AAP's 'sexist' ad: Wife has to take care of house, son while husband watches TV?

The Aam Aadmi Party has released a TV commercial. A TV commercial commending Arvind Kejriwal and AAP’s work against corruption. The ad’s protagonist is a middle-class woman, a wife, who tells us about the wonders of the government and its leader – whom she refers to fondly as “Hamarey Arvind”. [caption id=“attachment_2303446” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Screengrab from AAP’s new ad.[/caption] I’ll get to the quality of the advertisement later. First, the plot– We are shown a saree-clad woman in her late twenties or early thirties. She picks up her purse, goes to the vegetable vendor, buys vegetables, shows her newspaper-reading husband an electricity bill, drops her school-going son to school in an auto, comes back, walks past her husband who is watching TV, makes a face at the TV, starts cooking lauki angrily for her husband’s meal, stares unblinkingly into the camera; it becomes evening, she serves her husband his food and stares into the camera unblinkingly and unsmilingly again and the end. Through all this, there is a voiceover where she describes how tough life was before AAP came to power and how she’d cry alone and wonder how she’d pay the bills and make ends meet. Then Arvind came to Delhi and got rid of corruption and now her electricity bill is Rs 1000 (which is when you see her only interaction with her husband when she hands him the bill and smiles at him). While violently peeling the lauki, she tells us how incompetent people are always criticising Arvind and how it angers her no end. (It’s a scary moment I have to admit. You think she’ll knife someone.) She then serves her husband his meal –- he’s still watching TV at the time -– and then looks into the camera. Her voiceover says that we need to keep “Hamarey Arvind” safe. Through all this, her husband has not budged from his spot in front of the TV, although he was reading a newspaper in the beginning. He doesn’t even notice her stare into empty space. Gripping stuff. Also, in case you missed it, the background music is the opening notes of Peter Cetera’s Glory Of Love which was the theme song in Karate Kid.

The advertisement is as pedestrian as it gets. From the production value to the storyline to the acting. The connection from her cribbing to anti-corruption by AAP is tenuous to say the least. But the criticism being bandied about isn’t about the shoddy advertisement. It’s that the ad is sexist because it shows a woman as a housewife, or if you’re very PC, a.k.a housemaker. And how could AAP propagate that the role of a woman is at home. How utterly sexist of them! This is where I beg to differ. Since when did it become infra dig to be a housewife? Many women do it, out of choice. In this case, for a woman whose stream of consciousness narration is the backbone of this advertisement, you would think that if she was dissatisfied with cooking and dropping her son to school, we’d hear a mention of it in that deadpan narration. I cannot understand why all of us who work for a living, or work because we want to and not necessarily to earn money, look down upon women who choose not to do the same. It’s a deep-seated prejudice which makes us think that we are superior and stay-at-home moms and housewives are second class citizens to be pitied. I agree if you’re forced to give up your job and made to tend to home and hearth, it is to be denounced. But taking the ad at face value, there is no hint that the woman has been made to sacrifice a bigger better life to play house. She’s after all shown as quite the decision-maker, coming and going without even an aside to her non-moving husband, she checks the bills, she manages household expenses, and she decides what to cook -– in this case, delicious lauki. What I do have a problem with is how her husband has been depicted. Now this is the same man who is in the anti-smoking ads we are subjected to in movie theatres. Where he is covered in a haze of smoke when he comes back from work and exhales smoke and coughs on his daughter. Charming chap.

He’s as charming here. He’s shown reading the newspaper in the morning, when she hands him the electricity bill. When she returns from vegetable shopping, he’s watching TV. When she serves him food, he’s still watching TV. Unless the cancer he was avoiding in the PVR anti-smoking ad has rendered him physically immobile, there’s no explanation for why he wouldn’t be shown as helping his wife at some point in the ad. If he’s so useless, why show him at all? Unless, of course, AAP thinks it’s par for the course for women to be handling home and child and catering to their husbands as well. That the man in the house – husband, brother, father, son, uncle -– doesn’t need to chip in. It’s a stereotype which one would hope a government advertisement would steer clear of. Nothing justifies propagating the image of a husband who doesn’t think he needs to help around the house -– just because he may be bringing home the bacon. It may be the way most households operate, but do we need to encourage it and show it as the norm. After all this isn’t a Nivea ad or a Prestige ad, which is only focused on selling its product, by pushing whatever stereotype or prejudice is necessary. Or maybe it is, and Arvind is the pressure cooker. Although in Prestige’s defence, they do show Abhishek Bachchan cooking a meal for his wife. And that’s the pain point with the AAP ad. There is absolutely nothing wrong with showing a woman as a housewife. But there is something wrong with showing an unfair division of labour, because why should men lift a finger at home? They could have shown something as simple as the husband walking both her and the son to the auto. Or simply left him out of the ad. Or pulled at our heartstrings a little and shown him in a wheelchair. So, not only are her bills inflated, she also has an invalid husband a son to look after. Pathos, baby. That’s how you sell a product. In this case, Hamarey Bajaj, sorry, Hamarey Arvind. This is a government-sponsored ad. So it’s only fair to think it would be a little bit more responsible than ordinary commercials, in the message it’s sending out. But going by the rest of the ad, maybe that’s expecting too much. I understand AAP has a lot on its plate nowadays with its squabbles with the LG and dealing with Somnath Bharti, but maybe some better judgment should have been exercised before finalising this ad. Unless of course, this is how AAP sees its voter-bank. As people living lives where there is unequal division of labour between genders and the aam aadmi is to be waited on hand and foot at home.