Easy Rider: Media Svengali

So a while back, I posted about those ridiculously sexist Swiffer commercials where women are so surprised to find they've finished the housework before collapsing in a dusty heap at their pampered family's feet, they excitedly allow themselves a treat. Something their husbands and children take for granted, but for them is a luxurious indulgence--things like reading, bathing, drinking or going outside.

Do you know where the bathroom is?

I'm pretty sure the next commercial would go something like this:

Mom

(shocked)

I'm done. 

      Picks up roll of toilet paper.

Mom

(elated)

I'm going to use this!

     

      Her family looks at her with detached disdain.

Mom

I mean, I'm going to figure out how to use this...then I'm going to USE THIS!

Or it would have had I not stepped in and saved the day. After I called them out for those commercials (as well as a Facebook post where the big brains down at Swiffer Marketing compared a man who actually cleans to a mermaid sighting) they changed their tone and come out with two new, less sexist, commercials. 

This might be good for a larf.

In these ads, the women are not quite as shocked to have free time, and they choose something a bit more frivolous to fill it with--like taking a Cosmo quiz, or having a squirt gun fight. Most amazingly, one of the ads actually shows a man cleaning (either that, or he is placing objectionable reading material out of reach from his impressionable wife, but let's go with cleaning.) 

Who has two thumbs and is afraid of Virginia Woolf? This guy!

Women of America, you are welcome.