Building Better Marriages

By Rob Furlong
Challenge Newspaper October 2004

An old friend of mine recently sent me the following humorous (but untrue!) story:

“A Husband Shopping Centre has opened in Atlanta, where a woman can go to choose from among many men to be her husband. It is laid out in five floors, with the men increasing in positive attributes as you ascend.There is, however, a catch. You’re only allowed in once.
Once you open the door to any floor, you must choose a man from that floor. If you go up a floor, you can’t go back down except to exit the building.So, a woman goes to the shopping centre to find a husband. On the first floor the sign on the door says:

Floor 1: These men have jobs and love kids. The woman reads the sign. “Well, that’s better than not having jobs, or not loving kids, but I wonder what’s further up?” So up she goes.The second floor sign says:

Floor 2: these men have high paying jobs, love kids and are extremely good-looking. “Hmmm, better,” says the woman. “But I wonder what’s further up?”The third floor sign reads:

Floor 3: These men have high paying jobs, love kids, are extremely good looking and help with the housework. “Wow,” says the woman, “very tempting. BUT, there’s more further up!” And so again, she goes up. On the fourth floor the sign reads:

Floor 4: These men have high paying jobs, love kids, are extremely good looking, help with the housework and have a strong romantic streak. “Oh, mercy me.” (That’s how women talk in Georgia).“But just think .. what must be awaiting me further up?” So up to the fifth floor she goes. The sign on that door says:

Floor 5: This floor is just to prove that women are impossible to please. Thank you for shopping.”

We laugh at a story like that because we can all make points of contact with it but we also recognise that it does stereotype men and women.Far more damaging however, is the stereotyping of men and women by the advertising industry.

Mark Earley from the U.S.A. commented on this recently as he warned people about “Mooks” and “Midriffs”. Take a close look at what he says:

“On television, men are increasingly portrayed as perpetual adolescents: pre-occupied with sexual matters and incapable of meaningful conversation. One obvious example is Miller Lite’s controversial “Catfight” commercials. A discussion about the beer quickly degenerates into “an angry, clothes-shredding, wrestling match” between two women in a fountain. The ad then cuts to a bar where it turns out that the fight was merely a male fantasy: two guys’ idea of the perfect beer ad."

Then there’s the recent Domino’s Pizza ads in which men were explicitly compared to dogs, blindly running towards a ringing door bell in the expectation of their favourite pizza. Or car ads where young men are shown as incapable of any thought more substantial than which comic book character would win a hypothetical fight.

Advertisers claim that these ads provide an “insight into guys’ mentality.” But, as Douglas Rushkoff of New York University says, this portrayal of the American male, which he calls the “Mook,” is entirely “the creation of marketers.” It’s designed to sell guys things by appealing to an exaggerated version of their worst instincts.And, yes, there’s a female equivalent of the “mook”. Rushkoff calls her a “midriff”. She’s style-conscious and sexually precocious along the lines of a Britney Spears. Like the “mook” the “midriff” embodies advertisers’ ideal consumer of their goods and services.”

Here is my question then to those of you who regularly read this column:

From whom do you derive your idea of self from?

• Do you think you are a man because you are with a beautiful woman?
• Do you feel like a woman because there is a man in your life who idolises you?
• Or maybe you take your cues from the advertising industry?

If you answer yes to any of these then your house is built on very unstable ground. Our sense of worth, identity, who we are, is built on our relationship to God. We are made in His image, to bring Him glory. When we understand that we discover what it means to be a man or a woman and we also see the “Mook” and the “Midriff” for what they are: gross distortions of reality!