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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27029 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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It's the old "foreign prolefeed becomes high-status because consooming foreign product shows cosmopolitan sophistication" scam. In my youth it was Asterix and Tintin being more sophisticated than Marvel and DC.

In Japan, anime is slightly higher-status than Mickey Mouse because there is no animation age ghetto, but it is fundamentally mass-market TV. Sturgeon's law applies, and also the 10% that isn't crap is still passive entertainment for Japanese normies.

I remember seeing bus-stop ads in NYC ripping off this issue for beer in the late noughties. I don't remember who paid for them - the vibe is right for Yeungling but it may have been a generic Drink American ad by a trade association. There was a picture of two bottles of Stella Artois. One was captioned "The beer of the poor in Holland" (This is cuts even deeper than the target audience would have spotted - at 5.2% Stella has a relatively high ABV for mass market beer, so it is the beer of drunks and hooligans. In the UK at the time, it was called "beater" because it was said to be what you drank before beating your wife) and the other "$7 a bottle in the US" (or whatever a bottle of overpriced beer cost at the time).

Might have been Heineken, who also mocked Sam Adams ("Benedict Arnold Pittsburgh Lager") and some other beer they called "Grandpa's Old Fuzzy Ale". Or Newcastle, which has mocked Stella before. I don't recall Yeungling doing mocking ads.

Reminds me of this scene from Mad Men: https://youtube.com/watch?v=deXGXYJo4-0?si=V5uQm8Q-7JoJlZQ1

Isn’t the “beater” thing also a reference to “A Streetcar named Desire” where Marlon brando’s character screams “stelllla!” while wearing a tank top undershirt? (AKA, a wife beater.)

It is possible that it began that way, but I doubt it. The overlap between people who drank lager in the UK in the 1990s (the respectable working class still drank bitter, and the middle class drank wine) and the people who were familiar with vintage Marlon Brando movies, let alone Tennessee Williams plays, was not large. When I was introduced to the saying, there was no suggestion that the reference to wife beating was other than literal.

There was a straight-to-VHS remake of A Streetcar named Desire in 1995 starring Alec Baldwin, that might also be the source if it has the same scene in it.

I mean it's worth noting that a 'wife beater' tank top undershirt in the US has, by repute, the same etymology- it's the garment of people who beat their wives(in this case explicitly class based- it has always been associated with people who can't afford air conditioning, for perhaps understandable reasons).

It’s the euphemism treadmill in action again. My dad (silent gen/New Jersey kid) still calls it a guinea tee

I always thought this was also due, in part, to shows like Cops wherein arrested male suspects ended up handcuffed wearing the tank top? Because many of these were related to domestics, the fashion-guilt-by-association emerged.

Probably, yeah, but isn’t it an older term than Cops?

Snopes is actually good (almost like old times!) here: https://www.snopes.com/articles/465371/wife-beater-tank-top-origin-of-phrase/

They reference a 1979 newspaper article, which seems to rule out Cops as the source: https://www.snopes.com/articles/465371/wife-beater-tank-top-origin-of-phrase/

I think it's one of those vernacular things that just didn't really get written down often; the newspaper article seems to be deliberately going for that slice-of-life effect.

I can say that we would wear those shirts in the summer right near the beginning of the Cops run, and did call them that -- but it wasn't like a new term that needed explaining, so I doubt that's the origin per se. It's not like the term was actually used on the show, or that it was the exclusive choice of shirt for the unfortunates getting busted.

Google Books only provides evidence of the term to ~1990, though there's lots of speculation with it starting with A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), and I find a 1977 mention (in a book called _Wife Beating: The Silent Crisis) of the stereotype (referring back to Streetcar) without the term. Cops goes back to 1989, so the timing fits, but I have no other evidence.

In my youth it was Asterix and Tintin being more sophisticated than Marvel and DC.

But Asterix is far more sophisticated than 50s Marvel ever was. (Of course, that says more about 50s Marvel than anything else. I'm not sure it's more sophisticated than Carl Barks's Donald Duck from the same period.)

Exactly. There have been high quality sophisticated comics that have come out of US but Marvel and DC sure as hell aren't those.

I'm not sure it's more sophisticated than Carl Barks's Donald Duck from the same period

Yes, well, we can't all have a concept album created by a symphonic metal composer, now can we?

That album was inspired by Don Rosa's Life and Times of Scrooge Mcduck, though Don Rosa himself was a Barks fanboy who mostly expanded on his work.

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