And Yet It Went Out: How Institutions Normalize Misogyny

There is something almost reassuring about the individual misogynist.  At least we know where to locate the problem.  He says the ugly thing, makes the crude joke, demeans the woman in the room, and leaves little doubt about what he is.

Institutional misogyny is more dangerous because it is harder to see and easier to excuse.  It does not always arrive in the form of one openly hostile man.  It appears instead as a chain of approvals, silences, rationalizations, and failures of courage.  It survives because so many people participate in it indirectly, and because so few stop to say, “What, exactly, are we doing?”

That is why the recent Good Good x Callaway golf advertisement is so revealing.

A male golfer sees a female golfer reach for his club.  He tackles or throws her to the ground, stands over her, and warns her not to touch it.  The scene is presented as comedy, a knowing bit of exaggerated male possessiveness meant to sell a product and generate laughs.  The intended defense is obvious before anyone even utters it: relax, it is just a joke.

But that is precisely the point at which women are expected to abandon both reason and memory.  We have heard this defense all our lives.  “I was just being funny.”  “Can’t you take a joke?”  “You’re too sensitive.” 

For generations, misogyny has been laundered through humor.  The offensive act is recast as wit, and the woman who objects is recast as the problem.  Her discomfort becomes the breach of etiquette.  Her objection becomes the overreaction. Her refusal to laugh is treated as a greater social offense than the degradation itself.

Enough.

Violence against women is not funny. A man knocking a woman to the ground is not funny. A joke that depends upon female humiliation, intimidation, or physical domination is not edgy, irreverent, or daring.  It is merely old, offensive, and damaging. It is one of the oldest tricks in the cultural playbook: degrade a woman, call it humor, and then mock her if she declines to smile.

Still, offensive humor alone is not the most troubling part of this incident.  The truly disturbing question is not who first thought of the ad.  It is how many people saw it on its way to publication and failed to stop it.

An ad does not simply materialize.  Someone pitches the concept.  Someone approves the concept.  Someone writes or outlines the scene.  Someone schedules the shoot.  A crew gathers.  Cameras are set up.  The performers are styled and directed. The scene is filmed, likely more than once.  Someone edits the footage.  Someone reviews the cut.  Someone prepares it for release.  Marketing teams see it.  Brand teams see it.  Executives see it.  Lawyers may see it.  By the time it reaches the public, it has passed through layer after layer of human judgment.

And yet it went out.

That is institutional misogyny.

It is not merely one person with a bad idea.  It is the terrible ease with which a bad idea travels through an entire professional apparatus.  It is a system in which enough people either fail to recognize misogyny, do not care enough to challenge it, or lack the authority and support to stop it.  It is what happens when the degradation of women appears normal enough, familiar enough, or trivial enough to proceed unchecked through a supposedly sophisticated organization.

Somewhere in that process, perhaps someone felt uneasy.  Perhaps a junior employee thought, This is ugly.  Perhaps a woman in the room understood immediately what the imagery communicated.  Perhaps someone considered speaking up and then thought better of it.  That, too, is part of the story.  Institutional misogyny does not persist only because bad ideas are born.  It persists because institutions train people, subtly and effectively, to keep the machinery moving.

Junior employees learn quickly which objections make them sound thoughtful and which make them sound “difficult.”  Women learn quickly that objecting to sexism carries professional risk.  No one wants to be dismissed as humorless, shrill, dramatic, or, of course, too sensitive.  The language changes with the era, but the social mechanism remains the same: if you point out misogyny, you become the inconvenience.

This is one reason such incidents continue to occur even within companies that undoubtedly speak the language of inclusion. Many institutions now have statements about diversity, belonging, and respect.  They celebrate women in marketing campaigns, feature women in leadership pages, and issue polished declarations about equity. Yet those commitments mean very little if an ad showing a man violently subduing a woman can still make its way through the pipeline.  In that case, the institution has already told us what it truly normalizes.

And normalization is the heart of the problem.

Institutional misogyny is not always loud.  Often, it is ambient.  It is present in the assumptions people no longer examine. It is present in what passes as funny, in whose objections are downgraded, in what a company will tolerate so long as it appears marketable, viral, or on brand.  It is present whenever a culture asks women to endure indignity for the sake of everyone else’s comfort.

