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Not to be outdone by Bud Lite, Miller Lite has apparently been running their own "woke" beer advertisements: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_NtBQWZqaHo
IMO the campaign here is actually clever, take this "bad" thing, use money to buy it, and turn it into a "good" thing. Whoever came up with this idea: cool idea.
But here's my question: is any of this old "bad" stuff actually bad? Let's look at contemporary things like onlyfans, instagram, tiktok, the hundreds of reddit 'gonewild' type porn forums, etc. It seems to me that many women, given the chance, enjoy wearing bikinis, being sexualized, being lusted after etc. Not all women, obviously, since some women don't like this, but...isn't this trying to strip the pro-sexualization women of their agency?
Aside from that, isn't Miller saying that women belong...in the kitchen? Don't go out to the beach and get drunk and have fun. Wear modest clothing (like the person in the ad), stay inside in the dark, and make things for people to eat.
Also: the claim that women were the primary brewers historically, is not only dumb, it's also wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weihenstephan_Abbey?useskin=vector
I can't claim to know a lot about marketing, but I don't know how this campaign got out of the gates:
-The word "Shit" is spoken a dozen times in their beverage ad and "Shit" is printed on their product. If your ad campaign works, people associate Miller with "Good Shit". Like I took a good shit this morning.
-Mud wrestling ads from 2003 are not on the forefront of anybody's mind in 2023. Nobody associates Miller with those long forgotten about ads. Nobody except for the all female marketing team responsible for the ad, who apparently were looking over old ads and posters and took them personally.
-Like Bud Light's marketing executive, Miller is taking a swipe at their core demographic of straight guys. Why are companies hiring marketers who hate the consumers of their products? Do they think they can do a 1:1 trade for a cooler demo?
-Who is going to participate in this Stalinist campaign? Who still has Miller Lite bikini ads from the 90's and wants to destroy them so they can Stand With Women?
-Literally destroying beauty (blurred faces, turning into mulch) and using homely women to sell your product.
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Blurring the faces of those women on the cardboard cutout is an interesting strategy in an ad meant to promote women.
The explicit claim seems to be that women were "some of the first" to brew beer, which is nearly content free but also true I guess.
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Cynical bastard in me can't help but suspect that the sudden prominence of this in social media despite it being older than the whole Mulvaney fiasco is at least in part the InBev marketing department trying to distract from/cover thier tracks.
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I honestly don't understand the weird outrage towards these ad campaigns. People getting angry over "woke" ads just don't understand that not all ads are aimed at them. The drag queen Bud Light endorsement was a short instagram reel and it was aimed at that person's followers, not conservatives or rednecks. It's real main character syndrome energy to get mad because an ad campaign doesn't reflect your own individual or group likes/dislikes/personae.
I don't understand why it's hard to understand. These ads are potentially offensive on several levels.
They offend the core demographic of the brand by selecting a message that is antithetical to the values of the core demographic of the brand.
One level deeper: They selected this message precisely because it offends their core demographic. The only other possibility is that the marketers really have no idea who their core demographic is, but as the Bud Light exec said in the video that was circulating, this was not the case. They want to replace their uncool customers with cool customers.
One level removed: From the POV of someone who doesn't care about either brand, it just seems like an insanely bad idea to market against one's customer base, making it offensive to notions of common sense or of an orderly rational universe.
There is a baked-in dishonestly to several parts of either ad in their concepts of their new targeted demographics. Are women of any biological persuasion really going to be moved to drink lite beer because of these ad campaigns? Is the Miller Lite ad seriously presupposing that sexist ads drove women away from beer as more a likely explanation than sexist ads were created to appeal to the major beer-drinking market: men who like hot women and cold beer? Let alone the claims made about the preponderance of beer-brewing women or the gender of one particular spokesperson.
One almost has to not look at all to not find something offensive to mere common sense.
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Maybe they think it's not as simple as you do?
For example, a moderately more complex story could be "Group A tries to appeal to Group B with an ad that Group B likes because it offends Group C." Is A talking to C? Well, that depends on how you precisify "talking to".
