Ah, disgusting! So, the way to target women with your advertising is to tell them you suspect they are only pretending to be smart and and into jazz or world affairs to fit in, but that we secretly don't even know our basic geography! (Eg. What's Paraguay? Are you fucking kidding me? Is it suddenly supposed to be cute not to know your South American countries?) I don't exactly go to McDonald's often as it is, but this is inspiring a brand new boycott on my part.

it's weird, but i can't muster any real reaction to ads doing what they always have to women. i just sort o sigh wearily and move on. however i AM annoyed at mcdonald's trying to make coffee shops out to be bad/snooty places. i love coffee shops. and i'm sick of this anti-intellectualism infecting everything.

seriously what the FUCK? McDonalds has now given me one more reason NOT to eat there.

My favorite part was the last line- "I just want to show my knees!" As if the move towards equality secretly leaves us dying to go back to the good old days of being a brainless sex object. Sigh, reading makes my head hurt.

I've gone into Second Cup in skirt and heels many times...these adds drive me nuts, because goodness know that you can't be well dressed, femminine ( if you chose) and inteligent at the same time !

I've gone into Second Cup in skirt and heels many times...these adds drive me nuts, because goodness know that you can't be well dressed, femminine ( if you chose) and inteligent at the same time !

I've gone into Second Cup in skirt and heels many times...these adds drive me nuts, because goodness know that you can't be well dressed, femminine ( if you chose) and inteligent at the same time !

I could be wrong on this, but the folks at Mickey D's also made a commercial similar to this with two men in a coffee shop.

This is all hearsay, but I think they said something along the lines of "Sweet! Now we don't have to call movies films anymore!" and "Rad! I can shave off my goatee!"

For the men, it was a great thing that fast food lattes enabled them to shed their intellectual silliness to get manly.

For the women, it was a great thing that fast food lattes enabled them to shed their intellectual side and become dumb chicks again!

...I don't get it either way.

Fuck McDonalds.

Just as I was running our of reasons to hate fast food... thanks McDonalds!

In all seriousness, this commercial is terrible.

This is a slam on "latte drinking liberals" who apparently tend to frequent coffee houses rather than patriotic American fast food restaurants. But it's very telling that they cast women in the role. Very stupid ad. Anti-intellectualism is so very in vogue right now.

I thought it was interesting that McDonald's clearly labeled the stereotypical coffee shop intellectuals as androgynous, and then so blatantly attacked the presence of said androgyny. McDonald's is basically saying, "Why participate in non-gender specific intellectual activities, when you can conform to offensively simplistic gender norms, and abandon all sense of a non-gendered self?"

Gross.

Wow... way to get back to American tradition... you know, like the Know Nothing party... i'm going to be sick, now.

So McDonald's is actually calling all of its own customers stupid? Nice.

McDonald's. i'm lovin' ignorance.

I still don't understand what they're even trying to do. McDonald's has spent years (and presumably a lot of money) on marketing its restaurant as a place for grownups as well as fry-hungry kids, and then it makes commercials that insult...people who act like grownups? Is their ad agency working for Burger King?

I don't want to be the outcast here, but I found it pretty funny. I love coffee houses, but you can't deny some of the people who go there are pretty much pseudo intellectuals. Not all, but some.
The thing that did make me angry was the "i don't know where Paraguay is" line. I thought that kind of pushed it over the edge into making women seem stupid, but if you compare the male equivalent of this ad to the female equivalent, they're pretty much saying the same thing. Males who are really into sports are stereotypically the same thing as women who read fashion magazines.
I thought it was pretty funny.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg87E1tjTOE
that's the male one.

Maybe it's because I'm not American, maybe it's because I don't watch a lot of TV, but I don't get this ad. I mean, I really don't get this ad. I've never in my life associated coffee shops with feminism, intellectualism, prudery, or geography, I've associated them with...well, with coffee. Sweet, delicious coffee. So, IMHO, this ad is setting up an unnecessary and off-base generalization about what is expected behaviour and etiquette in a coffee shop, taking it for granted as fact in the minds of the general populace, and using that shoddily-constructed base to further the point that any and all intellect is a ruse and forced upon the womenfolk, who do it just for the coffee. Good Lord, if women pretend to be smart for coffee, think of the other things women pretended to be smart for! University degrees, publishing deals, governmental office...you name it, women don't know what the hell they're doing. Apparently.

Also, wtf is with the "I just wanna show my knees!"? McDonald's is way sexier than...coffee shops...because normal people (i.e. the uncultured/uninformed, as suggested by this ad) go there? You're right, McDonald's, I can think of nothing more sexually fulfilling than Big Mac giving me the seedy eye as I flounce into the restaurant, the dream of lattes dancing in my empty brainpan. Aw yeah.

