As someone who once lived in the capital of Country Music Songs About Doing Stuff To Women In Pickup Trucks — more formally known as Nashville — there is nothing quite as relatable as this parody of sexist pickup truck commercials, brought to this unworthy internet by New Zealand sketch comedy group Funny Girls. The sketch starts out with the stereotypically deep-voiced narrator weaving a tale of super macho manliness as the pick-up truck rolls through a rugged farm lane, only to come to a screeching, hilarious halt when the narrator realizes that it is (gasp!) a woman behind the wheel. The commercial slowly gets more and more derailed as the narrator trucksplains our heroine, attributes her ability to drive a truck to a man's help, and eventually makes a hilarious ass of himself.
All of this, of course, speaks to a well-known truth — pickup trucks are associated with manliness, in and out of the commercial-sphere. It was a joke-that-wasn't-quite-a-joke in Nashville that so long as you copied together some Frankensteinian chorus involving the words "girl," "tailgate," "painted-on jeans," and "pickup truck" in Nashville, you were pretty much guaranteed a summer hit on country radio. The pickup truck's inadvertent history with sexism is a long and documented one, but never quite so funny as it is in this recent ad parody.
Of course, these ads are no accident. There is plenty of strategic marketing that goes into them, based on the particular audience companies want to reach. Marketing-schools.org names "Pride in fatherhood," "Commitment to work," and "Desire to increase one's power" as three different emotions elicited by popular truck campaigns aimed at men, which certainly is in line with the projection of them we see in television ads. The same way songwriters use the pickup truck to elicit specific imagery and get dudes excited about a song, advertisers use the actual images to get dudes excited about the truck.
But in 2016, it is always a little disheartening to see something so heavily gendered — if not just in ads, but in popular culture as well. No doubt advertising has contributed significantly to the bro culture of pickup trucks, which can lead to a lot of problematic, sexist representations of situations with pickup trucks in the media. Nothing sums that up quite as succinctly or hilariously as Maddie & Tae's "Girl In A Country Song".
A lot of the argument behind why we don't have women in pickup truck ads is because these ads are meant to exude "power" and "strength," but it's hilarious depictions like these that show just how late advertising is to the party when women aren't represented that way as well. But no worries, guys. The recent "car designed especially for women!!!" will fill the gaps that the pickup trucks left behind. (Le sigh.)
Images: Funny Girls/Facebook
