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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.
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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