I think I see what they're trying to do here, but when I attempt to logically follow the path this campaign has taken, I trip over my legs and fall into a rotting bog of eternal stench. What the eff.

MB, there's a lot of uniquely American code in there: latte-sipping liberals, grievance culture as a form of displaced class war, anti-intellectualism, and the misogynist "shut up and be a sex object" variant thereof.

Vile, feel like vomiting. My spouse and I will review this situation and perhaps take our fry-eating kids to some other purveyor of string-cut fries and chicken nuggets for a while. It ain't like they have a patent on the friolator.

Yeah... I can see what they THOUGHT they were doing. We don't really have the whole coffee-shop-is-place-for-intellectual thing here in Blimey, but US sitcoms have certainly made us aware of the concept. I could have- not appreciated or found funny, but understood their "pseudo-intellectualism is bad" joke, except that they failed at it utterly.

Instead we have McD equatting intelligence with a loss of mainstream sexuality, and the generally accepted standards for sexiness equated with stupidity, with the stupid-but-slutty side being portrayed as positive, and the smart-but-frumpy side portrayed as something completely false.

As if their shitty, rubbery, thin pseudo-meat burgers, greasy lard-filled "healthy options" and foul smelling "food" wasn't enough reason for me to avoid the damn places like the plague.

Hey! Flats are just as stylish as heels. Sometimes even more stylish. There are some hideous heels out there.

But yeah. Instead of combating the stereotype that the people who work at McDonald's are at the bottom rung of the social ladder, they're just calling their customers dummies too.

I'll have to admit that I do often feel pressured to express an appreciation for jazz music.

That is a horrible ad. I checked out the "man version", and to me it's SO much less offensive. It's a vaguely amusing scorning cliched pretentiousness (like goatees) ad. Dumb, being McDonald's, but not really offensive. It's not saying that the men should be stupid, just that it's okay for them to admit to enjoying football.

With the women's version you somehow get a laundry list of "stupid" things the women are now going to be embracing. Now they can follow gendered beauty standards, hurt their feet, not know geography, not care about less popular music, etc. It's so much worse.

This ad is INCREDIBLY sexist and unpleasant.

so, commenters: take action!

Head over here to McDonald's official advertising complaint formand tell them just what you think of this piece of retrograde crap.

I end up pitying the actresses who had to enthuse about the pleasures of stupidity in order to pay the rent.

On top of everything everyone else said, did anyone else do a double-take when Woman 1 tossed the book away -- because it nearly looks like she chucked it into the fireplace? Meep!

Um, I never knew there was a connection between coffee houses and women not being able to wear high heels.

Here's a link to the male counterpart to this ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg87E1tjTOE

Both of them play into gender stereotypes: women prefer heels to flats, men prefer football to books. When it comes down to it, they're just flat-out anti-intellectualism.

I hate this because it assumes that coffee places are "uncool" to hang out. Like you can really hang out at McDonald's? Sexist, anti-intellectualism, snooty, whatever you want to call it, I was never for McCafe anyway because I know they don't use fair trade coffee, as opposed to most cafes that do (it saves them monies). I'd rather have coffee knowing I didn't exploit a bunch of innocent people so that I can have my mid-morning buzz.

I wrote them a letter... and this is what I said...

To Whom This May Concern:

I am disgusted with your "McCafe Intellectuals commercial." It perpetuates gender stereotypes. I would equally be disgusted if your threw gender stereotypes at two men. Societal conditioning perpetuates how women and men act and behave. But a wise woman or man will listen to their own guidance and be who they truly are outside of societies conditioning. Don't perpetuate stereotypes among any person regardless of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, martial status, etc.

I do not support McDonalds or any other fast food corporation but I do support progressive thinking in our world. I believe if the corporation is to exist in can choose to progressive especially in our rapidly changing world.

Sincerely,
my name

I worked in a coffee shop/espresso bar for 2 years.

I worked the morning shift, the closing shift, the lunch shift, the dinner-time slow shift. And let me tell you something: We didn't play jazz (though I wouldn't have minded if we did). We had stacks of sprots, fishing, fashion and beauty magazines in amongst "Maclean's" (for those who don't know, it's a right-wing politics mag, basically a Canadian "Time"), children's colouring books, one daily newspaper and absolutely no liberal intellectual publications. We had a club that would come in twice a week to play board games and a tutoring service that taught young kids.

So not only is this horribly sexist, it makes no sense to me. Starbucks is the haven of the intellectual? Please, I worked at an independedent, and it wasn't even like that. McDonald's is clearly as idiotic as it thinks its customers are.

