Via Cracked, we have the five most insulting ways products are advertised to men. I’m going to assume you’ve gone over there and read the article, on account of my article will be far more boring and lacking in dick jokes. (Also, less ableist, so go me.)
5. Assume Men Are Stupid (And Proud Of It)
This is part of a distressing trend towards defining masculinity around anti-intellectualism, which is probably some of the reason why men tend to do less well in school and are less likely to go to college. See also: “boy books,” which involve explosions and boogers and Captain Underpants. Don’t get me wrong, Captain Underpants rocked my fifth-grade underpants, but I think it is a bit condescending to assume that boys can’t be interested in reading unless it is a book with poop jokes involved.
Masculinity tends to define itself as Not X: “not woman,” of course, but that’s fairly simple, because no matter how unmanly they are most men manage to pass the “not woman” test with flying colors. So it defines itself against other groups, the membership of which is perpetually in flux. “Not faggot” is a perennial favorite. And so is “not nerd.” Real men don’t care about school! Real men get Cs and never study!
4) Question Your Masculinity
Speaking of masculinity defining itself against things…
What all these ads have in common is the following argument: “if you do not buy our product, you are probably a woman. Masculine people are Not Women. So buy our product or you won’t be masculine.”
Masculinity, in our culture, is an achieved state: you don’t just get to be masculine because your pronoun is “he.” You have to go about proving you aren’t a woman ALL THE TIME by drinking some shitty-ass beer.
3) Dress Ordinary Products Up As Manly Industrial Power Tools
It’s our old friend femmephobia! Hi femmephobia, nice to see you again.
The advertisements here are either for grooming products (razor, loofah) or an iron. Both of those are feminine objects in our culture, because adornment is gendered female. But GOD forbid that men seem feminine by doing such a girly thing as removing hair or wanting clothes that aren’t wrinkly. So the products get compared with power tools and machines and similarly manly things, and all is right with the world.
2) Turn Regular Foods and Flavors into Sausagefests
Okay, seriously, what is it with meat-eaters and bacon? I tried bacon once! It is kind of salty and meaty and gross! It is not worth all the hero-worship, guys. If you have to lord your superior foodstuffs over the herbivores of the world, might I suggest cheese? Or perhaps smoked salmon? Smoked salmon is delicious.
Other than that, I think I’m going to fold my discussion of this into the next point…
1) Assume You’re Hungry for a Heart Attack
“Masculine” food, in American culture, means two things: fatty and with huge portion sizes. So because bacon tends to be bad for you, it’s a manly food. Canned soups and yogurt aimed at men advertise that they’re big enough for a man’s hunger. And God forbid that men eat something that’s diet food.
In our shitty sexist culture, women face a Beauty Myth: you have to be thin and young and cute, or you aren’t worth anything as a person. So a lot of the female population spends a lot of its time dieting. However, to be a man is to be a Not Woman, and therefore real men can’t even eat healthily (unless they’re athletes, in which case they get an exception for being manly sports dudes). They have to eat burgers and fried chicken, not “chick food” (i.e. diet/healthy food) like salads.
I remain boggled at the gender politics of food. I mean, candy and carrots are both good! One should have both of them in one’s diet! Both constantly dieting and constantly overeating are terrible for one’s health! If I didn’t know better I’d say all this was created by a consortium of doctors trying to create repeat business.
About ozyfrantz
@gillianlove
The fact that that we have evolved to be omnivores means that I don’t believe that killing animals for meat is in and of itself unethical. I can still have problems with the methods used to raise and slaughter the vast majority of meat animals in the industrial world.
