I watched it again, without audio. All I got from that was awkward glances. Maybe I’m filtering what I see from the backstory of a brother and sister who haven’t seen each other for a while.
Once I was standing next to one of my brothers at a local fete. We were talking and joking as usual, when a new neighbor of mine walked up. My brother is married, and wears a ring. My neighbor made a comment that led me to realize he’d assumed we were a couple - until he saw the look of horror on my face. My brother and I look nothing alike, so I figured it was a combination of that and the idea that there must be some relationship between people of the opposite sex interacting like close friends. He just picked the wrong relationship. If he’d seen me arguing with my other brother, he would’ve probably thought we were an old married couple about to go through a bitter divorce.
It’s probably because families display affection differently, and encountering something more or less than what they are used to makes some people uncomfortable. This is why those SNL sketches with families who interact differently are Thanksgiving classics (The Loud Family, the one with boys lacking salivary glands, etc.).
Kissing and hugging tend to get the most reaction. There are some families where men kiss, and others who cringe if there’s anything more than a handshake between males. Some kiss everybody on the lips. Others only kiss on the cheek, or air kiss.
As a kid, I used to dread the initial ten minutes of extended family gatherings, because it was like running the gauntlet of crushing, kissing, and cleanup (because every female relative wore lipstick). Fortunately times have changed, and even my serial hugger friends always ask before they move in to squeeze out my “sweet, sweet energy juices*.” Describing interactions as creepy seems to imply non-consensual or illicit behavior.
I’ve heard this so many times when traveling, it’s not funny. The worst variant is that the locals would buy the product, but can’t afford it because of taxation. Unless the product is something rare, it’s often cheaper to search for it in the U.S. than to find it in another country and bring it home. A co-worker of mine once asked me to call from Canada to tell him the price of Johnnie Walker Blue, just to compare with what he had to pay in Dubai or Lahore.
Just want to say that the alternation of replies about brother-sister incest and the quality of coffee in various territories in this thread is a thing to behold.
The extended family I grew up with is all about manly handshakes between guys and little hugs from women. There’ll probably be a muted “hey, good to see you” and some stoic nods, then talk about sports, jobs, and the weather. I can’t possibly imagine any of my uncles or cousins hugging me.
The family I’m a part of now – the brothers and sisters of my partner – kiss on the cheeks, hug tightly, yell and swear and laugh. It’s better, but I’m still getting used to it!
I guess it made me think of the other thread where, similarly, there seemed to be a lot of judgment from those who thought the commercial was not creepy towards those who thought it was creepy. In that case there was the implication that missing the creepiness was buying into sexism as well, but here there isn’t that.
It just makes me think about how being told something is creepy when you didn’t find it creepy might come across as an attack to people. Like if I don’t see something as creepy and then you tell me you did I feel like you are saying I’m either imperceptive or that I normalize the creepy part. So the person who’s been told it’s creepy reacts by saying, “You’ve got a warped perspective” / “It’s all in your head”.
Anyway, just like with the other one, when you get to a sufficiently large crowd of people responding to a commercial in the same way, it’s fair to say that the message they got was in the commercial not just in their heads*.
But like if someone made a product with a name that happened to be a homophone of an offensive word in a language I didn’t know, that information would be contained in the product name*, but I would have no way to access that information. Whatever messages people are getting/not getting from this commercial are clearly mediated through some experience or lens (that could to relate to culture, upbringing, ability to read emotions from facial expressions, etc) but instead of noting that we have different lenses on things we are arguing about who is seeing it right.
Of course you’re right too. If someone watched this commercial and thought, “That’s how I act with my brother/sister” and someone else said it looked like incest, being on the defensive about that seems pretty natural.
* All non-private ideas are large physical objects with mass and volume encompassing parts of various people’s brains as well as various other parts of the world that store the idea and connect the brains, but I’m ignoring that for these purposes.
Yeah, I didn’t and don’t see it… It all seems pretty chaste to me. In point of fact, the young woman strikes me as a late teen/high schooler, living at home with mom and dad when her idolized older brother comes home from the Peace Corps. Probably just as Folgers intended.
Perhaps it’s because I’m not far from being old enough to be her grandfather. I suspect the target demographic and likely screening audience was upper-middle class cisgender white folks in their 50’s.
Edit: My brother-in-law frequently asks Mrs. Campesino to ship him US branded Folgers to the UK. I suppose he’s just gotten used to the taste.
