Eh, it's not that far fetched. Imagine masculinity as a cliff and femininity as a rushing river. Rushing rivers erode the cliff. Such dichotomies are not that uncommon. 

Also, I began laughing hysterically as the guy walks off the swan boat. Not everyone will agree with the comedic content, the physical comedy was pretty golden.

it's pretty funny that you have to eat something that phallic for the cure.

 Commercials like these always confuse me.  Because they aren't policing masculinity in general, but specifically heterosexual masculinity (gay men are portrayed as failed men or non-men when they are depicted, which is almost never).  But, isn't the crowning pinnacle of being a successful heterosexual man supposed to be getting yourself a lady, and maybe procreating with her (in reference to the man who bought a minivan)?  The masculinity presented and the masculinity I see adult men in real life try to adhere to is way different.  It seems that this is more like the masculinity 8 year old boys want to adhere to.  "Girls are icky, never get rid of your cool car, Shakespeare is booooooring, and I am going to eat slim jims all day."

I am confused as to the "moist/tender" description of the product. 

Tender definitely has feminine connotations, in the commercial's context, men should men care about the softness of their meat? (giggle) As for moist, I know women who HATE the way that word sounds, but I think it is more the idea of something *moist* that grosses them out. I am not sure why these words were chosen for this product.

It is worth remembering that it took the Serpent to talk Eve into eating the "apple" but all she had to do was offer the big, strong Adam a bite and he took it.

No wonder some of the Greek Fathers believed the apple was sexual intercourse.

It's my understanding that masculinity finds itself so often in crisis due to the fact that it is so often defined by what it is not.  Rather than stress what it means to be a virtuous man in a positivist sense, it is "fragilely" characterized by what it is not.  Of course what begins as an "innocent" dialectic of male/female almost always turns hierarchical, with positive associations being attached to one and negative associations to the Other.

In this sense patriarchy hurts us all.  Sure being a man in this system has many more benefits than otherwise, but that's like being warden is better than being an inmate - fact is they're both in prison.

To wit, I've been wondering for a while now whether a fourth wave of feminism isn't in order - one which personalizes the problems of sexism for men similar to the way the concept of "white privilege" was introduced to race theory.  The first wave was suffrage, the second wave rights and liberation, and the third wave broadened the movement to include multicultural voices.  So maybe it's time for a fourth wave to broaden the movement more to encourage more men to become feminists.  (Not a new idea, I know, just new rhetoric...)

Every man needs another man to shove meat in his mouth? Yeah thats ... interesting.

subtext, ahoy.

Our histology laboratory buys a Slim Jim, rehydrates it overnight at room temperature, fixes it in formalin, and processes it for a Gram (bacterial) stain positive control "tissue". The needed Gram-positive cocci grow from the bacteria already present in the packaged Slim Jim.

Really. And this is a common enough positive control for bacterial staining, at least locally.

Needless to say, I won't eat Slim Jims. Furthermore, I see the stained result, and I can tell you that the most abundant component is fat (>50%), followed by unidentifiable substance, possibly the "pink slime" renderings recently made famous, followed by plant material (whether intentional or from the food animal's gut), followed by less than 5% each of identifiable muscle (meat), cartilage (gristle), and bone.

Yes, I know. TMI.

Oh my god. You people need to lighten up. They are just meant to be funny commercials. That's it. If you get offended by Slim Jim commercials, just stop watching tv. You're clearly going to get angry about everything that you see and be forced by post snobby, pretentious paragraphs about them online.

No Shakespeare?  Someone had better tell Patrick Stewart.

The problem I have with analyses of these is that they're not properly couched in their comedic intent. Yes, society polices masculinity. Yes, some of this can occasionally be accurate. But most of it is exaggerated for comedic effect. Taking it literally misses the purpose of the videos and loses the context in which they're made. This is actually another iteration of a trend in advertising fueled by third-wave feminism to mock social standards as a method of selling you a product. You thought this was funny, so you go and buy a slim jim. You think the old spice ad is funny, you buy old spice. You think the Dr. Pepper ad is funny, you buy Dr. Pepper.

The only way you find it funny is if you recognize the inherent exaggerations and on some level reject them. If you truly accepted the idea that shakespeare with your girlfriend was so unmanly, you'd consider this a documentary instead of a funny ad. So we can't discuss this using literals, but instead we should discuss how the ads might tacitly allow actual policing to take place because we don't take the potential danger/implications of gender policing very seriously. Or something like that. Or frankly anything other than trying to approach this from a sobered standpoint.

I really wish we could get rid of the stereotype that men who are vegetarians/vegans aren't "real men". It's just so stupid, why should eating dead animals or animal products make you more any more masculine? 

Especially considering the fact that meat and also dairy/eggs contain high amounts of Estrogen. But whenever I try to tell this to people they never believe me.

These commercials are satirical meta-commentary on the state of gender,
male-female relationships, and male-male interaction. Each seems
to subtly imply that the "un-manly" situation isn't so bad -- since the
cure is just to continue doing the "un-manly" thing, while eating a
Slim Jim. They poke fun at other spots which hit the femininity-masculinity angle too hard.

Yogurt commercials and cleaning product commercials are far worse in perpetuating gender stereotypes and constructs.

Furthermore, the spots serve to deconstruct gender. Here are a few ways:

-  "Male Spice Loss" is itself a play on 'erectile dysfunction,' and harks to the bombardment of Viagra and Cialis advertisements to which men are subjected.

-  Two of the spots end with the revived men saying in a polite, soft way, "It's so... moist."

-  Did you notice that in both "Intensive Care" and "Waiting Room," male characters portray nurses?

-  Ironing isn't the problem - ironing jeans is the problem. Jeans rarely need to be ironed. It would be strange to iron jeans.

-  The men doing the reviving are hyper-masculine, to the point of charicature. Do you need a mustache, captain's hat, and turtleneck to pilot an airboat?

If anyone's perpetuating the adult game of cooties, it's Gwen Sharp.

These commercials are interesting satires of gender roles, I find them entertainging they should do

haha funny

 "is just an adult version of the game of cooties". Correct. It's silly and not to be taken seriously. Get over it. Next I guess you'll tell us how the old spice commercials about a very muscular man kicking over a building puts unrealistic expectations in the minds of young men.

I'm not surprised a woman wouldn't get the message here,you can't.I figure on dying alone anyway,so I'll say it;for most every man,no matter how much he loves a woman,there comes a point when he begins to feel over-whelmed and over-burdened by constant exposure to the things SHE likes.Many women take it for granted that she and he can enjoy every experience together,and may even have already begun to treat him more like a girlfriend with a penis than a boyfriend.She'll take it for granted that he'll enjoy an afternoon of "The Taming Of The Shrew" in the park more than he would an afternoon of playing "Halo" with his guy friends just because he's with her.Does this mean he hates Shakespeare?No,it may mean he just hates Shakespeare in the park.Does it mean he hates her or that he wants out?No,it may just mean that she needs to accept that gender differences DO exist,and that she has to learn to accept that her boyfriend is NOT to be used as a substitute girlfriend.   

I came across the line in the last paragraph by accident and out of this specific context, that is: "It’s fascinating, really: femininity is depicted as weakness, the sapping of strength, yet masculinity is so fragile that apparently even the slightest brush with the feminine destroys it."

As a whatever-gender bio-male, this perfectly describes my experience with the dynamic of masculinity: the dynamic rooted in not just insecurity or fear, but the absolute abject terror of anything less than 100% masculinity. And hence the weakness. There is nowhere to go but down, in their estimation.

Thanks for the precise distillation.

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