Hot on the heels of my last Miller Lite post comes another marketing move by the beer manufacturer that falls squarely in Manvertising category.
I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus lately for a variety of reasons but am back now and kicking off a batch of stuff that promises to be extra maddening as the summer progresses (it is barbecues-and-beer season, after all, a highlight of the manvertising year).
What’s grabbed my attention right now is the latest commercial and beer technology from Miller Lite.
While I spend most of my time examining manvertising in American media, it is definitely not just an American phenomenon. Just like the UK had the “lad” movement in the 1990s, in which men deliberately reverted to being “bad” and doing “bad” things as a way of taking back masculinity (which led, inadvertently, to the creation of magazines like Maxim, which started in the UK before moving to the US), Canada also has a history of emphasizing a specific and rigid set of imagery to describe how “real” men act. Beer commercials, just like in the US, might be the best place to observe these practices. Perhaps even more than in the US, these ads connect masculinity to national identity, and what it means to be a “Real Canadian Man.”
Moosehead ads, perhaps more than any other Canadian examples, and most definitely more than any contemporary American commercials, have latched onto homophobia as a marketing technique. It’s startling to think that the account managers at Moosehead don’t realize that, in fact, men can and definitely do all these things. These are also prototypical examples of the male gaze, and how women’s bodies become the property of male desire, seemingly existing only to function as male fantasies. Not surprisingly, those fantasies are really just lesbianism (for male pleasure, of course) and the possession of two women by one man.
Ads after the jump.