Now, obviously it’s a question of degree, but in my original post was specifically pointing out that i don’t find the majority of vegetarians and vegans “preachy”. I want to reiterate – i don’t find simply stating your position problematic, especially if i had asked about it. Often I’ll actually enjoy a good discussion/argument – something that i’m aware that others might find off-putting, so I try to be aware if it’s welcomed or not. Now that i’m trying to verbalize it, i guess there are 3 main factors that can make me feel preached at:
1. Unsolicited (especially if the topic is shoehorned into conversation at the slightest opportunity, or even without opportunity)
2. Repeated
3. Unwillingness to even consider other viewpoints as valid.
@PetroniusArbiter: Being “preachy” in the way you describe is definitely counter-productive. (I’m a vegan myself since sixteen years, and will present my arguments if people ask, but not unless they ask.)
Still, I think there’s an important difference between preaching veganism and preaching gender roles. If you’re preaching veganism, that’s because you think people are doing something which is ethically wrong. If you’re preaching gender roles, you do this just because you’re annoyed with people who seem “different” in some way.
Btw, doesn’t everyone consider bacon healthy these days? Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE who’s trying to lose weight nowadays do it by cutting down carbs to a minimum… by living on bacon, eggs, fatty cheese, cream and all kinds of meat.
Oh my, I think it is time to link this:
The Comment Section for Every Article Ever Written About PETA
http://thehairpin.com/2012/03/the-comment-section-for-every-article-ever-written-about-peta
I see some of them here already!
PS: Meat is murder. GROSS!
I’m also certain a lot of below middle-class men would love the opportunity to explore a variety of food if given a chance. People that can prioritize eating “non-manly” should knock-off the sexist bullcrap and count their blessings! Growing up working-class/poor, we got what we got. My (at the time single) dad worked(s) six days a week as a truck driver delivering poultry and meat; we ate it so he knew we’d always have food. My single mother with no car got us food that food stamps would cover. Veganism, etc., wasn’t an option.
shhhhhhh, no trolling….
In a related note, what is daiya?
Daiya is a kind of vegan cheese that tastes better than standard soy cheese and actually, you know, melts.
Re # 3 – While I don’t think it’s good writing to drop the liberally drop the word “man” into an advertising campaign, as if we were some new kind of Smurfs, and assuming I enjoy power tools is just as sexist as assuming women love vacuum cleaners, is it always de-facto femmephobia to realize that appealing to the feminine doesn’t appeal to the masculine? If one’s product caters to the feminine, and you’d like to expand your market, why not create a version of a product to appeal to the masculine? I read this article before and didn’t reread it today- but didn’t the author start smacking on a bottle of shampoo for being redesigned in black? Or a loofah for being made blue and gray or something?
Sometimes saying “I don’t believe in sexism,” is an excuse to act sexist. Just like video games and comic books could stand to be less androcentric and produce more androgynous and fem-friendly stuff, I think there are commercial markets that could stand to cater to men more. I don’t think lady nerds should accept “Stop being so sensitive,” as a brush off when they want a little a recognition – men don’t need femmephobia, emotional immaturity, or insecurity, as a brush off when they’d like the same. If something only comes in Feminine or Androgynous- that’s sexist. When they come out with Masculine, and you shame the guy who continues to buy Feminine yeah, that’s sexist, too. But when you shame the men (and women) buy the Masculine by implying they’re dumb, unenlightened sheeple who are afraid of pink, that’s still sexist.
I think it’s right to slam most of these advertisement campaigns for promoting negative stereotypes and insulting guys. but I can’t get onboard with yelling about creating options just because the option created was directed at men. Options are good, just so long as you don’t yell at people for picking the ‘wrong’ one.
tl;dr It feels like I see a lot of “This needs to change so women can enjoy it,” coupled with “Men need to change so they can enjoy this.” That’s not the absence of sexism.
The current one winding me up here in NZ is a campaign by one of the major brewers that states that men do not enjoy wine – they pretend to, but they always pine for beer. Aside from the sexism, that one’s JUST PLAIN WRONG.
Even my friends who drink for the purpose of getting horribly wasted (by far the most stereotypically manly way to drink) drink wine – and do it on purpose. Wine, after all, comes out ahead on the all important price:alcohol/mls ratio.
