Tag Archives: NFL

Volkswagen, We Need to Talk

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GoldieBlox, meet Volkswagen.  I think you have a lot to talk about.  Specifically, Volkswagen, don’t speak.  Listen.  You see, GoldieBlox is a toy company that markets engineering toys to little girls.  It asks them to summon their inner engineer and not their inner princess.  As a company, it takes seriously the intellects and aspirations of little girls and encourages them to grow up to be scientists or engineers or just full human beings with brains.

GoldieBlox won Intuit’s small business competition and secured the opportunity to air their celebration of young girls’ potential during the Super Bowl, an evening that is usually dedicated to demeaning and degrading images of women (yes, I’m talking to you, GoDaddy).  Their ad showed little girls collecting all of their sickly pink toys and launching them off into space in a rocket they built themselves.  “So come on ditch your toys… girls build like all the boys” plays in the background to the tune of Quiet Riot’s “Come on Feel the Noise.”

This is where you come in, Volkswagen. You see, you also aired an advertisement during the Super Bowl, and you are also interested in engineering.  Your farcical ad imagined that every time a Volkswagen reaches 100,000 miles an engineer gets his wings. Yes, somehow in 2014 you managed not to show any female engineers gaining their wings.

Wait, what do you say, Volkswagen.  You say that in your defense there was a female engineer in the ad.

I am glad you mentioned that because I was going to.  I assume you were referring to the lovely white coated be-speckled brunette in the elevator (we know she is smart because she is wearing glasses!!!).  Yes, the brunette who slaps the male engineer for what she deems to be inappropriate touching as a result of him sprouting his wings.

You see, that’s kind of the problem.  You think she counts.  But in your ad about engineers, your female engineer is still just a sexual object. You don’t take women seriously, which is foolish for many reasons, including the fact that we buy automobiles.

So, please, sit down.  Have a chat with GoldieBlox here.  They may be able to help you to see women as more than objects, and perhaps even hire a few.

When you’re done, GoldieBlox, I’d like to talk to you about visiting some schools.

An Awakening

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Something is happening.  It is percolating in our society- bubbling up in disparate and surprising places.  It is born out of a deep spiritual dissatisfaction with American society though its manifestations are profoundly positive.

We see it in education where parents, teachers and students are revolting against high stakes testing and common core standards. They do so because they love learning and they believe that an emphasis on scores and quantitative data obscures the meaning of education.  They are tired of a rat race that is so focused on future careers, that it loses sight of raising happy, healthy citizens.

We see it in the slow food movement, where people are joining together to promote local communities, traditions and farms.  They seek to restore pleasure to eating, asking people to sit down together for a meal- to savor both the taste of the food and each other’s company.

We see this in the NFL (of all places) where the Seattle Seahawks are including meditation and yoga in their training.  Even in the violent sport of football, this team has found the benefit of caring for the entire player- for his soul, his body and his mental well-being.  They believe they can excel in the game (and their record supports them on it) and take care of their players.

What do these things have in common? They are rejections of the status quo.  They are rejections of our society’s relentless pursuit of the end-result without any regard for the process or journey.  They are statements that the journey matters.  They are affirmations of the importance of being human; of all the different ways of being human.

There are others out there doing innovative things; resisting the march to conformity.  We should honor and encourage these movements (even if we personally might not choose them) because they broaden our definition of what it means to be human.   This broader definition opens up greater possibilities for all of us.