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These aren't "buy our insurance because it's 23.6% cheaper than the competition" kinds of ads. These are lifestyle type of ads. They are promoting certain style and outlook on life and associate it with the brand. If this style is offensive to people who previously associated themselves with the brand, then these people would feel negatively towards the brand from now on. And such kind of action is aimed at everybody, all the time - multi-national brand is not something you advertise in secret. And culture war is not something you join unwittingly - not that BL marketers didn't publish plenty of proclamations suggesting very clearly on whose side they are joining.
Let me give you an extreme example. Suppose some crazy marketer, after taking too much cocaine one night, decided that Nazis - I mean the real ones, the guys prancing around with swastikas and tiki torches - are an under-covered market, and his brand needs to have a campaign aimed at them. And suppose, by a series of freak accidents and misunderstandings, this plan gets approved, set in production and the resulting ad - featuring all a real Nazi loves and seeks in life, presented as a positive lifestyle associated with the brand - is posted on official Instagram channel.
After that happened, and the inevitable aftermath - do you think your explanation that people just don't understand that not all ads are aimed at them is going to play very well or convince somebody that it doesn't mean anything that they disliked the ad?
P.S. For the "trigger warning" part of the audience, hopefully minor, but ever vocal, explicit disclaimer - no, I am not comparing anybody to Nazis. Except for, you know, the actual Nazis.
And that the product is bagels. Or menorahs.
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That's part of the bargain to be a lifestyle brand. If you want people to value your product not just for its practical utility but for what that product says about the people who consume it, then they're going to be as insulted by the unfavorable brand implications as they are flattered by the favorable. It doesn't matter that the ad wasn't "aimed" at them. Lifestyle brand advertising works by influencing what other people think of the product's customers, not just the customers themselves. The whole reason you choose to become a customer of a lifestyle brand is because of what you expect it will make other people think of you.
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The memes/jokes write themselves—
Budweiser: We just had a disastrous marketing campaign designed to advance the careers of our marketing “thought leaders” rather than appeal to our customers
Miller: Hold my beer
If I were a large shareholder of a Food and Beverage company, the last thing I’d want is to have the word “shit” getting mentioned anywhere near our products, including in censored form. We want our customers, and potential customers, to think of “shit” when consuming (or thinking of consuming) our food and drinks? If this happened in Mad Men, fans would have complained that such a marketing campaign is an unrealistic weakman for Don Draper to knock down.
Especially if I were a large shareholder at an American beer company, where our product is already regularly compared to piss or pisswater. This type of principal-agent problem should be unacceptable, where the progressive marketing types are feeling themselves too much, enjoying the smell of their own farts, resume-building using company resources. "Heads, spikes, walls" should be the figurative consequences as GoT Tyrion remarked. Concentrated benefits vs. diffuse costs strike once again.
Although YouTube comments are generally pretty basic, sterile, and devoid of wrong-think nowadays, that Miller Lite video has some zesty top comments (“spicy” would be too strong, as they’re more chives and onion rather than serranos and ghost peppers):
> "I always look for lectures to be given by public companies, (such as Gillette, Budweiser, or Miller Lite), in the form of commercials, to help me see exactly how I am living life with the wrong opinions, and to help guide me to change those opinions or actions to be a better person!" -Said No One Ever
> Love being lectured by a beer company for something I had nothing to do with.
> Considering the spokesperson is the type who benefits most from beer goggles, you would think she wouldn't upset the applecart too much.
> If women brew beer as good as they tell jokes, it's going to be a rough road ahead.
> Yeah, whoever runs the marketing for these beer companies needs to be fired and blacklisted from the industry.
> Did the beer companies all decide to start doing fentanyl back in March or something? How did we get 2 of the best examples of having no clue who your customers were 2 months in a row? Now notice how I said "were" and not "are".
What jumped out to me was the spokeswoman declaring: “They put us in bikinis.” As if beer companies somehow coerced women into being sex objects—rather than it being women’s revealed preferences, that many of them rather enjoy being sex objects.
By their revealed preferences, many (maybe more like most) women enjoy being sex objects to the extent they can. One isn’t supposed to Notice or point it out though, lest women feel less wonderful.
