This New York Times article, which is almost certainly behind a firewall by now, is about the ongoing series of “Man Law” commercials for Miller Lite beer. The Man Law premise is the upscale version, basically, of the Milwaukee’s Best Light commercials that Jamie and I were annoyed by a few weeks ago. Actually, they are precisely the upscale version of those ads, as Miller Lite and Milwaukee’s Best Light are owned by the same company – Miller is their middle-class product, and the Beast is their working class (and frat boy) product. Anyway ?
In the television campaign, well-known male role models like Burt Reynolds, the rodeo champion Ty Murray, the comedian Eddie Griffin and the boxer Oscar de la Hoya, sit around a square table and discuss a new code of conduct that manly men are meant to live by (example: don’t put lime — or any fruit — in your beer).
The article goes into business-y details in celebration of Miller’s pathbreaking, envelop-pushing, imagineering, jaw-droppingly brilliant decision to ? wait for it ? start running print advertisements around the Man Law theme.
“No man shall own a dog smaller than a football,” declares one Miller Lite ad in the December issue of FHM, which shows a man walking a small white dog on a leash. It is not unlike a recent commercial for the Dodge Caliber in which a fairy transforms a tough guy walking a Doberman into a yuppie with yapping Pomeranians.
The second Miller Lite ad in the issue depicts a man lifting a huge suitcase into the trunk of a taxi cab. “No matter how long the trip, a man’s suitcase shall not exceed 1.8 cubic feet,” the headline proclaims.
The 2007 calendar offers a man law for each month. For instance, the January edict insists, “No man shall make any resolution that involves ‘watching his waistline.’ ” The October man law states: “In a pinch, it shall be perfectly acceptable for a man to commandeer female clothing for Halloween costuming purposes.”
I don’t know how much more I want to say about this kind of vulgar gender-typing – probably quite a bit, but not right now. I brought this up because I want to introduce a new feature to the website.
At Masculinity and Its Discontents, we don’t believe in “Man Laws,” with all their rigidity, linearity, logocentrism and heteronormativity. We do, however, believe in “Man Conjectures,” which are like Man Laws but with much less of all of those adjectives I just listed. A Man Law, for instance, declares that you can’t own a dog smaller than a football. A Man Conjecture, by contrast, might hypothesize that on cold winter mornings, when you’re lying in bed with your sweetie and you both realize that one of you has to get up and walk the (very small) dog in the very cold winter air, more often than not it’s gonna be the guy who does it.
A Man Conjecture, in other words, is a provisional attempt to make a reasonable generalization about a way that traditional gender roles persist even in modern, relatively enlightened society. Man Conjectures (manjectures, perhaps?) are always subject to revision, and in fact invite comment and suggestions for revision from our readers, particularly our women readers. Man Conjectures can even be rejected, or retired, if a sufficient quorum of readers feels that it doesn’t do it for them.
Anyway, to start things off, here’s my Man Conjecture #1:
Men still prefer to usher women into spaces. That might mean, for instance, holding the door for a woman, or it might mean, simply, letting women walk in front of you up the stairs. But men tend to feel boorish when they walk ahead of women, or precede them into spaces. Women, by contrast, don’t worry about this with respect to men (and probably don’t care, very much, whether men are gentlemanly in this way, or maybe they do — I’m not sure).
Any thoughts?
