product: alcohol

Larry Harnisch, of The Daily Mirror, scanned these two ads for Grand Marnier from the latest New Yorker.  Normally we don’t get too worked up over phallic imagery, but I thought these two might be good for discussion.  Besides, it’s been a while since we linked to our awesome collections of ads featuring ejaculation imagery, subliminal sex, and not-so-subliminal sex (NSFW).

In the first, the woman greets a man at his door.  She is wearing a dress with a very low cut back.  She is holding the bottle behind her, angled provocatively.  Don’t miss the shape of the bottle itself (and what exactly is that circle at the base of its neck?).

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In the second ad, the woman sits deep in an armchair, her legs in the air.  The bottle, being poured by a man, is tilted towards her, and spilling liquid into her glass.

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So, Readers, what do you think?  Is the bottle meant to be read as a penis subconsciously?  Do you think it works that way, intended or not?

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

I love beer. I also love wine and liquor, but beer’s what I come back to. Beer is plain ol’ delicious: every brand has a distinct flavor and it goes well with food or alone. It’s just intoxicating enough: if I don’t feel like getting wasted, one or two will do me, but steady drinking will get the job done fine if I’m in a partying mood.

My fella and I get tired of the same old, same old beer selection at our local Kroger, so when we travel out of state, we often pick up a lot of regional beers – up to 12 six packs when we have the cash! The beer boxes are my second favorite part of buying the beer after drinking it. Beer packaging is colorful and diverse, and often beautiful*:


The boxes serve as a runner around our walls. They’re a fascinating and unique decorative element of which I’m quite proud and which get a lot of comments from our friends. It’s a good record of our travels and our life together. They are not meant and usually are not read as endorsements of every beer we drink, but are in the context of over a hundred other examples of packaging. Pedestrian PBR is next to regional Yuengling, and obscure Backfin is next to a sampler pack. Every box that we (or occasionally a friend who works at a beer store) consume goes up on our wall, regardless of aesthetic or political merit: they are meant to provoke critique and examination of the relative merits and values in different packages of different beer.

Since I’m surrounded by the boxes all day, I begin to pick up on elements of their design. Namely, that males and whiteness are constantly normalized within the design of the boxes**:

 








Excepting the daguerreotype-esque Southern Ale, all of the men above are shown enjoying the beer, usually while engaging in their daily duties or in making the beer. The cottonwood man is not actively engaged, but he is holding the wheat that will make the beer, thus conferring involvement in the beer on him. The Highlands man is somewhat othered by the bagpipes, and I’m not sure how the man in the Rogue ale is constructed, but both are drinking and enjoying the beer they’re intended to represent. They are active and involved – not passive, not just drinking the beer, not just there. They are constructed as dynamic and effectual as they drink the beer. And they are all white: men of color are erased in beer packaging as far as I’ve seen.

Now, let’s look at the women that show up on the wall:

Women love to drink. Women love beer. But you would never know it from their scarce representation in beer packaging.

In the beer packages I’ve got up, women are not engaged in the act of drinking the beer that they represent. In fact, they’re not engaged in anything. Except opening their mouths, or, um, being on fire. They’re… objects. More specifically, sexual objects that have in most cases been disembodied. They’re floating heads, with their mouths open.

It gets worse when you look at how, specifically, the women of color are constructed. Look at the “Bad Penny” packaging above, and this one that I recently saw at a music festival:

The black women are constructed as reductive, exotic others, black women whose sexuality exists for the inebriated male gaze. It is not a coincidence that both have afros. Natural hair beautiful and laudatory, but there is only one kind of natural hair here: the style that is often problematized as dangerous and exotic, as another element that makes them an exotic experience for the male drinker.

Their sexuality is especially lacking in agency: the naked woman in the sexual chocolate ads is literally presented as an offering to the male gaze. She’s not engaged with the viewer by drinking, or by making eye contact. She is passive, and coded as naked: she is wearing a tube top, but it’s obscured by lettering of the same color as the top. A cartoon figure, she is not active; she is just there, waiting to be debased.

The “Bad Penny” character is making eye contact, but her eyes are heavily lidded, unlike the white women above. I took the “bad” in the name of the beer to be capitalization on blaxploitation by an alcohol company that aligns itself with kyriarchical forces: it’s the “Big Boss”. If the producer of this beer is the boss, where does that leave the women who hawk it?

Speaking of othering, let’s look at another one I found online:

Note again the heavily lidded eyes, the more explicit nudity. Though she is at least shown to be holding liquid, she’s not drinking it or enjoying it; she’s pandering to the male gaze with an oh-so-subtle finger in her mouth.

This is supposed to construct Aztec culture (which I am not well-versed in discussing). Please note the feathers, the background, and the jewelry as elements of othering and exoticization that I can’t fully articulate. Also not that this is not in a stein, as with most males shown with beer, but in some kind of “primitive”-looking stone goblet.

Women in the marketing of beer is a grim, grim field. Beer is a man’s drink, and women are excluded from independent enjoyment of it. They are not the drinkers of beer; they’re the sex that sells the beer, the static objects of intoxicated lust.

To end on a less grim note, I did come across one ad that struck me as positive:

This woman is not being objectified, or reduced to an othered sexual object. She is normalized by her whiteness, but also by her active enjoyment of beer. She’s drinking, which is what women do with beer.

ETA: meloukhia pointed out this label, which I’d seen before:

While the legs are somewhat sexual, and her eyes are closed, this woman is engaged and active – she is enjoying the beer, and life. Check out the comments for more beer packaging and discussion.

*It should be noted that while I appreciate the aesthetics of this example of packaging, this is an example of how voodoo is problematized and othered – especially when paired with a loaded word like “Dixie”.

