For a show striving towards boldly going where no man has gone before on four wheels, Top Gear’s latest advert has gone where many men have gone before – 1950s gender stereotypes. In the newest trailer, the men are shown getting up to their usual manly antics revving through mud and knocking giant balls around while the women, inexplicably reminiscent of a housewife stereotype, whine about the mess the boys have made of their clothes. Meanwhile, a young and pretty woman is polishing the Stig’s helmet. And suddenly all the gender stereotypes the media has been gently edging away from for decades are blown back in our faces.
Top Gear hasn’t been the greatest feminist advocate, it’s true. Jeremy Clarkson’s presence alone is enough to burn straight through to the “banter” hashtag on twitter. But there’s something about how unsurprising this is as a Top Gear advert that makes it so much more surprising. Of course the excitement of rallies and rugby would be contrasted with mundane womanly housework. Of course there would be a pretty girl to show how cool they are and how uncool women over 30 are. And, of course, its fans would advise a “sense of humour transplant” to anybody criticising a single frame of the show; under Lorraine Candy’s article in the Daily Mail is scrawled a plethora of attacks guarding their beloved show from the cruel hand of a “dried-up old feminist”. But we could probably use a few dried-up old feminists scrubbing the misogynism out of the trio’s muddy reputations.
Instead of desensitising ourselves into a “sense of humour” bland enough to find misogynism funny, maybe The Boys should work on the absolute minimum requirement of sensitivity that it takes to avoid association with the #everydaysexism tag. It doesn’t take that much out of you, I swear.
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