#GirlsWhoWorkOut are often in the gym face-painted, in just sports-bra and compression shorts. Music festivals and Halloween are thinly veiled, plausibly deniable excuses for women to dress up in slutty outfits to take photos of themselves and bait male attention. Instagram/TikTok/SnapChat are full of female selfies, bikini pics, lingerie shots, dances. “Hostess” jobs, ring-girls, and cheerleading squads are never lacking from a dearth of female applicants. Women's sports often serve as feeder leagues for e-thottery (and sometimes OnlyFans), ranging from women's volleyball, tennis, to MMA. Many a #WomanInSTEM treats their job as but a playground for looking cuUuUute. Every preekend in the US, undergraduate girls get dolled-up, slap on their high-heels and slinky cocktail dresses to deliver themselves to the supposed hives of scum, villainy, misogyny, and toxic masculinity that are fraternity houses. Female celebrities might complain about the alleged sexualization of women one moment, but eagerly sexualize themselves the next.
Good for women. Love what you do and you won’t ever have to work a day in your life, to paraphrase the classic quote.
I’d posit a large portion of the seethe caused by The Fappening was it unveiled that women—including famous women—enjoy being sex objects and taking sexualized, submissive photos/videos of themselves, despite presenting otherwise. It’s somewhat less plausibly deniable and #Girlboss-y when you regularly take ass, tits, and pussy shots of yourself for the male gaze, and perhaps have photos/videos floating around of yourself getting facialed like WWE Paige or Jennifer Lawrence.
To circle back on “they put us in bikinis,” it appears that women don’t like to take accountability or ownership of their decisions, their preferences. It's a common form of Merited Impossibility in mainstream discourse. Women hate being sex objects, but if they do love being sex objects it's only due to socialization. And it's not necessarily restricted to the specific topic of being sex objects:
To the extent women aren’t always strong, independent, wonderful #GirlBosses, it’s due to socialization. It’s not their own choices, not their own tendencies, not their own preferences, not their own constitution. Women are socialized to sexualize themselves, socialized to wear make-up, socialized to be preoccupied with fashion, socialized to like wearing sexy underwear and lingerie, socialized to prefer people over things, socialized not to approach men, socialized to be passive rather than active in dating, socialized to prefer tall, high-status men. Their actions and revealed preferences are only due to some exogeneous influence, like society or the patriarchy. Not their fault! They’re just victims in all this.
Socialization is a fully general boogeyman (entity of boogeytry), as if it were an Act of God or extraterrestrial intervention. “Feminists are the real misogynists,” some on the dirtbag left or dissident right might meekly insist, in trying to point out the horseshoe touching between mainstream feminists and outside-the-Overton-window red/blackpillers when it comes to absolving women of agency.
One can, of course, in dating take advantage of the female penchant for being sex objects. Living at and/or renting a nice place with an expensive-looking pool/hot-tub is a great way for getting young women to come straight over to your place, so they can have some plausible deniability and get more bikini-pics for social media. Otherwise they might put up some resistance against coming straight over, and instead push for dinner dates and/or group events (where you can court-jester and monkey-dance for her and her friends and still not get laid).
This sounds a bit isomorphic to "Men must want to wear a suit and tie and sit in a cubicle being a wagie for 8 hours a day, look how many of them do it!"
I work in my wagie cube grudgingly because I need the money. It is not beyond imagination that Instagram/TikTok/SnapChat thots have similar ulterior motives.
That's an incorrect comparison. Most of the men who work office cubicle jobs do so because there's no other way for them to make a living. This doesn't apply to insta/tiktok/etc models.
Doesn't it?
I mean, obviously the median woman with an Instagram account doesn't need to post Instagram bikini pics to to able to afford bread. But human beings have other requirements, like high-value mates. How do you think (or how does she think) she's going to get one of those without some kind of self-promotion?
I ask you not to move the goalposts. Nobody was discussing such other requirements here.
Yes, I maintain that most of the women modeling full-time on tiktok/insta etc. could also earn a living by doing mundane crappy office cubicle jobs or service jobs etc. What they're doing is a lifestyle choice, not a necessity. This differentiates them from the average man working that same type of job (to earn a living, and not for any ulterior motive), because he usually doesn't have that option.
Well I certainly was, and given that I wrote the post to which you are responding, I can assure you that the goalposts remain exactly where I first placed them. My point about working in the wagie cubes was intended to refer to the broad class of "activities engaged in grudgingly" rather than the specific class of "activities engaged in out of purely economic necessity". Revealed preferences need not always refer to the revealed preferences of one's employment.
