I came across this ad, in the form of a multi-page booklet, while thumbing through the lastest car mag to arrive in my mailbox (I think it was Car And Driver). OK, the cover's kind of amusing, so I thought I'd page further into it. What I found was the sort of misogyny that might be funny in the hands of the writers for Married… With Children, but it totally falls flat when done by people who think that it's a great idea to put the Korean-built Aveo on a billboard with the tagline "An American Revolution". The stupidity starts right on the first inside page, with bold print proudly proclaiming "Boys play with trucks. Girls play with dolls. Let's start there." Things don't get any better. The whole thing just reeks of ad guys who are trying to act tough, when we know damn well they're not driving pickup trucks to their chest-waxing appointments.

Let?s establish a few things. First, trucks are getting easier to live with every year, and anyone wanting to put hair on his chest isn?t going to do it by driving a modern truck. Our grandfathers were not manly because they had a 4x4 with power folding mirrors, heated leather seats, and an engine that doesn?t require maintenance for 100,000 miles. This whole idea that it takes a ?real man? to drive a new truck is a bunch of crap. GM doesn?t even sell a light truck with a solid front axle, after all. If they want to bring back kingpins, then maybe we can start with the Y-chromosome posturing.

Second, pickup trucks are GM?s best-selling product line - so why alienate so many buyers? Women play a role in 80% of new-vehicle purchase decisions, and GM pickups represent nearly 1/16th of all new-car sales. This is not a position that is likely to be maintained by pissing off a bit more than half of one?s customer base.

Finally, most non-commercial ?real use? of a pickup truck occurs in a family setting. By that, I mean towing a boat or travel trailer, or hauling a couple cubic yards of black dirt for the garden. As much as us guys might want to think that we really need a pickup for bringing dirt bikes into the woods or hauling a Hemi engine block to the local machine shop, this simply is not the case for most users. To be perfectly honest, it?d be tough for me to justify having my pickup if I wasn?t a married homeowner.

I guess the real reason this ticks me off, though, is that most of the women in my life have had absolutely no problem using pickups in the intended manner, such as my mom who had no problem hopping in our family?s ?78 GMC K25 and using it to pull our 34? travel trailer, and my mother-in-law plows driveways with a ?83 Ford F-250. To be honest, though, this sort of advertising probably doesn?t affect these people too much - they?re too busy trying to get work done to be caught up in reading a stupid ad.