**Many, though not all, of these packages repeat the imagery shown here in packaging of other varieties of beer.

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Rachel McCarthy James is a writer and tutor living in Virginia. She writes about feminism and stuff at Deeply Problematic.

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Brandon H. let me know about two viral Smirnoff videos that humorously illustrate some of the differences (perceived and real) between “old money” families and the newly rich.

The old money/East Coast version:

Argyle sweaters! White pants! Pearls!

The nouveau riche West Coast version:

Massages! Spray tans! Collagen implants!

Of course, there’s other interesting stuff going on here, too–the typical “women as background dancers/accessories” theme, the lack of non-White people, the way that moisturizer and lip balm is associated with a laughable masculinity. Of course, by current popular ideals of masculinity, both of these groups of men come up lacking, and in fact, rich men are often both idolized and portrayed as intellectual but not really “manly” (which is reserved for hard-workin’ midwestern types).

Also: Joe’s Crab Shack, what does rich look like?, masculinize your sissy upper-class dogs with Alpo, women as prizes for rich men, representing the working class at Honfest, evoking class with literary references, upper-class luxury in ads, communicating class in Cadillac ads, “class is forever“, and old money is old-fashioned.

One way to study social problems is to take a social constructionist approach.  This approach suggests that the degree to which a social problem is perceived as problematic, as well as the kind of problem it is understood to be, is a function of social interaction.  For example, many Americans consider drunk driving to be a very bad thing and a serious threat.  Drunk driving is not only embarrassing, it is punishable by law, and a conviction could result in social opprobrium.  It wasn’t always that way, and it still isn’t all that stigmatized in some parts of the U.S. and, of course, elsewhere.

So, social problems aren’t immediately obvious, but need to be interpreted and presented to us.  And, of course, some people have more power to deliver a message to the public than others.

Artist Susannah Hertrich developed this graphic (via) designed to bring to consciousness the difference between the likelihood of harm from certain threats and public outrage:

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I am unsure as to how she measured both “public outrage” and “actual hazard” but, giving her the benefit of the doubt and assuming that this information is based on some reasonable systematic measurement, the image nicely draws our attention to how some social problems can receive a disproportionate amount of outrage, contributing to their social construction as significant or insignificant social problems (or, alternatively, their social construction as public problems for which outrage is appropriate and useful, versus private problems that have no public policy dimensions).

So, for example, heat is seen as relatively harmless even though, as Eric Klinenberg shows in his book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, it kills many, many people every year and is severely exacerbated by social policies both directly and indirectly related to weather.  But the people who die from heat, and those who love them, tend to be relatively powerless members of our society: usually the elderly poor.

Conversely, the threat of terrorism attracts a great deal of public outrage, but is not a significant threat to our individual well-being.  Still, certain members of our society with an ease of access to the media and authoritative roles in our society (mostly politicians and pundits) can raise our fears of terrorism to disproportionate levels.

Similarly, bird flu makes for a fun story (as all gruesome health scandals can) and gun crime feeds “mainstream” fears of the “underclasses” (often perceived as black and brown men).  Both make for good media stories.  Less so, perhaps, pedestrian accidents.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Caroline J. sent in a link to an anti-rape campaign in Scotland title This Is Not an Invitation to Rape Me. The campaign includes various posters with commentary on the myths associated with them. Some examples of the posters (the second one might not be safe for work, so after the jump):

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On the heels of our Frito Bandito post, comes this (I think) 1975 ad for Tequila Gavilan.  Slogan: “One taste…and you’re not a Gringo anymore.”

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If I’m reading this ad correctly, both the woman and the man in this ad are supposed to be Mexican. What’s interesting, then, is the different social construction of Mexican men and women. While the male is the familiar “Frito Bandito,” sombrero-wearing fool, the female is a hot, spicy Latina.  Today the Mexican fool is a risky stereotype to pull out, but the hot spicy Latina is still a very common trope.

From another angle, this reminds me a bit of the history of colonization and war. All too frequently, male ethnic others in war are considered enemies, while female ethnic others are considered the spoils of war. So the idea that the racially-othered men are disposable, while “their” women are desirable has a very long history in Western thought (see, for example, Joane Nagel’s great book, Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality).

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Dmitriy T.M. sent us a link to an AdWeek post reporting that Miller Beer began advertising in Vietnam last week with this commercial:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG9H5_oKVd0[/youtube]

Some sociologists who study international relations apply the idea of the brand to nations.  Nations, they argue, can be seen as a product in a global marketplace. Australia, for example, is marketed as a rough and tumble place where we can get back to nature and find our true selves. Insofar as they can can control their brand, countries can draw tourism and increase demand for their exports (see here and here for Australian examples).

The ad above is an excellent example of Miller capitalizing on the American brand: “It’s American Time. It’s Miller Time.” Notice also that the ad is in English and doesn’t feature anyone that looks Vietnamese. The whiteness of the ad is purposeful. Miller is selling a specific version of “America” characterized by white people, urban life, sex-mixed socializing and, also, really bad music.

UPDATE!  In the comments, Adam linked to this ad which ran in the Phillipines:

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You can also think of the California happy cows commercials as a form of state branding.

See herehere, and herefor posts showing the social construction of America as white.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

In a list of 15 contrasting billboards on Buzzfeed, I found these three:

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I usually think of public service announcements as a form of education.  Presumably there’s a harmful ignorance out there somewhere that can be corrected.  But these contrasts bring into stark relief the fact that public service announcements aren’t only fighting ignorance, they’re fighting corporations.  The battle isn’t just between misinformation and information, it’s between for-profit and non-profit organizations.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.