But with that out of the way:
It feels strange for me to be whiteknighting career e-thots, but I still think your reasoning is flawed. Let's say Job A contains upside 1 and downside 2, while Job B contains upside 3 and upside 4. And let's say the magnitudes of the upsides and downsides run 1 > 2 >> 3 > 4. Job 1 has big upsides and big downsides compared to either in Job B, but in both cases the upside exceeds the downside so you do actually want the job (more than unemployment). That you stick with Job A despite REALLY hating downside 2 is testament to the advantage of upside 1, not that you actually, secretly, masochistically enjoy downside 2.
To but some colour to these scenarios: Job A is Instathot, upside 1 is simpbux, downside 2 is "constant thirstposting in her comments", Job B is office worker, upside 3 is mediocre salary bux, and downside 4 is the anomie of regular office work.
In this rubric we see that it is logically possible that Instathots do not in fact appreciate the drool and asparagus emojis they get in their DMs, but they're willing to put up with it to live the high life. Whether they have any moral right to complain about it is another question - they have signed the Faustian Pact and bought themselves tropical holidays with it, it seems therefore petty to whine that the devil will inevitably take his due. But do they like having to hold up their side of the contract? Well, no-one I know has ever enjoyed holding up their side of a contract, so I can believe that they do, in fact, not, and are just in it for the (lots of) money.
As your comment was a response to a response to the original comment, I’d say you weren’t the one to place the goalposts. You expressed your disagreement with @Butlerian, who expressed his disagreement with the claim in this particular ad that the US beer industry used to put women in bikinis, implying that they were somehow coerced or manipulated into posing for ad photoshoots in bikinis. This is where the goalposts are.
Let’s clarify a few things. If you want to discuss the human requirement to find a high-value mate, then go ahead, but I ask you to recognize that this is a completely different issue. Because it is.
Also, I’ll claim that differentiating “activities engaged in grudgingly [in exchange for money]” from "activities engaged in out of purely economic necessity [that is, in exchange for money]" is needlessly pedantic and pointless.
And also, please recognize the very crucial and clear difference between male office cubicle workers and instathots, namely that the latter are choosing an economic option which does not exist for the former.
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By revealed preferences, they do. That's because revealed preferences, on their own, don't make for good social inference.
So we can go a little beyond: we can ask men if they would enjoy their work more if they didn't have to wear a suit and tie. We can ask women if they would enjoy having attention and approval more if they didn't have to put any effort into it.
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Perhaps they know that they live in an attention economy, even as they wish they did not? They think it would be better if they were valued for their opinions and not their curves, but alas, it is not so.
(Also I don't think they're spending their own money on those swimsuits)
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Yeesh. Old timey church ladies didn't shame male sexual interests this much.
I'm pretty sure they (descriptively) shamed public displays of sexuality much more, tbh. E.g. - wouldn't approve of even showing the 'bad shit' on screen in the ad.
I have read a lot of Victorian material, and while there was a lot of concern, I'm not sure if they use of shame was comparable, at least against men. Remember that laws regarding prostitution were more liberal back then, in most places, than today. On the other hand, "seduction" (obtaining sex from a woman, especially a virgin of middle or high birth, with the promise of marriage) was a huge source of shame for a man and would destroy his reputation.
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I am sure it did not escape the ad-makers notice that while they're talking about destroying all the "bad" stuff, they're showing it. Nor was the substantial endowment of the spokeswoman an accident.
Behind pixelated faces! It's like bizarro-world Islam where women's faces must be concealed, not the breasts or anything.
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I don't really understand what this paragraph has to do with the advertisement. It seems like the implication is supposed to be "it was bad for beer companies to use sexualized images of women to sell beer" -> "it's wrong for women to post sexualized images of themselves" but it's not clear to me that the second statement follows this first. It seems to me there are lots of ways the first statement could be true without the second statement being true.
I don't understand how this can be a takeaway from this advertisement. Literally every scene involving a woman is outside the home. The advertisement depicts women involved in several parts of the brewing process, every one of which is outside their home. "Stay in the kitchen by.... making fertilizer to grow hops to brew beer for our giant corporation!" Just, what?
I don't understand how the existence of Weihenstephan Abbey demonstrates that women weren't the primary brewers historically. Especially when the advertisement mentions brewing that predates this abbey pretty substantially.
