This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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 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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link