The problems you highlighted in your editorial are actual, however please don’t suppose that advertisers care about them (The Guardian view on the John Lewis Christmas ad: a modern story of fathers and sons, 7 November).
This advert is a shameless try to make customers suppose they’re doing one thing worthwhile in shopping for overpriced presents in a failing retailer that used to share its earnings with employees however hasn’t paid them any bonus in the past few years.
If something, the relentless strain of promoting (the place the Christmas season begins earlier every year) solely serves to pile extra strain on people who find themselves struggling. The cynicism of those advertisements – pretending to care whereas desperately attempting to set off the Pavlovian Christmas buying response – is really miserable.
Chris Linward
Salford
Your editorial’s declare that the brand new John Lewis Christmas advert was “reminiscent of the Nineteen Nineties” and evoked “a simpler time to be a younger man” can be information to anybody who remembers that point because the period of laddism and Loaded, and the underlying unease about males’s emotional lives as proven in novels similar to Tim Lott’s White Metropolis Blue and Nick Hornby’s A couple of Boy. “Questions of up to date masculinity and fatherhood” existed again then too.
Derrick Cameron
Stoke-on-Trent
After studying your editorial on the John Lewis Christmas advert, am I the one one to really feel uncomfortable that not solely are the females within the narrative “shadowy figures within the background” however that their roles are home duties? I’m all for constructive male function modelling, however not with the (unintended) adverse consequence of perpetuating feminine stereotypes.
Brigid Reid
Leeds
