-headed black man getting sets in on a bench press, bearded biker tinkering with ride in garage. Cowboy: "I’m a man." Weightlifter: "I’m a man." Biker: "I’m a man, man." Motorcycle guy is wearing a shirt whose sleeves have been chopped off either with a fork or by an ex-Project Runway contestant inspired by The Flintstones:

The ad spins through more caricatures: guy with hay in pickup truck bed, guy standing in sun wearing Katherine Hepburn On Golden Pond gardening hat while propping elbow on rural porch, guy in blue gingham shirt standing in front of horse. They give their bona fides: they like their steak rare, they drink barrel-proof bourbon, and weightlifter guy is "man man enough to deadlift 500 and braid the [bleep] out of my daughter’s hair." The turn comes when Gingham Horseman barks, "I tell you another thing I sure as shit am not afraid of. Women."

I wondered what the horse’s SAG rate was. They are all actors. Weightlifter Lanre Idewu’s non-X work includes "sexy pool guy" from the Anne Heche/Ashton Kutcher vehicle Spread, while heavyset chicken-feeding dude who eats "carburetors for breakfast" is Winston Carter, front-seated in a Spaghettiman tub scene:

In Reed’s writeup, in many ways funnier and more revealing than the ad, he says we’re "overdue for a redefinition of what it means to be a man in America," and hopes the Harris/Walz campaign "can start to shape that conversation." But redefining "what it means to be a man" to Reed apparently requires denigrating existing masculine archetypes. Which is fine as far as it goes, except he’s mocking stereotypes that doesn’t exist outside of Hollywood, the imaginations of pre-pre-pubescent boys, and the writings of authors like Ruth Whippman. Well, and one more place. Cowboy, muscle man, biker, horseman: Reed is only a headdress short!

Look, I love the Village People. They were a great band, one of the best camp acts of all time, and one of the funniest burns ever on uptight America. But I don’t think it’s an accident this is what came out when "Creatives For Harris" (a group whose first webpage prompt reads, "I Represent An Affinity Group And I Need Creative Assistance") took aim at what they think it "means to be a man" in middle America. The "White Dudes For Harris" model of self-flagellating beta-male, standing mute and service-ready with Gimp-style ballgag in its mouth while the Kamala-led DNC drums fingers on its head, has been subsumed in postmodern idiocy for so long, it only understands maleness as a collection of stereotyped identity markers.

If Reed really wanted to redefine "what it means to be a man" in a way that had a chance of reaching outside his circle, he wouldn’t dress these guys in the gender equivalent of blackface to recite lines like "I’m man enough to be emotional in front of my wife," and "Have all the cats you want!" Instead, he’d get a bunch of actual Harris-supporting men, have them dress as they normally would (with or without smart glasses or man-buns), and say the same things, minus the sardonic convulsions. Be who you are and say what you mean, you might win some people over.

Instead, he hired actors to pose in front of fields and pickups to thump chests about benching and bourbon, only to shift and proclaim in Hee Haw voices that they cry at West Side Story and "love women who support their families" (but also women who decide not have families! Whatever you want! It’s fine!). One by one, the actors recite, almost in homage to Stanley Kubrick’s I’m Spartacus! scene, "I love women!" But they’re all still wearing their ironic Village People costumes and hamming the delivery, so you don’t believe any of them. It’s camp without libido, which I didn’t think was possible. The only hint of eroticism comes with Gingham Man says he’s not afraid to be emotional "in front of my horse," then pauses to look longingly at the horse (the script surely reads something like Looks longingly at horse). In a 90-second ad a pause is a lifetime, so there’s a point, but what? It looks like regret that he can’t fuck the horse anymore. Because he supports Harris/Walz? Even that feels like bad trade.

Batya Ungar-Sargon suggests the Harris ad isn’t actually targeting men, but was put out to "reassure her base—college educated women—that the Democratic Party is truly theirs. The only men the party recognizes are these emasculated, AI generated putzes." I buy that’s true on some level, but the party clearly is sweating the male vote. They dragged Barack Obama out to give a speech to "the brothers" (I covered two Obama elections and he was never anything but phobic about that kind of language) while sending Tim Walz on a "man-focused media blitz" meant to involve walking with Michael Strahan on a football field as well as "pheasant hunting with social media influencers." Walz nearly blew his balls off on the pheasant hunt and Good Morning America seems to have balked on the field shot, so it’s hard to avoid reading "I’m a Man" as anything but another messaging fumble. Even if it’s part intentional in-joke, there’s no way they’ve properly calculated how this goes over.

Clowning the stereotypical male for not "supporting women" will go down like the proverbial vomit smoothie with the masses of "unreimagined" men who do love and support the women in their lives. Equating failure to support Harris with being "afraid of women" also won’t go over well, but at least that’s part of a toxicity charge that isn’t new. If this is the "reimagined" gender model, are there even women who want in?

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