Commercials are annoying to everyone, but sometimes I feel like I have a special kind of annoyance. Most people don’t enjoy having their shows interrupted, and I often feel the same way. But why does every commercial on television have to be a sexist, racist, offensive insult to my intelligence?

Some people say it’s my own fault for watching “Passions,” but on the rare occasions when I tune in during the day I am bombarded by sexist crap.

There’s mommy, wiping up your spill, fixing your yummies, dancing with the Swiffer. Doesn’t she look content with her happy heterosexual house of Lysol?

Whoops! Here comes inept dad, bumbling in to ruin another batch of Shake ‘n’ Bake and bathe the children in the anti-freeze. That dad, what a loser! Thank goodness choosy moms choose Jif and momma’s got the magic of Clorox.

Why can’t daddy, mommy’s lesbian partner, the guy on the couch or, heaven forbid, one of those damn kids use a paper towel? Even the nuclear family has some variation in who makes the Hamburger Helper. I think dad, perhaps even if he only had one arm and a double-digit IQ, could handle placing a 2000 Flushes in a toilet bowel. And he does.

But not only are commercials lame and distant from reality, they’re trying to sell more than peanut butter and bleach. They’re even selling more than the idea of how your life will be easier with the product. They aim to show how their crap fits into the idealized life their female demographic failed to build themselves and are now scrambling to create. Not only do Scrubbing Bubbles make mom happy for the moment she’s cleaning the bathtub, they take her one step closer to the life we’re all supposed to want.

Commercials also target people by race, and they do it in the most obvious and bizarre ways possible. If you make a commercial with black people and white people in it, it has to be the diversity commercial that also includes a token member of every other ethnicity.

Targeting just a black audience usually involves a racist caricature of black Americans. McDonald’s commercials with white people actually picture them sitting in the restaurant, eating the food and playing with the Happy Meal toys. Others feature cute children playing cute pranks to trick their parents into taking them to McDonald’s. But when McDonald’s decides to make a commercial with black people, they’re loitering on a corner, rapping about cheeseburgers.

Kool-Aid has taken the “black people” commercial in a particularly offensive new direction. Every version of the black Kool-Aid commercial features a house bursting with a giant family of folksy black caricatures, gushing and rhapsodizing about Kool-Aid. Now I know every commercial involves the actors becoming overly excited about the product, but Kool-Aid seems to posture itself as the glue that holds black families together.

The teenage girl commercials have to be my absolute favorite. As everyone knows, teenage girls’ interests are few and simple: clothes, talking on the phone, boy bands and the prom. Does every department store commercial have to involve a girl changing her clothes a billion times before going out with some lame-o? I adore the one where the girl can’t pause her phone conversation long enough to eat a taco and ends up bound and gagged with the phone cord.

Yeah, these commercials are obviously lame and insulting to the average person’s intelligence. But they work, and that’s why we keep seeing them. Commercials and TV shows that try to sell a way of life get into people’s heads. This assault on our senses seems unavoidable doesn’t it?

Well not really. Here’s my idea: Turn off the television for as long as possible. The longer you go without it, the easier it gets, the more you’ll like it. I promise.

*Jamie Fetty is News editor and semi-monthly columnist for The Daily Eastern News. Fetty also is a senior journalism major. She can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected]