commercials. And not in a good way.
The commercials were an awkward and jarringly sexist attempt to
imitate a series of Broadway musical skits. In one, a bevy of housewives
gathers for a cocktail party, with one squealing over her wedding ring and
another phoning her husband, who is golfing with the men. The housewives
are coiffed like June Cleaver in Leave It to Beaver.
“Why would you need that?” a voice asks in the background when the
commercial introduces a feature called “air gesture,” which allows users to
browse without actually touching the screen.
“My nails are wet!”...“Sunscreen!”...“I really don’t want to put down
this drink.” The ad was widely derided as sexist and tone-deaf.
In shock at the cultural insensitivity of the South Korean headquarters,
two of Pendleton’s marketers told me that they had hoped the company was
beyond that.
“In the middle of a red-hot conversation about women in technology,
the resurgence of equal-pay discussion, and Sheryl Sandberg reigniting the
very concept of feminism in America,” wrote CNET’s Molly Wood,
“Samsung delivered a Galaxy S4 launch event that served up more ’50s-era
stereotypes about women than I can count, and packaged them all as campy
Broadway caricatures of the most, yes, offensive variety.
“To be fair, everyone in Samsung’s bizarre, hour-long parade of
awkward exchanges, forced laughs, and hammy skits was a stereotype. The
kid was lispy, tow-headed, and tap-dancing. The little girl did ballet, of
course. Will Chase, the emcee-as-actor, was orange and desperate for fame;
his in-skit ‘agent’ was clueless, abrasive, self-absorbed and vaguely Jewish.
The backpacking guys were horny, the Chinese actor in his 60s was an ‘old
guy.’ So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the women would also be a
little, let’s say, underdeveloped, as characters.”
I broke out in laughter as I watched the debacle from my apartment in
Seoul. I knew this was a typical advertising campaign in South Korea; it
was hilarious seeing it play out in an American setting. I’d seen these kinds
of cultural expressions at K-pop concerts, on television, even at political
speeches and rallies in Korea. I attended a product launch for which
Samsung had hired young models to stand around its new OLED
televisions.
It was a typical culture clash between South Korea and the West. The
housewives were demonstrating a Korean ideal called aegyo—a slang word