Aren't the two threads you have here in tension? The brewing that predates the Abbey were in the kitchen. Not that it really matters all that much, just seemed weird that you didn't see what the above poster meant by saying that the ad implied they belong in the kitchen and then pointed to brewing historically done in the ktichen.
The point of emphasizing women's historical role in brewing is to rebut an (implied) presumption that it's something women can't do or are unsuited to doing. It's about the activity. The location is not really important (as you note). I don't see anything in the ad that implies that women's participation in this activity is (or ought to be) limited to the location it was historically done in, quite the opposite. So the OPs inference seemed strange when the content of the ad seemed quite opposed to their point.
Where does this presumptions originate? The assumption in the advertising is that men like beer more than women, or at the very least consume much more of it. Frankly it seems like a pretty solid assumption from my lived experience with much more parsimonious explanations than that the advertising companies(who have inexplicably decided to stop psyoping us for some implied pro-social motivation) psyoped us all into having these different preferences. Prior to seeing this ad was there even such a meme that it takes a manly person to brew a beer for men? It's a perenial classic to have a big busted feminine lady bring beer to men, would you really predict that an ad in the 90s of a big busted woman brewing the beer for the men first wouldn't do gangbuster? Would it really occur to the men that it's emasculating that a woman brewed their beer?
The whole ad to me just seems like it's fanning the flames to the battle of the sexes for cynical profits. I think the main mistake of the previous poster is in even engaging with it at all. It's just pernicious bullshit to make us hate each other slightly more at the hopes that this somehow translates to more miller lite sales.
I am not sure, but I know it exists. So much so that when I went to a hobbyist class on barrel aged beer the instructor went out of his way to emphasize to us how the best brewers he had known were women (which was extremely awkward). It was pretty clear to me that none of us had any particular bias against women brewers but he expected us to have such a bias.
I don't understand where "psyop" is coming from as an explanation. One simple explanation (that I think is true) is the gender makeup of who is running beer advertising has changed over the intervening decades and men and women have different ideas about what will get people to buy beer. This also assumes that men and women's relative preferences towards beer are not shaped, in part, by these advertising campaigns. You don't exactly see tons of women's products advertised by unrelated sexy women!
I am not plugged into the domestic light beer scene at all but... maybe? Where I grew up there was definitely a general perception that women weren't competent or capable at traditionally male dominated activities.
I mean, are there any such ads? If such an ad would do gangbusters I am skeptical that the first context it would be thought of in is this conversation we're having.
My contention is not that such men would find it emasculating, merely that they would doubt a woman's competence as a brewer and so have a bias against any beer they had brewed.
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Sure. One way I think it can be wrong is that reinforces harmful notions of masculinity by connecting perceived success as a man (attractive women will sleep with you) with consuming a particular product (their beer). I think this is common in a lot of marketing that uses sex or sexuality to sell some other product but isn't present in transactions about sex more directly.
The reason these images are bad in a commercial context is the implication that the individuals so depicted will sleep with you, or be more into you, or that you will be more successful at attracting the kind of individual so depicted as a result of consuming the product in question. Not obvious to me how a similar principal could be at work in non-commercial contexts.
If men wanting attractive women to sleep with them is a harmful notion of masculinity, I'm rather concerned about the future of humanity.
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If you were a "red blooded american" you wouldn't let Disney anywhere near your children. It has been prog-propaganda for a long, long time at least 10-15 years. To boycot Disney+ you'd need to be a subscriber first, and my guesstimate is being woke on the sjw-question is inversely corelated with being a disney or netflix subscriber.
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Beer has been a symbol for guys as to what kind of person you are. If you drink plain American beer, it is mainly to show that you are a regular American guy. Buying Bud Light is now a symbol that you might consider wearing a dress. Some of the people drank Bud Light to show they are just plain normal, not fancy nor nothin, American guys do not want to signal this. People are not boycotting the beer to punish Anheuser Busch. They are trying to avoid being mocked for the next 50 years or so. Scott had a story about how Eskimos brutally teased people for things that happened decades earlier. Rural folk are like that. Someone who accidentally drank Bud Lite risks being asked about his dresses for the foreseeable future. That kind of joke never grows old if you live somewhere backward enough.
