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.
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
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… Read more »
@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.
@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.
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.
Cracked is being surprisingly progressive recently. Case in point.
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.
BTW, I hate the auto correct too, but I’m sure you get the right sense of the words I was intending to write. 🙂
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… Read more »
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”… Read more »
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… Read more »
Daiya is a kind of vegan cheese that tastes better than standard soy cheese and actually, you know, melts.
shhhhhhh, no trolling….
In a related note, what is daiya?
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.
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!
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.
@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.
@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… Read more »
Describing food as “Manly” or “Feminine” is hilarious to me. How can a food product be feminine? What does that make a steak salad? I love them by the way.
I do not think that advertising genderized foods but saw that people thought like that and brought it out in the open, when before people just thought it and never said anything.
@PetroniusArbiter “… and in blatant disregard of facts (such as, ohhh, anywhere between .5 and 2.5 mil. years of evolution as omnivorous scavenger/opportunistic meat eaters).” How does the fact we’re omnivores change the fact that it might be ethically wrong to eat animal products, and treat animals the way we do? I found your comment interesting, because I hear the same thing all the time from people who feel they are being ‘preached at’ by feminists, vegans, eco-warriors… If someone makes a misogynist comment, I will push back and tell them I find it offensive, and why. That person might… Read more »
Potatoes are tubers, and beans are technically seeds, so they are generally not considered a vegetable in the same way rice or wheat is not considered a vegetable. Green beans are the exception, as most of what you are eating with those is the fibrous pod, rather than the actual beans.
Anyway, unless you are using it in a strictly botanical sense, what is and is not considered vegetable is rather arbitrary, so this was mostly intended to show what i mean when i say vegetables. It’s largely besides the point, and i probably shouldn’t even have included that sentence.
“Don’t think you can count potatoes and beans as vegetables, unless you use a definition that more or less includes any plant matter.”
So just what the heck are beans and potatoes? Fruit? My eleventh edition Merriam-Webster defines vegetable as: ” a usu. herbaceous plant (as the cabbage, bean, or potato) grown for an edible part that is usu. eaten as part of a meal; also, such an edible part”.
Question of taste, really. Don’t think you can count potatoes and beans as vegetables, unless you use a definition of vegetables that more or less includes any plant matter (unless you mean green beans i guess?). Tomatoes i just slice raw, with some olive oil, salt and pepper. As for boiled vegetables – i pretty much won’t eat any vegetable that has been boiled. Much prefer them raw, or stir fried at most.
Have you tried using lemon juice in salads instead of vinegar? I’m not too fond of vinegar myself, though i’ll have some balsamic dressing now and then.
Sometimes I wonder if bacon is so celebrated because it’s the opposite of what Experts claim is Good For You: it is in no way “balanced,” low-fat, low-sodium, low-calorie, nor vegetable sourced.
“Just as an example, since i saw Schala’s last post after i wrote mine – zie says “I never ate a salad in my life, and probably won’t ever either”. That baffles me, as i love salad – i’ll always have something green with my steak, or at least a sliced tomato. ” I don’t mind vegetables with my meat either. Carrot, potatoes, beans of various kinds (preferably cut), tomatoes in a state that isn’t whole or sliced (they can be diced, mashed or anything small enough to just be a “red lump”, or a kind of sauce, thick or… Read more »