The Super Bowl is known for its expensive advertising spectacles. It’s where the three Budweiser frogs debuted, it’s where Apple introduced the Mac in a 1984 commercial directed by Ridley Scott, and it’s where a scantily-clad Cindy Crawford slowly drank Pepsi in front of children.

This year M&Ms showed the world their latest anthropomorphised character, the imaginatively named Ms Brown.

Firstly, note that their tagline is “not your average chocolate”. M&Ms, produced by Mars, are the very definition of average chocolate. I completely fail to understand the draw of the M&M World stores, especially in the UK where we’re not even privvy to half the flavours the US has. Almond, coconut and pretzel M&Ms can only be found here in the overpriced import shops (though the fewer places pretzel M&Ms are, the better). Which means that London’s M&M World in Leicester Square is a completely unnecessary four floors of mostly empty space with a few shelves on each of repetitive merchandise.

So anyway: Ms Brown. Unlike the stupid male Red M&M she’s smart and she’s sassy. Her ‘role’ is Chief Chocolate Officer, and she has her own Twitter account where in her first tweet she quoted noted feminist author Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Then related it to chocolate.

Additionally Mars has chosen to give her quite an authoritarian look; it reminds me of another confused feminist character: Irene Adler, the dominatrix from a recent episode of the BBC’s Sherlock. Maybe Ms Brown is into S&M&M?

If Mars felt the need to introduce another M&Ms ‘thing’ I guess it seems right to make it female. Of the six characters, the only other female, the green M&M (creatively named Ms. Green), is a vacuous shopping-obsessed stereotype so this whole campaign was, I guess, a half-arsed apology to women.

But what bothers me most about the laziness of the M&Ms mascots is the fleshy arms and legs - do they have bones? And is that human skin? If M&Ms produce other M&Ms for the sole purpose of consumption, doesn’t that make them hugely complicit in the genocide of their own race?