Another Beer Commercial
I have a very clear memory of writing about the beer commercial that started it all off for me (and by “it” I mean my obsession with and rage at images of masculinity in beer ads), but I can’t seem to find said post in our archives, so I guess it was before the blog took its current form. The ad in question is one you may be familiar with, dear reader, as it has spawned the ubiquitous lad neologism “wingman.” The (in)famous Coors Light Wingman ad was one that many have found hilarious (in large part because of its music, a mini-rock-anthem with a passionate falsetto refrain), a few have found inspirational, and perhaps a couple besides your humble scribe have found infuriating. So I’d like to (re)address it before I get to my latest rant about beer-sculinity, the Heineken Draft Keg robot ad.
So please, watch “Wingman,” above.
Okay, now that you’ve watched it, let’s do something of a close reading/viewing, as I initially did to explore why it made/makes me so fucking mad. First, let us consider the lyrics:
This chick’s rockin’ your bro on the dance floor
Okay, we are introduced to a fellow being “rocked” by a “chick” while another fellow, a “bro” – in this case simply fraternital (that’s right, “fraternital,” a new word to adjectivally distinguish fraternities from brotherliness) slang for “friend” – is apparently nearby, watching, envious.
But she’s towing an anchor, A junior investment banker, who talks about herself and not much more
The plot thickens. Said “chick” doing said dance-floor rockin’ is accompanied by another young woman who is a burdensome narcissist. Thus, our protagonist, if you will, is in a less enviable position than his “bro,” who is dancing with a smiling, mini-skirted, hair-whipping-back-over her shoulder “good-time girl,” if you will. Although perhaps that term, “good-time” is misleading, as it suggests a “loose” woman, a woman without virtue. This woman is not that, not quite. She has just enough virtue that she is not a given sexual partner for the night, she is a challenge, a potential conquest, who also needs to be separated from her friend (from the herd), rocked on said floor, then rocked, as a baby, if you will, into submission via alcohol and compliment and “listening,” but who doesn’t need nearly so much tending to that she’d ever be called an “anchor.”
So buy her a beer, that’s the reason you’re here, mighty wingman.
Perhaps this would be a good point to refer to Urbandictionary.com, where a few good men can always be counted on to provide sensible clarification:
“A Wingman is a buddy that takes care of the ugly fat friend who is always standing two feet next to the hot chick you want to get with. . . . The Wingman “occupies” the ugly girl IN ANOTHER ROOM, leaving yourself and the sweet sweet little hotty alone so that you can bang her, bang her like a drum . . . . The Wingman is also responsible for going along with any lies you may tell during the evening. . . . orig. US Air Force n. A pilot whose plane is positioned behind and outside the leader in a formation of flying aircraft."
Thus, our Wingman, our Horatio, if you will, is sacrificing himself for the betterment of his “bro”, to wit:
You’re taking one for the team, so your buddy can live the dream.
Wingman is spending time with the unappealing female that his partner might mate with the appealing one, and more, that all men may bear witness to a wingman’s noble sacrifice.
Here’s where I have to step out of this somewhat formal stylistic construct I’ve attempted and get down to it. AAAaaaaaarrrrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhhhh! So, a wingman is a guy who talks with the “fatty,” the “bitch,” the “slag” or “skag” (I’m never sure which it is) while his bud, his bro, his main duder, works on priming the airhead for fucking. The Coors Light admen wisely decided they can’t risk actually making the friend what red-blooded American kids would actually consider “fat” or “ugly” so they show a – to this male’s gaze, anyway – very attractive woman talking to our hapless hero, but a woman made ugly by her talking and talking and talking and talking, all the while making what I can only think to call “jappy”/valley-girl faces, sneering, rolling her eyes in disgust, etc. On top of that – and I’m usually the last guy to cry anti-Semitism – the hot chick on the dance floor has straight, lighter hair to accompany her care-free manner, while her friend has darker curly hair and distinctly “ethnic” features – oh, and she talks with her hands, too. What could be less attractive than a yappy Jew girl? What she needs is something in her mouth to shut her up, one might easily infer as subtext.
Add to this the fact that the “self-centered bitch,” if you will is “a junior investment banker.” Here, Coors seems to be appealing the bohemian, the free-spirit within all its drinkers – an investment banker, how pathetic, and only a “junior” one at that (Coors hedging bets so as not to insult the actual investment bankers or aspiring ones in the targe demographic). She is also “junior,” perhaps, to lessen her income and thus her power. Nothing less attractive than a bitch who not only talks but makes more money than you do too, right? An investment banker: smart, aggressive, hard working, successful, what could be uglier in a chick.
And Horatio, he’s a wide-eyed innocent, a nice guy doing his bud an unpleasant favor. And who knows, if he can just ignore her and keep feeding her Coors Lights (if she ever shuts her pie hole [and has there ever been an uglier expression than “pie hole”?] long enough to drink the swill) maybe he’ll even get a blowjob out of it, because those kike bitches are like totally oral, you didn’t know that?
I know I wrote about this ad previously because I distinctly remember the response of one friend to my hatred of it. This is a friend who is a conscious, thoughtful, culturally-critical man, but also one who watches a lot of sports and plays Grand Theft Auto. That is, he falls somewhere in between Hugo Schyzer (http://hugoschwyzer.net/category/feminism/) and a frat boy. He read what I wrote, some version of the above, and said, more or less, “Dude, chill out, it’s just a commercial, and it’s fucking funny.”
And, in a sense, he’s right, the song itself, the performance of it, is funny. And his feedback did make me think about my response. Was I just overreacting, being just the kind of person who makes the word “activist” send people running from the person thus self-dubbed? I just don’t know. For me, it’s tight-asses who can’t get past the “objectionable” material (gosh I’m using a lot of quotation marks in this piece) in South Park, say, who make politically/socially engaged people look bad. Well, if I paint myself into the tight-ass corner here, so be it; the very fact that this commercial is funny, that it shields its – I have to say – hatred of women, with humor, to me, makes it all the more in need of attack. It sneakily perpetuates the worst kind of stereotypes of both men and women. Men are entitled to try to get laid by any means available to them. Women, to be attractive, should be smiling, silent and pliable.
But my friend’s dismissal of my objections still sticks in my mind. It sticks with me when I think about how I try to respond to sexism in the big world as readily as I do in this blog and, say, in academia – to act in a nonsexist or at least conscious-of-my-own-sexist-behavior manner in the bedroom and the kitchen and the classroom and the bar and the locker room. It’s sometimes hard to do so without coming off as a humorless crank, to put it mildly.
Lately, in fact, I’m facing just such a dilemma – say what I feel and come off as an uptight dick, or keep quiet and seem like a cool guy (in this case a cool, older, boss). Working in our kitchen at the bar is a sweet, tough young man who, especially after a few beers, speaks of women in general as bitches and worse, but at the same time clearly respects the particular women around him. I keep telling myself I’m going to talk to him about the language he uses and its implications, but haven’t yet found the way to do so. Will I? Dang it, I will. But I digress in this post that is itself a digression.
So, now I find that I’ve begun my post about a Heineken ad with a digression that’s become a post of its own about a Coors Light ad that I already wrote about. What I planned to write about was a current ad, for Heineken’s new “Draft Keg” that features the ultimate woman – a smiling, hot babe robot chick who hatches mini kegs of beer from her belly and serves them to you via her telescoping robot arm, all the while shaking her tush and winkily, sassily promising much much more! I’ll go into that in detail in my next post, though, as I’m sure you’ve had just about enough of this for now.
