LEANING INTO THE SCORN?

I'm not sure when and how personal transportation morphed into adults replaying "Cool and Nerds" with the hope of flipping the script in high school.  Streetsblog, which seems to be populated with particularly soy-poisoned bike and rapid transit advocates, has decided to use the cool kids' fetishes as a tool against them.

Contrary to what the all-powerful truck nut lobby would have you believe, the kind of car you drive (or don’t drive!) connotes literally nothing about your gonads, genitals, or secondary sex characteristics, much less the infinite range of gender expressions and sexual orientations that have existed since the dawn of the species.

Unfortunately, the average American auto ad exec never made it to gender studies 101.

Today, we’re looking at two commercials that harness some of the blandest flavors of heteropatriarchy to shame insecure people into buying death machines — and while these two happen to be from Chevy, most automakers featured in the contest are guilty of it, too.

The pickup truck scrotum is so Bush Administration, and I want somebody to explain how Gillette's advertisements are better for the writers having taken gender studies.  Whatever.  Streetsblog, though, are having their own version of bracketology, voting on the most toxic automobile advertisements (apparently of all time.)  One contestant was a Chevrolet truck commercial from the era of truck scrota that the company subsequently withdrew!  The other was a faux-focus-group commercial from 2015.

This 2015 campaign for the new-and-improved (and-20-percent-heavier) edition of the Chevy Colorado doesn’t scream offensive “no homo” stereotypes quite as explicitly as its 2005 counterpart.

But it’s not that far off.

In the spot, which aired during 50th Superbowl and remained in circulation for at least two years, a focus group of selectively edited everyday Americans are shown photos of the same actor standing in front of two cars: the extremely awesome and tough Chevy Colorado, and a puny sedan for weak emasculated babies.

Then they are asked a series of leading questions about these two drivers — who, once again, are literally the same person.

Who they find more sexually alluring? (All choose the truck driver, including, alarmingly, the focus group composed entirely of children).

Nowhere during the faux-focus-groups did anybody ask about using the pickup truck for hauling 4x8 building material sheets or other useful stuff around, it was more about selling the image, and the choice of "literally the same guy" was with that in mind.  Car-culture culture wars aren't going to turn out well.  Strong Towns participant Daniel Herriges elaborates.

Where there is partisan polarization, it's not surprising to see a corresponding increase in polarization around the cultural signifiers of that divide—the things that make you think, "These are my kind of people." But it's a tall order to claim that cultural hostility to "walking places" is what's causing conservatives to live in low-density areas. The reality is much more complex and multi-factor. A survey that says that conservatives prefer spread-out environments might simply be reflecting the reality of more conservatives having grown up and lived in such environments.

But this doesn't really tell us, in a constraining sense, what kinds of places people actually would enjoy living, or could enjoy if their lives put them in a context where a different set of choices made sense.

The problem, and Mr Herriges notes as much, is that neighborhoods come as bundles.  That walkable neighborhood might come with more aggressive panhandlers or less functional schools, for instance.  Identifying toxic car commercials doesn't do much to make the bundles more desirable.