The scandal, then, is not only that the ad existed. The scandal is that it encountered an institution and the institution did not immediately recoil.

That failure matters beyond this one campaign.  Golf, like many industries, has long reflected a culture in which men’s territory, men’s appetites, and men’s perspectives are treated as the default. Against that backdrop, an ad in which a woman is physically punished for touching a man’s golf club is not random slapstick.  It draws from a much larger archive of entitlement and exclusion.  Its “humor” depends on a hierarchy the culture has been rehearsing for a very long time.

Women are told to ignore these things, to stop making everything political, to recognize a joke when we see one.  We do recognize it.  That is the problem.  We recognize the joke because we have lived inside its logic for decades.  We know how often women’s discomfort is minimized.  We know how often aggression is trivialized.  We know how often institutions protect the performance of innocence over the reality of harm.

So let me be plain.

Violence against women is not funny.  Institutional misogyny is not funny. And women are no longer obliged to prove their good humor by laughing at their own degradation.

If companies genuinely want to understand what accountability looks like,it begins with a prompt and documented investigation,not a vague expression of regret.  They should preserve every version of the concept, script, footage, edit, approval, and internal communication; identify everyone who proposed, reviewed, approved, or raised concerns about the campaign; and publish a clear account of how the decision was made.  The investigation should be led by an independent reviewer with expertise in workplace discrimination and advertising ethics, rather than by the same executives responsible for the campaign.

Companies should also remove the advertisement promptly, stop paid distribution, notify partners and platforms, and issue a direct apology that names the harm without blaming audience reaction or hiding behind claims of humor.  If employees or contractors raised concerns, the company should protect them from retaliation and explain how those concerns will be addressed.  Accountability may require disciplinary action, changes in leadership responsibility, or termination of partnerships when decision-makers knowingly disregard serious objections.

Prevention must be built into the creative process before a campaign reaches production.  Companies should require documented bias and harm reviews at the concept, script, casting, shoot, edit, and final-approval stages.  Those reviews should include women and people with relevant expertise in gender-based violence, harassment, and representation, with genuine authority to pause or reject a campaign.  Employees at every level should have confidential reporting channels, protection from retaliation, and a clear escalation process when a concern is ignored.  Mandatory training should address not only overt discrimination but also the use of humor to normalize humiliation, coercion, and violence.

Finally, companies should measure whether these reforms work. They should audit campaigns regularly, track complaints and near misses, report findings to senior leadership and boards, and make meaningful changes to approval structures when patterns emerge.  Inclusion cannot be reduced to a slogan or a casting choice.  It must be reflected in who has decision-making power, whose objections are taken seriously, and whether the institution is willing to sacrifice a supposedly clever idea before it harms people.

Until institutions are willing to answer honestly how so many people saw this and failed to stop it, they will continue to mistake public embarrassment for self-examination, and apologies for change.

The real issue is not that one offensive advertisement slipped through. The real issue is that the culture that produced it is still with us.  It is in the room before the pitch is made, in the silence after it is approved, and in the reflexive demand that women lighten up when we object.

We have lightened up long enough. Now companies must do the harder work: investigate what happened, protect the people who speak up, change the systems that allowed it, and make misogynistic advertising unacceptable at every stage of production.

And you, dear reader, have a responsibility too: to do the right thing and have the courage to speak up.  A male colleague recently described a vendor as “whining like a teenage girl.”  I asked him why he chose to characterize the whining as female.  “Men don’t whine?” I asked. That is the insidious nature of institutional racism, sexism, bigotry, and violence: unacceptable behavior is often disguised as ordinary language, humor, or habit. When that behavior is met with silence, everyone who remains silent helps normalize it. We are all accountable for what we permit to pass unchallenged.

So do not wait for someone else to object, for a formal complaint to be filed, or for public outrage to make courage safe. Interrupt the joke, question the language, document the concern, support the person who speaks up, and demand answers from the institutions that profit from these choices.  The time to challenge misogyny is not after the next harmful campaign goes live; it is now, in every room where it is proposed, approved, excused, or ignored.