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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Tangent-to-a-tangent below.

The Dr. Squatch adds are part of a certain streak of marketing that can be described as "tongue in cheek hyper-masculine." The other ones that come quickly to mind are the various, heavily-punned male grooming devices (Gronk did a couple of commercials for one), and beef jerky. The themes of the adds are all fundamentally the same "be a manly man by buying this product ... here are a bunch of pun-ny dick jokes and comic book illustrations of masculinity; chopping wood, wrestling a bear, etc." They stop far short of any actual violence, and the entire air of the ads are always meant to be comical.

So, it's safe-for-kids masculinity. It's not actually genuine or earnest. It's the little boy wearing his dad's work shoes and pretending to "go to the business factory." And this is why a lot of these ads are not-so-secretly hated by traditional masculinity oriented men - because they infantilize the men in them and the men who would buy the products. I'm trying to picture my WW2 vet Grandfather coming home to his wife and saying "look, honey, I bought the MAN soap!" I can, however, easily picture a Laptop Class San Franciscan showing off his "Warrior Berkenstocks" with genuine pride ... because I saw that happen in 2016.

Tin-foil-hat me sometimes thinks this is part of a radical feminist agenda (I told you I was wearing that hat at the beginning of that sentence!) That these advertisers want to create a "dress up pretend fund time" version masculinity that lets husbands and fathers feel like men ... but never, ever lets let actually develop self-assured independent traits that could break them out of the matriarchal dominance of the wives / mothers (often the same person functionally).

Then again, I'm waxing philosophic about men's soap on the internet. I'll go outside and fuck a bear now.

I'll go outside and fuck a bear now.

What kind of man doesn't have a bear inside the house?

Once you're married, dead bears inside (rugs, heads, etc) and live ones outside is a compromise you have to make. (and who fucks a dead bear? Don't answer that.)