When I was a little kid, I watched a lot of TV. But since I was stupid and lazy, I pretty much watched the same two or three channels every day, and would therefore see the same sort of programming and the same sort of commercials all the time. Now, when I was a kid, I hated advertising just as much as I do now, so you can imagine that I would come up with all sorts of complaints for the commercials that I thought I was being forced to watch every day.
There was one specific thing that always bothered me when I would watch these commercials, and it's a cliche that still doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me. See, there would be a whole bunch of commercials for traditionally "boy" type toys or campaigns. Y'know race cars and crap like that. Now, these commercials would often have a gag at the end where, in some sort of ridiculous competition involving the toys, some girl would show up and kick all those boys' asses. This baffled me as a child. Not because I was sexist, although like every other 8-year-old boy, I probably was.* However, I DID know that at that age, boys HATE that sort of thing, because again, we were all raging, sexist bastards. Some of us just didn't grow out of it.
And so I wondered. If these advertisers wanted to target young boys, why would they do that? Of course now, I know exactly why. It's because adults can't remember what being a kid was like. I'm going to try to hold on to that as long as I can, but I know that eventually, I'm going to become hopelessly ignorant too.
*Except that one kid who had almost all girl friends and a really girly voice. Every elementary school had one of those, and by 5th grade, when everyone learned what a "fag" was, we all just assumed he was gay.
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