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"Bud Light is throwing their weight behind the idea that a natural born man can transition into a woman - an idea that is harmful in its consequences, disrespectful to reality, and is quite possibly the most ridiculous development in our political arena in ways I could have never foreseen."
If you believe the above, I think this is a decent enough reason to boycott? This isn't an argument over some sprawling, poorly-understood topic like the pros/cons of taxes or immigration policy. This is more like a company telling you that the color green is no different from red, without a trace of winking, Millenial irony attached, except worse given the subject matter.
Some hack writer burning a Trump effigy in his show is dumb, but mostly just eyeroll-inducing. The psychology behind such a person and their behavior is completely legible to me, even if it's idiotic. But for trans issues, it does feel like many on the left are downloading their views from a heretofore undiscovered alien planet. I can break bread with or let bygones be bygones to some extent with somebody who really likes socialism. It is increasingly difficult to do so with people who are being absurd on an even more fundamental level - if not the most.
The Bud/Mulvaney controversy was likely sprung from a critical mass of people already predisposed towards being unfavorable having an "Oh, come the fuck on" moment, particularly attenuated by having this come from Bud Light of all brands.
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Did you not see the video(sorry for fox link, it's getting harder lately to find controversial videos on YouTube that aren't reactions to reactions) of the executive saying they wanted to move away from their current customer base? If you don't respond to a company literally insulting you then I think you're ready to just lay down and die.
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For most of history beer was generally home-brewed, and in those instances it was indeed produced primarily by women.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_brewing
Commercially brewed beer has been a predominantly male occupation for about 500 years. Basically, since the time where it was something a modern person would drink and recognize as beer.
The ad didn't split the hairs you're trying to split.
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Because as soon as something become profitable, men take it over and pretend women didn't contribute anything.
To be more precise, people who are willing to take big risks on obtaining status through commerce, who tend to be from a small minority of men, undertake the big risks involved in making things profitable and marketing them on a large scale, and tend to ignore or forget about earlier contributions, many (and sometimes most) of which were made by women.
Historically, when women e.g. had to worry about bleeding part of the month, being raped by a random stranger on a highway, having to raise enough children to fund their old ages despite the high levels of child mortalituy, as well as a host of legal inequalities, this gendered pattern was particularly prominent. See the history of textiles. Even today, AFAIK, women in business tend towards relatively stable but unprofitable businesses like baking, rather than sink-or-swim forms of enterprise that offer the possibility of huge success and the probability of large opportunity costs or even bankrupcy.
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So many kneejerk reactions to this ad.
I mean for starters, they censored all the faces of the pinup girls? Like they are in witness protection or some shit? It puts off strong Orwellian vibes that even as they are attempting to censor the past by buying up as much material as they can and destroying it, they have to censor even their request to further censor too?
And then there is the blatant destruction of history. I get it, it's beer pinup memorabilia. It's not The Iliad or Animal Farm. But it's still a part of culture, and seeing this active campaign to gather and destroy it is still remarkably offputting. It's not a practice I want out there being done in any context, lest it catch on the same way all the other obscene year zero impulses we've seen have caught on.
Edit: Is this even a real thing? It's an unlisted video, only has 2m views, was published March 7th, so before Bud's fiasco. Everything about this feels so artificial now that I look closer.
Perhaps they did not want you to notice that Megan Markle, Pamela Anderson, and Sofia Vergara were in the ads. These women still have quite a bit of cachet, so it is embarrassing to be pulping their images. For example, here is a post from one day ago of bikini pictures of Ms. Vergara. The people in the ads are still mainstream stars. Selling products is how stars make their money.
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I get the feeling that there’s an idea out there that’s something like, “sexually arousing content can only be ethically consumed on direct license from the content creator.” OnlyFans, Instagram, TikTok, GoneWild, etc. are all okay because the model is giving her direct consent for everyone to look at her by posting on her own personal account. This gives her a sense of agency that pin-up girls posing for beer ads lack.
I was going to critique your argument on the grounds that it is still not okay if we take some feminists views on objectification - which allegedly inculcates men with problematic and potentially violent ideas and, as 2rafa is arguing, may also send demoralizing messages to women.
