#ShareTheLoad | Vol. 3 / No. 17.5

Seriously: everyone. | Photo: Ariel India
Seriously: everyone. | Photo: Ariel India

Just a brief post this Friday, since Lindsey’s out and I’m grading Shakespeare papers.

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So being the avid consumerist I am, I thought I’d share an ad for laundry detergent that’s been making the rounds. Produced by BBDO for Indian detergent company Ariel (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Proctor and Gamble), the thing that makes me want to share it (and why it’s going viral) is the premise: the ad is narrated by an older man who, over the course of two minutes, expresses regret that his daughter has to do all the chores for her husband. Why? Because he set a bad example by letting his wife do all the chores. Accompanied by the hashtag #ShareTheLoad, it really gets down to one of the core fundamentals of feminism, which is that a woman shouldn’t have to ask her husband to do half the work, it should simply be done. Especially in the light of new research that says most men do less housework than they think, I could stand to see more marketing taking this tack. So take two minutes of your Friday, and watch a feminist laundry detergent commercial.

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Richard Ford Burley is a writer and doctoral candidate at Boston College, as well as an editor at Ledger, the first academic journal devoted to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. In his spare time he writes about science, skepticism, feminism, and futurism here at This Week In Tomorrow.