Ellen shooed away the “bad ingredients” in this ad skit. (Photo: The Ellen DeGeneres Show)

Let’s just say right off the bat that Ellen DeGeneres has been making millions of people laugh for decades, especially over the past 13 years on her syndicated daytime talk show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show. The fun-loving, award-winning host and comedian is also known for being a philanthropist and a pioneer, as well as a damn good dancer.

However, a columnist for Instinct magazine brought our attention to an eyebrow-raising sponsored-ad skit that appeared on her show last week. During the less-than-two-minute sketch, three “average-looking” shirtless men representing the bad ingredients in other soups (such as preservatives and MSG) were shooed away to make room for three younger, buffer guys who symbolized the better (yummier, perhaps) ingredients found in Campbell’s.

While Ellen’s show is notorious for featuring segments with beefy guys showing some skin all in the name of fun, this columnist brought up an interesting point: “Imagine if Harry Connick Jr. did this on his show with women.”

Make way for the sexy guys! (Photo: The Ellen DeGeneres Show)

One male viewer posted this comment regarding the skit on EllenTV.com: “Campbell’s soup used ever so slightly pudgy men to demonstrate it doesn’t contain bad elements and hunky guys to demonstrate the good elements. I’m surprised to see this on Ellen. What if they’d used chubby females to show bad and slender, toned females to show good?”

This keen observation begs the question: Why the double standard?

“We feel we can joke about something when it seems less threatening,” Robi Ludwig, a psychotherapist and author of Your Best Age Is Now, tells Yahoo Beauty. In the terms of one’s appearance, she explains that women are sensitive about being objectified “because historically it has meant their being disempowered in some way. Because the truth of the matter is, for women, their beauty has been connected to their power and their success, to some degree.” Ludwig refers this theory to the term “evolutionary psychology.”

“Women had to rely on their femininity because that was a form of power — of being desirable and of showing that they could carry on genetic lines,” she states. “So when we attack a woman or objectify her, that’s taking away her power, because that’s primarily where a woman’s evolutionary power came from. But for men, that’s really not so much the case.”

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That’s because a man’s power, evolutionarily speaking, has been linked to his ability to earn a living and provide for his family. “And this has changed recently because women are becoming economically important — their financial status has become more important — which has equalized the playing field,” continues Ludwig. “So for men to be objectified is a fairly new concept, and these ideas take a long time to truly change.”

However, another relatively new concept is that men also suffer from body image issues and are diagnosed with eating disorders and body dysmorphia (also known as body dysmorphic disorder) at increasing rates.

“We tend not to think about men as being affected by these types of issues, but they are,” she states. “Because of the ads that are around, men have been impacted more about how they experience themselves and their looks. The more images they see to compare themselves to, the more this can increase their own level of shaming and their own insecurities about how they look and how they feel about their looks. Women have had to deal with this reality for much, much longer, but men have become vulnerable too.”

So even though times have changed, gender differences remain.

“While there are similarities, men and women are still different,” concludes Ludwig. “As much as we want to deny that reality, there are still some truths. It’s a cultural reality.”

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