Gwen of Sociological Images has a nice post about the

Jayna T. and V. sent in a number of commercials for home security systems. They point out that in all the commercials they’d seen (there are many, many, many more than what I have here), the intruders are men (White men, from what I can tell) and the person endangered is a White woman, either alone or with her daughter.

[multiple embedded videos illustrating the genre]

So they’re selling home security systems by playing on the idea of the vulnerable middle-class White woman, easily victimized in her home. Luckily, home intruders are easily frightened away by an alarm system and run for the hills.

She said it here.

It’s not exactly what you’d want to call progress, but wow are these ads different from maybe 10-15 years ago when basically the same scenarios (white women alone with their white daughters) with taglines like “you can’t be there to protect them 100% of the time” were pitched to prospective male customers.

But here’s the trick: it’s not progress even though the ads appear to be directly targeting independent and/or single head-of-household women instead of their middle-class-anxious, wife-as-unguarded-property male counterparts because recognizing demographic reality isn’t the same as respecting it.

Yes, compared even to the 1980s there are lots more middle-class households headed by women who are affluent and/or autonomous enough to make their own purchasing decisions. But the significant marker to applaud is the very real progress that’s led to a market demographic large enough for Brinks or Broadview to chose to exploit. The ads themselves, on the other hand, are merely exploitive. (Worse, actually, are their calculated plays on old stereotypes whereby all calls are answered by muscular, conventionally handsome white men who reassuringly say things like “I’m sending help right now” to the distraught but grateful victims.)