But, I mean, the more obvious criticism is that it just doesn't seem like there's that sharp a distinction. The pin-up girl is also licensing her likeness - and it'd take a fool to not know why. She is simply using someone else's platform to spread that likeness. But then again, so is the person on Onlyfans, in a sense.
That isn't even getting into the fact that there's nothing saying the Onlyfans model inherently has more agency. She could be one of the unfortunate masses making Uber-level money for objectifying herself far worse than the model does. But she doesn't even get to blame some shady porn exec for upselling/coercing her into it. We also know that that also happens in OF because even some of the wealthiest girls in the game claim to be involved in abusive relationships that forced them to work
This is just about the worst link you could have attached to support your argument because Amouranth is extremely obviously fabricating her husband's "abuse" to facilitate more simp donations.
Indeed, you're on to a losing battle whenever you claim that we can "know" (justified true belief) that something is happening based on the evidence of an lewd streamer's Twitter self-reporting.
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I thought the ad was interesting, but do not like lite beers, or hoppy beers, and still do not want to go buy Miller Lite, nor do I condone focusing on hops. Aesthetically, I would be happier if they focused more on grains, but I understand that, logistically, a bunch of paper compost won't go very far in farming grains.
Plausibly there are a decent number of women who like showing off their bodies, bikinis, and so on, but dislike a media environment saturated in even hotter, photoshopped women for them to compare themselves to. There has been a big backlash about that over the past several years. It's "bad sh*t" from a female point of view because it makes average women look unattractive in comparison. If a woman puts on a bikini in a culture that's moving from more conservative mores to more liberal ones, it's great if she can get a lot of attention for how daring she is. She probably can't regularly drink more than one or two beers and still look good, though, so she isn't really the target audience of cheap beer ads. It's frustrating if she is expected to look sexy, in a culture moving from more liberal to more conservative mores -- if she looks great, she'll be a bit less attractive than the advertisement behind her, or if she doesn't, she'll be looked down on as frumpy. Maybe the norm is to only sell bikinis, and she has to buy one or face a steep price hike and inconvenience ordering something from a more niche brand, but she's fat or older, and feels awkward and ugly in it.
The woman in the ad is wearing a rather short, tight skirt -- women can be a bit sexy, nobody wants to go full burqa, but she's not sexier than the viewer. Nor is she more conservative than the viewer. The viewer would be in a fair competition with her. A woman who wants to stand out as unusually attractive would like the media women to be in overalls and sweatshirts, for contrast.
They're also having it both ways -- showing the bikini models to get attention, while decrying them as bad sh*t. Encouraging their male audience members to take a look at their older advertisements in order to send them in.
If women stated that the issue was avoiding runaway intrasexual competition it'd be one thing.
But that's not what they say. They say it's bad as such, immoral. Some feminists will even draw a line between this "objectification" and actual violence.
"Ban this ad because other women are hotter than me" is not a sentiment that any woman wants to admit to others or herself, a'la cognitive dissonance. To out yourself as an uggo is to lower your own social status, so I can't really begrudge women for not making that argument any more than I begrudge myself for not making the argument that all gyms should be banned so fewer guys are buffer than me so I can get more chicks. I would like it if they were but I can't make the argument.
We can nevertheless infer that this is their true motive by mapping out their incentive structures.
But are you making the argument that gyms should be banned because of toxic masculinity or [insert made-up argument]? If so, that's unethical, if not, the comparison doesn't work out.
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That was mostly conjecture.
The ad is to some extent an exploration of the question: what if men don't buy cheap beer so much more than women because men in general actually prefer the product more than women, but because they have been marketed to so hard? What if women were pandered to as much as men? Would they be willing to buy cheap beer product, instead of having to make actually different products? This is the main kind of pandering they could come up with, and it's much cheaper than changing the taste or even packaging significantly.
I don't actually know what Miller Lite tastes like, because I'm so certain it isn't for me, I've never actually tried it. If someone poured it in a glass and called it a beer flavored soda, who knows, maybe I would like it? Or at least not dislike it? But I won't try that out, and will continue just buying pre-mixed margarita in the spring and summer, Octoberfest beers in the fall, and mulled wine in the winter. They probably aren't wrong that they have an image problem as much as a taste problem among women and other people who find bikini clad models tasteless. I'm not offended, exactly, it isn't a question of morality, I just know with complete certainty that it isn't the sort of drink people like me choose, and have no reason to choose it, since by all accounts it doesn't taste like much.
