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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
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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