Via Copyranter, a French ad for the Renault Twingo shows gay marriage as a matter of course.
This proves to the cynic in me that there is no social change so great that it cannot be used to sell you something. At least that is an immutable fact of our society!
Very cute otherwise. It actually made me smile.
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Giliell, the woman who said Good-bye to Kitty
January 8, 2012 at 11:30 am CDT (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Damn, and we just bought a Peugeot.
It is cute.
'Tis Himself, OM.
January 8, 2012 at 11:45 am CDT (UTC -5) Link to this comment
It’s a cute commercial. But I’m still not going to buy a Renault.
Mark D.
January 8, 2012 at 12:16 pm CDT (UTC -5) Link to this comment
So, by this timeline we should expect atheist toilet paper about….2030 or so.
Cents
January 8, 2012 at 1:46 pm CDT (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Republican politics in America make expect atheist toilet paper in 2130. Looking forward to it when we all get there.
Aratina Cage
January 8, 2012 at 4:03 pm CDT (UTC -5) Link to this comment
I think it’s great how it hits the “Gheyz can’t have children” whine head-on.
Ibis3, denizen of a spiteful ghetto
January 8, 2012 at 4:21 pm CDT (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Nope. Not “a matter of course”. It’s still unexpected enough to be the “edgy gimmick”. I *did* see a commercial or public service ad (can’t remember which) a couple of years ago, in which a gay couple was just one of a few doing normal household things (changing the windshield wipers on the car or deciding whether to go to the doctor’s office vs. ER or something). I’m not positive, but I think the animated Service Ontario commercial that came out last year had a hetero couple getting married morph into a m/m couple with a kid between them. The picture was pretty small at that point though, and I could be wrong. Anyway, the point is, it will be “a matter of course” when it’s not remarkable.
Sadly, in commercial-land women still do all the housework and cooking, men are the experts (even when it comes to cleaning and cooking products), multi-racial families are rare, and wholly ethnic minority families are even moreso.* It will be decades before same-sex couples are as common in commercials as even they are in real life. For example we’ve had gay, married politicians for almost a decade. But in ad-land? Not so much.
Still, cute ad, and a step forward.
*Kudos go out to the Gov’t of Canada ad promoting career change as an economic stimulus that actually has a woman becoming a construction worker and a guy becoming a nurse.
Jason Thibeault
January 8, 2012 at 6:08 pm CDT (UTC -5) Link to this comment
I suppose I meant that, in the context of the world within the ad itself, nobody thought it was particularly odd that an older man with a daughter was marrying a younger man. You’re right that they presented it as an “edgy” way of saying “times have changed”, Ibis — that message was pretty on the nose.
I like the idea of presenting gay couples in perfectly ordinary situations in advertisements, and really liked this one SMBC comic where the joke had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that it was about two guys on a date, they were just completely incidentally gay. More of that kind of thing and being gay will REALLY be a matter of course, not a novelty.
Irene Delse
January 8, 2012 at 8:21 pm CDT (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Oh, the irony! It’s an ad for a French car, but we still don’t have same-sex marriage in France. (Only a kind of civil union that doesn’t lend itself to big ceremonies.)
Still, 2012 is an election year here too, and many are hoping that change will come at last and bring to the home of Twingo what already exists in Canada and in many European countries and US states.
gwen
January 9, 2012 at 3:34 am CDT (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Too bad the ‘marriage’ was taking place in a church, land of the progressive social change (not).
Katherine Lorraine, Chaton de la Mort
January 9, 2012 at 11:01 am CDT (UTC -5) Link to this comment
The car is ugly…