I was browsing around the internets the other day, and I came across this article from last year. It’s titled “How To Sell Humvees To Men,” and allow me to ruin the suspense and summarize the answer: you sell Hummers to men by calling them homos. Or, as the article puts it:
Freud argued that people respond to attacks on their identity by exaggerating the threatened trait. Scientists have noted since the 1950s that men who were insecure about their masculinity were more likely to be racist and authoritarian, though few sociologists have tested this by manipulating men’s insecurities experimentally. To investigate the effects of psychological emasculation, sociologist Robb Willer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and colleagues gave 111 Cornell undergraduates a gender identity survey, and regardless of the answers, told half that they appeared extremely feminine and half that they seemed terribly masculine. The researchers then surveyed students’ attitudes towards politics, homosexuality, and car purchases. Males who were told they were effeminate were more likely to support the Iraq war, Bush’s handling of the war, and a ban on gay marriage. Threatened men also expressed greater interest in buying an SUV, and they were willing to pay up to $7,000 more for the vehicle than their nonthreatened peers.
From this perspective, Jamie’s beloved Milwaukee’s Best advertising campaign – in which a giant beer can descends from the heavens to crush insufficiently manly men –looks somewhat more psychologically sophisticated (though no less offensive) than it seemed at first glance. It ratchets up masculine anxiety not by offering up stereotypically unmanly behavior, or by lampooning stereotypically effeminate men, but precisely by homo-baiting men for doing things that are barely even “un-manly” at all. Among the giant-beer-can-summoning behaviors are:
A guy comes out of the liquor store, and instead of holding some sixers of beer, he’s bought some of the new-fangled, flavored malt liquor beverages (e..g hard lemonade, twisted tea).
A guy gets a little silly on a trampoline.
Three guys fail to pitch a tent properly (a literal tent, and I suppose a symbolic one as well).
A guy is tossed a beer and ? wait for it ? he fumbles and drops it.
A guy dabs the excess grease off of his slice of pizza.
A guy steps away from the poker table to “check in” with his sweetie.
BOOM, down comes the beer can, and then the manly voiceover to drive the point home: “Men should act like men, and light beer should taste like beer.” The none-too-subtle point is that manly men drink Milwaukee’s Best light beer. The more subtle point is that you’re always, as a man, at risk of being or appearing unmanly. This risk, this danger, is further heightened by the fact that the ads feature the same group of four or five friends, and each one of them ends up, at one time or another, getting crushed by the masculine-norm-enforcing beer can. There’s not even refuge, in other words, in being the manliest of your friends, or in turning your least manly friend into the group sacrifice. In the Milwaukee’s Best world, every man is a potential fag. The Beer Can of Damocles hovers over him, at every moment, waiting to plunge into him if he makes a false, unmanly step.
Milwaukee’s Best is targeting a specific demographic with this campaign – “‘blue-collar, mostly men’ between the ages of 28 and 35,” apparently—and I’m not a part of that demographic. I’m not going to buy the beer to shore up my masculine credentials, both because the class symbolism in the campaign (and of the product) is not intended to manipulate me, and because I’m actually pretty good at ignoring the most blatant commercial attempts to manipulate me into buying things.
I’m not, however, immune from the anxiety and insecurity that the ad is trying to exploit. It’s just that it tends to play out in other realms of my life much more than it does in my relationship to the world of things to buy.
When my wife gets frustrated with me, for instance, because I can be passive and procrastinatory about doing certain kinds of “manly” things around the house –painting the front door, for instance, or using the drill to put a new towel rack in the bathroom –I almost always react as if my masculinity is being impugned. At my worst, I react by getting angry. I yell and scream and, occasionally, punch a wall or enact a kind of displaced violence. I get “manly,” in other words. I “respond to attacks on [my] identity by exaggerating the threatened trait.”
And it doesn’t take much for me to fall into that hole. It’s not as if my wife says to me, “Dan, you’re such a pussy, why can’t you drill a hole in the wall?” (though it would be nicely, if upsettingly, symbolic if she did say that). She says, “Dan, you keep promising to replace the towel rack but you don’t do it.”
I’m the one who, instinctively, constructs it as an attack of my masculinity because I have a whole heap of insecurities about my inadequacy when it comes to fixing things and using power tools, and because I’ve been conditioned by our macho culture into thinking that if I can’t work well with my hands I’m a big old puss.
I also, probably, procrastinate about doing these kinds of things precisely because I’m worried that I’ll screw them up, which leaves me with a kind of double whammy of masculine anxiety—I can’t do the things, which is unmanly, and I’m immobilized by worry about not being able to do the things, which is even more unmanly because men are, above all, supposed to be decisive.
I need a beer.
