The story: "No More Man Laws"
The analysis:
- After searching many articles, the article I finally chose is about a Miller Lite commercial. A while back Miller Lite released an ad campaign focusing on manly behavior, and listed a set of rules for men. These rules were pretty much guidelines on how to be a “real man”. Those rules were as follows; no man shall mute the t.v to answer his wife or girlfriend, no man shall garnish his beer with fruit, and finally no man shall put two rival beers in the same cooler. With that being said those were only a few of the laws voted on by men. When advertising their commercials they only used celebrities known for being “manly men” such as Burt Reynolds, Jimmy Johnson and Triple H from WWE. In these ads they discuss unacceptable manly behavior such as never wearing diamond earrings because they are a women’s best friend, and leaving your food or your seat for more than five minutes constitutes fair game for others.
In Byron Hurts documentary on hip-hop he discusses masculinity as one of the important social scripts. Being a manly man not only applies to hip-hop, but to most the male population as a whole. One of the rules was to never to garnish a beer with fruit. This was an obvious homophobic remark because drinking a fruity drink or even garnishing a manly beer with fruit is considered “totally gay”. I personally work in a restaurant and when I have a male order a pina colada or any fruity drink, I find myself wondering why they did not get a beer. Are they gay? Are they a wimp? These tend to be my initial thoughts. Then I start to wonder why I would even think such ridiculous nonsense. A guy orders a fruity drink and that’s considered a sign of weakness? Gender roles obviously start at a young age because from the minute I started drinking alcohol if you weren’t drinking beer or hard liquor you were considered a “pussy”.
I chose this article because I find it very interesting how corporate companies market their products to us. In this campaign it is obvious that they are attacking a male’s masculinity to sell a “manly beer”. “If you drink a fruity beverage then you might be considered a sissy, so show your strength and drink a Miller Lite”. That should be the perfect slogan for any beer company, wait …it already is!
1 comment:
What I find interesting here is the conflation between "less manly" and "gay" - as if the two were naturally related even though: 1) there's entire subcultures amongst gay men that valorizes hyper-masculine behavior and body image and 2) there's an automatic presumption that sexuality and masculinity are inherently linked. In other words, that "real men" like women and therefore, any behavior that appears to be "less man-like" is also presumed to be "less heterosexual." There are some major jumps in logic there but the attitude is something you can find throughout society.
In any case, beer ads - like cigarette ads - are fascinating distillations of social values and ideas. It's gotten to the point where some beer ads acknowledge how calculated they're being...yete this self-awareness is part of what makes the brand "cool." It's kind of genius.
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