According to the story, Sandberg considers it her mission to deny the impact of social structure and political policy on women. “[I]n her view,” the Times reporter explains, women “must take responsibility for their careers and not blame men for holding them back.”

Ms. Sandberg sees herself as more than an executive at one of the hottest companies around — more, too, than someone who will soon rank among the few self-made billionaires who are women. She sees herself as a role model for women in business and technology. In speeches, she often urges women to “keep your foot on the gas pedal,” and to aim high.

And, as she engages in such trite talk about “men” and fails to mention social class or the backward state of U.S. family welfare programs, exactly how self-made is Ms. Sandberg?

According to her 2004 NYT wedding announcement, “She is a daughter of Adele and Joel Sandberg of Miami. The bride’s father, an ophthalmologist, is a partner in Eye Surgery Associates, a group practice in Hollywood, Fla.”

Well, there you have it. Aren’t those the same basic conditions facing all little girls? Daddy’s a surgeon and I’m prepping for Harvard — I refuse to slip and have to go to FSU! And baseball starts at third base, right?

And is Sandberg spending her every hour trying to turn Facebook’s billions into better services, as her creepy CEO would have you presume? Um, unless you’re a major Procter & Gamble shareholder, not quite:

Part of Ms. Sandberg’s role has been to cultivate relationships with large advertisers seeking new ways to engage with customers — particularly female ones — online. She was instrumental in signing up advertisers like Procter & Gamble. After several meetings with Facebook, Procter chose the platform for a new Secret deodorant campaign aimed at young women.

“P.& G. wants to be where the people are, and more and more people are spending their time on social sites,” says Alex Tosolini, vice president of Procter’s global e-business unit. “The purpose of our Secret campaign was to inspire women of all ages to be more fearless.”

It’s a message that sounds similar to Ms. Sandberg’s. And it bumped domestic sales of Secret deodorant by 9 percent in the first six months of the campaign and raised Secret’s market share by 5 percent from the period a year earlier.

Glory, glory hallelujah! What great times we live in!

The ads are clearly targeted at men, whom they flatter by endorsing both the idea that stale pieces of misogyny are somehow wildly funny and the counterfactual suggestion that men themselves are going around being minutely careful about how they treat women.

Here’s how Goodby gets his laughs, meanwhile:

The idea, says Jeff Goodby, who shares the title of co-chairman at Goodby, Silverstein with Rich Silverstein, is to “enlist the spouse or significant other” of women to encourage them to drink milk.

“We did it in the past, but the women just didn’t drink enough milk,” he says, laughing. “If they’d only drink enough, we wouldn’t come back.” [NYT, 07/11/2011]

Haw, haw, haw! Isn’t recycling sexism to force-feed cow milk to an overweight population on behalf of factory farming, rBGH-injecting profiteers just a hoot?

And if you believe there really is any such thing with these people as “drink enough milk” or “we wouldn’t come back,” well, I can also get you a really excellent deal on the Brooklyn Bridge…

Axe ads have traditionally been about products that instantly turn women into lust-crazed vixens bent on coupling with Axe-wearing gents as quickly as possible. But in the first ad for the new fragrance Twist, a robot makes over the guy repeatedly during the course of a date in which the woman appears acutely interested only at the end. The ad is based on a concept co-created by consumers and ad agency Ponce (in late 2008, the agency was renamed Ponce Buenos Aires after Fernando Vega Olmos left to work on Unilever at JWT).

“Women get bored easily,” notes a version of the ad for Axe sibling Lynx in the U.K., which touts a “fragrance that changes.”

The reality, said David Cousino, global director of consumer and marketing insights at Unilever, is that all fragrances change, starting with a fresh, strong, usually citrusy top note that lasts for as long as an hour and aims to help cover the smell of alcohol-based propellants as they evaporate, progressing to a generally richer, milder mid-note and a longer-lasting and often subtler-still “dry-down” note. This is all old hat to fragrance developers and marketers, he said, but it was new and fascinating to the consumers in the development group.

“The guys linked that to the mating game and how guys are feeling that they need to constantly change and evolve to keep the girls interested,” Mr. Cousino said.

“Women get bored easily”?  Really?  In the 21st century, big businesses are still getting away with this?

And people wonder about the cultural impact of corporate marketing?

Ad Age describes the anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-love, anti-real-family nature of the ad:

The organization’s ad will feature college football star Tim Tebow and his mother, Pam, sharing a personal story centered on the theme of “Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life,” according to a news release from Focus on the Family.

Not only do I look forward to hating whatever NFL team gets stuck with the odious peckerwood Tebow, but I commend this ad to those interested in the competing analyses of which side of the spectrum is shut out of the corporate media, and which is not, despite its fact-free, flak-providing bleats about “the liberal media” (meaning “the leftist media”).

Ad Age, of course, relays the preposterous claim that FOTF’s “Super Bowl commercial is not polarizing and does not take an ‘anti’ stance against any issue.”

Sure.  And all the other ads, for each of which which CBS collects between $5,000,000 and $5,600,000 per minute (one wonders: WWJDWFMD?), are merely there to provide information, not mind-injections, to citizens.

Contrast this sense of where boondoggles come from with the excellent recent reportage of New Yorker critic Tad Friend on the workings of the corporate capitalist movie studios — where $50 million, by the way, is less than half of what gets spent there on a single movie, a.k.a. “property,” according to Friend.

As Friend reports:

“Studios now are pimples on the ass of giant conglomerates,” one studio’s president of production says. “So at green-light meetings it’s a bunch of marketing and sales guys giving you educated guesses about what a property might gross.

This, of course, means that:

Marketing considerations shape not only the kind of films studios make but who’s in them—gone are lavish adult dramas with no stars, like the 1982 “Gandhi.”

