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All I ask is that these ads be more or less representative of reality, and the reality is that there are plenty of black men in the military; more than enough for an ad to include one without it being political. Messaging that the military is for women is on balance harmful imo, while messaging that the military is for men of all races is much better than the alternative, especially if done in a way that doesn't alienate white men.
Why should they be representative of reality?
Like, literally asking, they are not a documentary, nor even an intricately crafted worldbuilding exercise. They're just marketing tools, trying to accomplish a goal.
Obviously one of their goals is increasing recruitment among women, which I'm guessing makes sense in a modern army that's as much about piloting drones and filing paperwork as it is about carrying a hundred pound pack 40 miles through the desert or w/e.
Maybe it was a bad strategy to try to recruit women with that type of ad (though I wouldn't conclude that based solely on this blog's argument), but I don't see why it's bad for an advertisement to not be reflective of reality?
Most ads are not.
A second-hand anecdote, for what it's worth:
Shortly after I graduated high school, but while both my younger brothers were still attending the same institution (a little over 20 years ago now), our mother began volunteering in our school's (small, poorly-maintained) library. And after Middle Brother graduated, Mom undertook to fix up and update the library's rather terrible collection of college prep/research/application materials, having then helped two kids through the process.
As a result of this, she also ended up with students asking for help searching the materials for schools of particular interest. And in one memorable incident, one girl (for context, an upper class white girl), after looking through the materials from various schools with an eye to their ethnic make-up, asked my mother for help in finding a school that wasn't "too white," since the best she could find was "only" a quarter black. How, my Mom asked, was that "too white"? Well, you see, this high school senior didn't want to attend a university that was "boring" and "racist," and so wanted one whose school body reflected the American population — you know, about one third black.
So my mom attempted, with the help of handy reference books containing government-sourced figures, to inform this young women as to the country's actual demographics. She didn't want to hear it, insisting that those figures had to be wrong, because she could clearly see for herself that America has a lot more black people than that any time she watches TV.
(So my mom just dug out the brochure they had for a historically black college, handed it off, and moved on.)
Yes, one teenager a couple decades ago does not alone a pattern make, but media representation does indeed influence people's views, for better or worse.
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I think people are pretty susceptible to propaganda, and even subtle things like tweaking racial/sexual makeups of a military squadron go a long way to feeding people false beliefs about the military. I don't want people to be stupid or have false beliefs, so I dislike these unrepresentative ads. That's pretty much it from a marketing standpoint.
From the military's standpoint, I think such ads are pretty ungrateful. Sending the message "the military is for women" also sends the message, at least partially, "the military is not for men." If all your ads feature crowds 90% composed of interracial female technicians building missiles, the real life white men working on the missiles are given proportionally somewhere between half and 1/10 of the recognition they deserve, and the women are given somewhere between 2x and 10x their earned recognition. This rises to the level of annoyance when everyone is doing it, because if you're not specifically paying attention you'll get the impression that every business is manned (sorry) by such groups while the men sit around at home or something.
Furthermore I think it's harmful for more women to join the military. Good for the military, sure--I'm sure they'll be helpful there--but all this stuff pushing women into traditionally male roles just harms both genders.
In the end I don't feel too strongly about it though, and it comes down to ingroup/outgroup signaling more than anything else. I want big powerful institutions to be on my team.
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