Hey guys. Can you admit that you’re influenced by car ads? The automotive industry thinks you are. Ads targeting men have been working since the 1920s when manufacturers realized that just touting the engineering of a car wasn’t working as well to sell them. They gradually began to sexualize ads (and the cars themselves), and in doing so, they realized that they were successful appealing to a male stereotype. Car ads have been working and we can see the result in the way roads have been designed, and the prevalence traffic and crashes.
BBC’s Spoof Ads Slam Automobiles as Man-Wombs, Winkies, Silly-Little-Me-Wagons
Carlton Reid Jan 19, 2019
For the multi-billion-dollar automobile industry a car for the typical man, imagines Barker channeling thousands of automobile adverts, has to be “sleek, fast, hard … imposing to other men.”
His Serious Car advert – “All Car, All Man, All Man Car. Car of Man. Manly car. Man. Men. Me” – appeared in the first series of The Damien Slash Mixtape, broadcast in 2017, and in the second series has now been joined by a version spoofing muscular off-road motor vehicles that never leave asphalt:
“It was observing my relationship with driving that gave me the idea for the joke. I noticed the tragic puffed-up fantasy identity I was adopting as I was driving, where does it come from? I thought how absurd it was to generate a sense of masculinity from a glorified cart, how absurd our relationship is with these enormous, asinine, polluting machines that have become a form of clothing as much as they are a form of transport.”
Nevertheless, he admits to having a “car addiction.”
He said: “I own two classic 5-liter V8s, for maximum self-loathing.”
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