Inveterate champion of the put-upon and the oppressed, Roy Colbert speaks ups for a newly pilloried minority.
I was incredulous when the Splash Consulting Group reported last month that they had surveyed women's attitudes to their portrayal in television advertising, and that 81% had found cause for resentment.
"Hah!" - as Kim Hill would say.
I'm sure women are misrepresented and impugned in television advertising, but men have been in television advertising since the dawn of time.
In fact, just in television, from Fred Flintstone to Homer Simpson.
That women would want to claim equality in advertising-impugning, as well as everything else, is outrageous.
But it is outrageous principally because they are not the only people who should be complaining.
The boundaries have been newly broken down by needlessly young advertising thinker-uppers fuelled on Red Bull, loud rock music and an Otago University education.
TV advertising is now impugning a whole new subculture of human, with gender thrown to the wind.
TV advertising is now impugning "gingas".
Why? I know there is a mythology of red-haired children in ancient villages being tortured because they descended from Lucifer, but, as someone who married into a ginga family, I have never been allowed to believe that.
However, it seems our current TV advertisers do.
They want the bullying to continue.
Let's just take three common television ads completely at random, and measure the ginga component.
The Elba dishwasher ad has a woman hurtling around the house in a psychotic frenzy until she finally flings herself from a balcony rail into a tree - to rescue a cat or a hat, I cannot quite tell.
She then falls, presumably, to her death.
Meanwhile, the dishwasher just bubbles on, because that is what dishwashers do; they don't save lives, they just wash dishes.
The woman is clearly a nong.
If the cat in the tree is the problem, she should ring the fire brigade.
If it's a hat, she's even more stupid.
Plus, she shouldn't be doing household tasks, that's man's work.
And nobody of sound mind would have tried a Cirque du Soleil leap to a tree from a balcony rail without supervision.
The woman in the Elba dishwasher ad is a ginga.
Then there's the Westpac ad about how easy it is to set up your banking needs, even if there's an insurmountable problem.
Gordon from Glasgow is incomprehensible, but Westpac can do incomprehensible, so they set up Gordon's lifetime banking needs in 40 seconds.
We also meet the son, Wee Hamish, who cried all the way out here, but doesn't cry now he is in the presence of the woman from Westpac.
Because Westpac do crying, too.
Gordon and Wee Hamish are both nongs.
Gordon doesn't look after his hair, can't speak properly, and keeps Wee Hamish in a cardboard box.
Wee Hamish is happy living in a cardboard box.
It is tautologous to point out they are both gingas, Wee Hamish startlingly so.
And finally, the Sky ad.
A 10-year-old boy, dishevelled and tear-stained, is pictured impaled on a coat hook in a school corridor.
The ad says that $49 will buy you seven minutes of private-school education, but a whole month of the education that is Sky.
Now this of course impugns private schools, but we'll gloss over that and address the hapless little boy.
He has been bullied, OK, but what sort of boy would allow himself to be hung on a coat hook? Only a nong, surely.
Did I mention coat-hook boy is a ginga? No need.
Impugning of gingas is insidiously creeping in.
Stand tall, paint up your protest signs and tell the research poll people at Splash.
Men and women are done for in television advertising, but for gingas, there may still be time.
Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