Dude.... that's legitimately disgusting. mixing a proper margarita is no harder than warming up mulled wine and significantly better. As far as having never tried a lite beer, are they just not at gatherings you go to? grab one, they're not great but alright and incredibly interchangeable.
In addition to nostalgia, I like that my husband thinks it's disgusting, so it's still there when I want a drink.
I think I have, but a different brand. It seemed drinkable, but not an improvement on soda, or even iced tea.
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Yes, I doubt it will work. Fruity seltzers are a much easier sell.
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I'd be happier with billboards reminding women their primary worth is as wives and mothers.
I'd think being sexy would be less demoralizing than than a PowerPoint / email job billboard but I'm not a woman. Maybe women really identify with Cathy. Ack!
Which would very obviously prove to be even more triggering.
Trying to pander to women's desire to feel empowered and justified by doing whatever they decide to do is a losing game.
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Men also know that height is an advantage and there's always someone hotter. But enough also seem to be reliably triggered enough at seeing Stacy on a Youtube channel saying she won't date a 5'11 man to actually make harnessing their resentment a viable business model for people.
These women also obviously knew that models were much fitter. Apparently them flaunting it still didn't play well.
Making intrasexual competition - or someone's allegedly lower place in the rankings - more salient seems to cause some people to get demoralized, resentful or to try to lash out and control the message. The same basic argument against social media status games in general tbh.
Okay. Then this theory predicts that this'll stop being an issue when the...I dunno, female objectification waterline is brought down to that of males.
I'm not convinced that's going to happen though. As I said: people have an ideological belief that "objectification" is wrong as such. Both ScarJo and Chris Hemsworth were sexified for money (knowing absolutely full well what they were doing), only one of them complains because of little kids will see it*. Such things gain a life of their own. For another, it's a very useful argument. There'll always be people of the sort I describe above. Not sure why they'd put aside a tool.
* Even though Hemsworth's ridiculous use of steroids and refusal to admit it is arguably worse for body image issues due to how little it's interrogated in comparison and how bad the potential health risks of taking these drugs are.
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Well that's a silly way to look at it: in the long term, almost every woman (and man's) worth is in their offspring, their children. Only few exceptional people will have another, greater, impact on the world than their children.
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It's all so exhausting. Does society really need to take a moment out of all its other reckonings to examine the ethics of light beer? It's poison that makes us fat, we should drink less of it but won't. Just for once I'd like a bipartisan push back rather than the two sides predictably being turned against each other at the behest of corporate ghouls.
Ab, Miller, ect. You make heaps of money to psyop people into buying poison, you do not have any possible position of moral high ground to lecture us.
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Trappist ales were the first thing I thought of in response to the claim that women were the original brewers of beer.
Also that fermented grain drinks arose in every culture with access to grain, and that it sourcing the original beer brewer would be as impossible as figuring out who baked the first loaf of bread.
I mean, if they really wanted to go with the women and early beer angle, they'd have a Mesopotamian-dressed queen drinking from a golden straw.
I still wouldn't buy Miller Lite, but props for effort would be in order.
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Yeah, my first thought was "even if it were true...so what?"
Like, we're not talking about some segregated modern job that can easily be tracked and we know it was mainly men did advanced mathematics until recently.
It was one form of manual work in a very different environment that didn't have those sharp lines. Why would I be surprised or blown away in any way by the idea that women allegedly worked in it as well?
I think their narrative is meant to be something like the following:
Ever since the very beginning of history up until the Founding of America, women have always been brewing beer. Girl power!
But then, men took this from women! At some unspecified time and in some unspecified fashion, they took all the respectable jobs of growing and brewing, and stripped the women down to use them as mere advertisements.
But now, Miller Lite is undoing all that! They're putting women back in charge (where they belong) and erasing and defacing the artifacts of the previous perverted period. Girl power!
So the reason why general-you is being asked to care about this is because bad things have been done, and now Miller Lite is undoing the badness and restoring the industry to its natural state, and they want you to help. They're not just making the point that "women have long been involved in the beer industries", they're advocating for rolling back the clock on the misdeeds of the recent past and retvrning to the alleged tradition of having women in charge. In that regard, it's quite a reactionary ad.
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