Here you go, welcome to the joy of New Zealand’s version of “ironic manliness” – ugh.
Other than getting off on a tangent about the finer points of vegetables or tubers, we have manwich, hungry man etc, and conjures up the image of big brawny men, certainly not dainty ladies, but odd, my wife likes them too, closet lesbian? And that’s what ticks me off. The idea that no one says a peep when she does feminine stuff, or masculine stuff, and is even applauded for it when she expresses masculine tastes, or rather what they’ve determined to be masculine tastes, yet if I order a salad, or choose to wear a pink shirt today, or tell my buddies I’m cooking or cleaning the house, then the jokes, the snide comments ate right behind. And what bugs me even mtore is that those comments are somewhat expected from the guys since it’s an odd expression of being friends when they bust your chops, but when the girls start in almost immediately I want to call them out as hypocritical and a standard bearer for the double standard sheeple mentality. Don’t they have a clue how much they are fussing their own gender? They are falling right into misogynist nonsense but are too dull to see it. Scary.
BTW, I hate the auto correct too, but I’m sure you get the right sense of the words I was intending to write.
Thinking a bit more on this, what really scares me for our culture is when the women do this they really do know what they’re doing, but are being so driven to conform to approval of the androgynous superiority mentality that they’re willing as bruno mars says to throw their head on a blade for them, and catch a grenade for them. They’re so easily led to being stupid makes me think they have a right to be in the position they are.
Cracked is being surprisingly progressive recently. Case in point.
I think it’s considered normal and okay for women to diet, but the ideal women should be super-thin WITHOUT dieting. That way, she’s beautiful without being vain, which is what our culture values most in a woman.
@Birdman
“They’re so easily led to being stupid makes me think they have a right to be in the position they are.”
Seriously, fuck you. Fuck. you.
@gillian. That was really uncalled for. I was talking about people in general, and women in particular that have been put down so often for absolutely no reason than for easily.sexism, and then turn it around on someone else.
just to make myself a bit clearer about wanting to fit in so much, which is why I bel;ieve my comment was taken completely out of context, when I was much younger, I was in a school that was very clique-ey. There were the in crowd and the out crowd. I was not in the inner sanctum. I had a friend who was even further out, and one day the innies started making fun of him, because of his economic status more than anything else. and trust me, our family status was not that much better, but by comparison it was. Anyway, instead of standing by him, I then joined the pack in order to “fit in” with the herd. The look of hurt on his face has haunted me ever since. I tried to apologize, but he wouldn’t accept it, for good reason. From that day forward I NEVER did that again. Not because of race, or sexual orientation gender-ism or economic-ism or any other ism. That was a valuable lesson because it made me think and see for the first time in my life how insidious the herd mentality can be, the need to fit in can cause a person to go to the dark side so quickly, the stupid side. and I surely went to the stupid side so easily and quickly.
So my point was that if you were black say, or gay, and those that are supposed to understand how you are feeling when dissed and attacked, then show up on the other side , for THEIR feelings of wanting to ensure the herd’s attacks on them are deflected so they join forces with the wrong side, then it’s betrayal, and makes them no better, and in my view somewhat even worse than the ones starting it. @ gillian, I believe you took this out of context for your own feelings, your own experience or viewpoint, say nasty things without explaining what your take on it is, and certainly without knowing why I have little respect for people who are supposed to know me, and then pull this, and perhaps assuming from your own experience is really unsettling.
From the example above, again, to this day, have NEVER judged another person for their personal preferences, their expression of themselves, and have followed a belief system that is ruled by, for myself and others, do anything you want, as long as you don’t hurt anybody else in the process. I may not like you, I may not have any interest in even learning anything about you, but I will never make sweeping conclusions about you so that it makes me fit in with what others may believe, valid belief or not.
Just a little funny comment on ethical treatment of animals and vegetarianism. No, it is not offensive (I think).
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2393#comic