: In June 2014, a Verizon ad was posted on blip.tv promoting the "Inspire Her Mind" campaign, further promoting women having careers in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (abbreviated STEM). It's a solid campaign with good examples to further its aims, but the commercial is quite suspect. In Time-Lapse, a girl named Sam is told time and again by her parents not to do certain things, such as "don't get your dress dirty," while rock climbing, "don't mess with that" when picking up a starfish on a beach, or even telling her a project is becoming too much to handle, said project being an impressive Solar System Mobile in her bedroom. The most egregious example comes in the form of this remark: "why don't you hand [the drill] to your brother" in the midst of building a model rocket. With all this together, the message can be misread as an attack against parents as promoting inadvertently androgynous ideals, limiting the feminine opportunity to just one that's saccharine and confining to
certain archetypes, as well as their insecurities. Before it's over, this can be seen as less girl-power oriented and more of a cry of "don't let your stubborn, obsolete family get in the way of your ambitions." A silver lining arrives at the end, where Sam notices a Science Fair poster in school and a narrator says that "it's time to tell her she's brilliant." Consider the commercial's structure: this young woman has had at least 15 years of this overshadowing, as well as the divine patience to deal with it, only to still be isolated to showing brilliance when the family is out of sight. Even for how inadvertently it's been delivered, the commercial's unintentional attack seems just as prominent when taking all of these happenings into account. In short, the campaign has great points and makes for another great display of Equality in Occupation
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, but this commercial only takes into account the
Fridge Horror of how any child's insecurities can be formed, especially in regards to the female psyche, in addition to the imposed superiority of parental ambitions and the inferiority complex in general.