In the middle of its Olympics ratings fiasco last week, NBC at least got some free publicity by pulling a Nike ad they had run for the first few days of the games. The offending ad featured dishy Olympic distance runner Suzy Favor Hamilton as a classic B-movie scream queen, being pursued by a chainsaw-wielding maniac in a hockey mask. It's an obvious spoof. The Jason/Leather-face knockoff chases Hamilton into the woods, but in her fabulous Nikes, she leaves him gasping for breath.
The reaction from the cranky fringe was swift. Letter-to-the-editor types in Washington and St. Louis described the ad as "truly disgusting and misogynistic" and accused Nike of perpetuating "women as victims of violence!" NBC claims to have received "thousands" of complaints. Even ostensibly sane people found fault. The Washington Post's editorial page said that while the ad may seem funny to the slick (presumably male) execs in Beaverton, "it's not a funny subject, surely not to women who have been or are frightened of becoming victims."
Spoofs, even clever ones, being a minority taste, THE SCRAPBOOK is willing to concede that Nike's judgment may have been less than optimal in choosing to run the ad during prime-time coverage of the Olympics, which have in recent decades been transformed into a quasi-religious spectacle, which must not be mocked!
But still, we feel a collegial duty to point out a couple of things to all the editorialists who swallowed too many solemnity vitamins with their Wheaties last week. Friday the 13th and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were not documentaries. Neither were any of the sequels. To the best of THE SCRAPBOOK's knowledge, no women have ever been pursued, much less killed, by chainsaw-wielding men in hockey masks.
Another Nike ad run during the Olympics showed a boy on a skateboard fleeing a sword-swinging gladiator who tries, repeatedly, to decapitate him. This commercial is also spoofing a movie, Gladiator. Gladiators were once real, and many men were at one time decapitated by them. Thus far, however, there have been no complaints about this ad.
It's hard to feel bad for Nike in all of this. The super-PC company has long put itself at the service of feminist agitators. Ads this winter in the now-defunct "Ms. Jones" series featured sprinter Marion Jones crusading for equal pay for male and female athletes, presumably in part to deflect attention from the low wage scale in Nike's third world factories. Maybe it isn't so bad that Nike is getting a taste of its own gender demagoguery.