Oh, and I was allowed to show my knees.

Dear McDonalds,
Your advertisements for McCafe lattes was brought to my attention today. I think it's incredibly insulting that your commercials suggests that people only pretend to be smart to be able to drink specialty coffees. Your embrace of anti-intellectualism and your celebration of a nation of women supposedly returning to vapid, ignorant sex-objects-in-heels is tawdry and sexist. What the female version of the ad basically says is that any woman who has a brain or chooses to wear something other than a short skirt with heels is secretly a fake who really wants to be able to be stupid out in the open. I recently received a coupon in the mail for your new coffee drinks and I thought I might try one sometime, but now i certainly will not since your ad tells me you think being ignorant is really cool. Disgusting.

This commercial is soooo dumb. Is McDonald's really that clueless? I'm boycotting them, which will not be hard, since I never eat their shitty food anyway.

Wait...

Whaaaaaaaaaaaa?

I sent them my 2 cents! My husband and I hate those commercials.

This better be from the Onion. Please let this be from the Onion.

If you go to 71st and Broadway (in New York City) you will see a McDonalds. It's right next door to the Starbucks.

I must say there is a difference in the clientele. Mostly kids in the McDs and adults in the Starbucks but that could be an artifact of the time of day/day of week.

Wow. This is so freaky. I just wrote a post a few weeks ago about gender and the Starbucks backlash. This ad touches on almost everything I wrote about:

http://popfeminist.blogspot.com/2008/09/masculinity-and-fall-of-starbucks.html

So I sent a little note to McDonalds about the disgust I feel. They now have my address and email. (Not my phone # though! I was sneeky about that!) Guess I showed them! Still though. I think we should all comment to McDonalds instead of just on Feministing! That would send a message!

PS I may be silly but I'm still shocked they think they can get away with that.

What do you want to bet that McDonald's can't make a decent latte anyway? It'll probably be spat out of a machine.

I have never known a woman who was relieved to be able to ditch flats for the excruciating pain of high heels. Not that I think there's anything wrong with wearing high heels, but I'm always more than happy to take them off and tend to the blisters they've given me.

Ugh. I am so sick of pop culture glorifying ignorance. I hate making a joke out of how many American's willfully ignore developing nations. I am fed up with smart women being seen as unnatural posers. Fuck you, McDonalds.

Ugh. I am so sick of shit like this. Treating a smart woman as an object of pity is not funny. Glorifying ignorance is not cool. Acting like it's ok that many Americans are willfully ignorant of even the most basic facts about most developing nations is not acceptable. Fuck you, McDonald's.

Nothing can fuel a culture war like a major presidential election.

My intellectual housemate and I were inside Halcyon, a local COFFEESHOP discussing these new, ridiculous McDonald's commercials.

While McDonald's and John McCain may be completely separate topics in one's mind, for me they are one in the McSame because they are both part of a huge corporate, American mindfuck machine that aims at duping Americans out of their own right to be different. Does John McCain want your vote so he can continue to keep the status quo and keep big business at the top of the food chain? Yes. So, of couse, McDonald's doesn't want you to vote for Barack Obama, who probably has never fed his two daughters a sniff of a Happy Meal. Somehow, American culture has individual Americans starting out at a very basic point -- where we eat at McDonald's and don't question the status quo and vote for Republicans. It is in McDonald's best interest both for business simply in relation to customers and relation to taxation and wage/benefit increases to keep Americans stupid, so they have to be part of the culture war that says intellectualism is bad because it muddies up the "real you", the "you" they love, the "you" that stops at McDonald's after school/soccer practice/work because you are too busy and poor to afford good, fresh, nutritous food.

It's funny that the slang for something that is generic is a prefix of "Mc" because that is, exactly, what McDonald's does to everything that is good about being alive. Because of their generic largeness, they have promoted generic and bad job and benefit expectations, bad food, bad nutrition, bad ethics, and now a generally generic and bad culture.

And they have done it with the help of Republicans.

FUCK YOU MCDONALD'S AND FUCK EVERYTHING YOU STAND FOR!

I suspect that some of you are aware of this, but for the record: this is very much a trope of modern porn. Not the coffeehouse part, but the woman who is oppressed by feminism and, through some outside force, released to be able to do things like wear high heels, show off her body, and not know stuff. I'm not saying that the ad firm knew this (although they certainly might), but convergent evolution and all that.

And yes, the male version is much less gender-driven*, and has an actual (weak) punchline. Hardly surprising.

* Other than the football thing, it's almost entirely about culture/style, whereas jazz is probably the only culture/style marker in the female version - maybe fashion mags, but I'm pretty dubious on that.