Even within this situation, which is well-known to industry insiders, if not the general public, there is no doubt what corporate capitalist movies are:

Marketers and filmmakers are often quietly at war. “The most common comment you hear from filmmakers after we’ve done our work is ‘This is not my movie,’ ” Terry Press, a consultant who used to run marketing at Dreamworks SKG, says. “I’d always say, ‘You’re right—this is the movie America wants to see.’ ”

Friend finds the resulting imperatives “unexpected,” but nonetheless does a great job listing them. Note how they all express the standard tactics from big business marketing — flattery of the audience, racist restriction of non-white persons from centrality in portrayals, pandering to gender stereotypes, general searching for emotional weaknesses and button-pushing, etc. (And Friend doesn’t even directly address things like the restriction of subject matter by ideology and the desire not to spoil corporate markets, or the metastasis of product placement.)

An unexpected corollary of the modern marketing-and-distribution model is that films no longer have time to find their audience; that audience has to be identified and solicited well in advance. Marketers segment the audience in a variety of ways, but the most common form of partition is the four quadrants: men under twenty-five; older men; women under twenty-five; older women. A studio rarely makes a film that it doesn’t expect will succeed with at least two quadrants, and a film’s budget is usually directly related to the number of quadrants it is anticipated to reach. The most expensive tent-pole movies, such as the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, are aimed at all four quadrants.

The collective wisdom is that young males like explosions, blood, cars flying through the air, pratfalls, poop jokes, “you’re so gay” banter, and sex—but not romance. Young women like friendship, pop music, fashion, sarcasm, sensitive boys who think with their hearts, and romance—but not sex (though they like to hear the naughty girl telling her friends about it). They go to horror films as much as young men, but they hate gore; you lure them by having the ingénue take her time walking down the dark hall.

Older women like feel-good films and Nicholas Sparks-style weepies: they are the core audience for stories of doomed love and triumphs of the human spirit. They enjoy seeing an older woman having her pick of men; they hate seeing a child in danger. Particularly once they reach thirty, these women are the most “review-sensitive”: a chorus of critical praise for a movie aimed at older women can increase the opening weekend’s gross by five million dollars. In other words, older women are discriminating, which is why so few films are made for them.

Older men like darker films, classic genres such as Westerns and war movies, men protecting their homes, and men behaving like idiots. Older men are easy to please, particularly if a film stars Clint Eastwood and is about guys just like them, but they’re hard to motivate. “Guys only get off their couches twice a year, to go to ‘Wild Hogs’ or ‘3:10 to Yuma,’ ” the marketing consultant Terry Press says. “If all you have is older males, it’s time to take a pill.”

Studio marketers have a few rules for making their films seem broadly “relatable”:

Can’t we all get along? In “Stomp the Yard,” which was about an urban street dancer who goes to college, the poster showed the African-American hero with his back turned, leaving his race indeterminate. The campaign for “Bring It On” portrayed the story as a rivalry between white and black cheerleading squads, even though more than eighty per cent of the film was about the white squad. The first marketing materials for Fox’s X-Men franchise showed only an “X.” Why exclude half your audience?

If the poster shows a poster child, the movie is for kids. Posters are intended to tell you the film’s genre at a glance, then make you look more closely. Horror posters, for instance, have dark backgrounds; comedies have white backgrounds with the title and copy line in red. Because stars are supposed to open the film, and because they have contractual approval of how they appear on the poster, the final image is often a so-called “big head” or “floating head” of the star. Every poster for a Will Smith movie features his head, and for good reason: he is the only true movie star left, the only one who could open even a film about beekeeping monks.

Everybody’s a comedian. Any drama with at least three funny moments in it will be portrayed, in the trailer and TV spots, as a comedy. The trailer for the 2005 film “The Squid and the Whale” conveyed a measure of the film’s delicate unease, but it was basically a series of wry exchanges. A joke, particularly a pratfall, is self-contained, whereas a sad or anxious moment is hard to convey briefly and out of context.

If it’s called “The Squid and the Whale,” it’s somebody else’s problem. That movie was produced by Samuel Goldwyn Films, an independent studio, and grossed seven million dollars—quite good for a small film, but not for a studio release. If a movie’s title and stars don’t tell you almost everything you need to know about a film—“Get Smart,” starring Steve Carell, say—marketers worry. Fox had to spend a little extra to sell “The Devil Wears Prada,” because casual moviegoers wondered what Meryl Streep was doing in a horror film. When a movie underperforms, an awkward title is often seen as the culprit.

Always cheat death. People die in movies; they almost never die in trailers. They are courageous (“The Express”) or missing (“Changeling”) or profoundly alive (“Revolutionary Road”). “If a movie is completely, one hundred per cent about death, then it’s also about life, right?” Fox’s co-head of marketing, Tony Sella, told me. The only thing marketers can’t pull off, Sella acknowledged, is “selling old to young”—persuading kids to see a movie like “Driving Miss Daisy.” “You can try with”—he adopted a baritone voice-over—“ ‘You don’t know where you’re going, but here’s what it’s going to look like when you arrive.’ But they usually say, ‘Screw you, I’ll wait.’ ”

The only difference is in the roles portrayed. African-Americans almost always appear in advertising and sponsored shows as athletes, musicians, buffoons, and/or sidekicks. Women appear as mothers, wives, servants, and/or carbon-based blow-up-doll life forms.

The effects on the culture are the same: Subtle and light, yet widely dominant suppression of the chances for further progress in deflating sexist ideology.

I think there are more loopholes and exceptions to sexism than to racism within the marketing juggernaut. Nonetheless, I am convinced that further vanquishment of our legacy of racism and sexism (and also of other bio-fictitious fibs like nationalism) will not occur until we also begin to assail big business marketing and the overclass its serves.