Comments on: Don’t Support the Objectification of Women: Drink Craft Beer

By: Peter Swanson

Peter Swanson — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 03:15:49 +0000

Are you buying beer, or a multi-million dollar advertising campaign? I guess a sexist dumbass is a dumbass in other realms of life as well. Go Wenchie, and expound the truth!

By: Julie Towery

Julie Towery — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 20:50:23 +0000

If you haven’t seen the film “Miss representation”, see it for sure. The corporate beer industry’s advertizing is just the tip of a HUGE iceberg. Video games, movies, etc are full of violence toward women. I would like to see boycotts of products whose advertisements include sex and violence toward women.

By: Women in Brewing at Stone | She Likes Beer

Women in Brewing at Stone | She Likes Beer — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 19:58:11 +0000

[...] by shelikesbeer on Oct 13, 2010 in Blog | 2 comments After reading The Beer Wench’s recent blog post about the objectification of women in the beer ad industry, I was put into the super feminist [...]

By: Vineagogo

Vineagogo — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 19:50:38 +0000

Great write up! We definitely share you sentiments, this kind of low-brow advertising really shows their true colors. If you have to push your beer through such means, then clearly your swill isn’t good enough to stand on its own merits. I raise my glass as well to the craft brewers who take the high road and respect their fellow human beings!

By: Wenchie

Wenchie — Mon, 23 May 2011 17:20:09 +0000

Jessica — Thanks for the comments! And thanks for sharing your frustrating experience. I hate when those types of marketers try to infiltrate craft beer events. They stick out like a sore thumb… thankfully, craft brewers do not need to stoop to the level of objectification to sell their awesome product! CHEERS!

By: Jessica Rice

Jessica Rice — Thu, 19 May 2011 00:02:53 +0000

Oh Man! Why couldn’t you have been at Orange County’s Beerfest 2011 this last saturday!? I just wrote about it on my blog and I had the same issue. There is a new “craft brewery” that just debuted their German Lager which was brewed locally with one of those stupid hollywood photo walls, model with a torn-up skin-tight dress and I wanted to vomit. It was the first taster I had and I clearly compared the taste to bud light. The beer was crap. Now I know why all the flash was necessary. I think I will save my money for better-tasting beers from breweries I can respect. Thanks for being so awesome.

By: Hanna

Hanna — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 17:46:01 +0000

I agree that the sort of objectification found in macrobreweries’ advertisements is abhorrent, but let’s not forget the objectification that occurs in a large segment of craft beer packaging and ads. In many craft beer print ads and product packages, women are depicted as sultry, sexy objects. Check out this other sweet blog post for examples:

http://www.deeplyproblematic.com/2009/08/normalization-of-maleness-and-whiteness.html

By: Craft Beer is Woman Friendly: OMG, My Life Makes Sense Now «

Craft Beer is Woman Friendly: OMG, My Life Makes Sense Now « — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 18:10:42 +0000

[...] I just discovered this kickass blog the Beer Wench. She has a great post up about why, besides that craft brews are tastier, we should support those companies because their [...]

By: poisoned_dwarf

poisoned_dwarf — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:11:43 +0000

What about this one?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=J1jPE9BwwUA

By: Kyle

Kyle — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:33:41 +0000

The difference in ads stems from the products’ intentions.

Light lagers have nothing to talk about. It’s like asking a paper napkin company to stand out from the competition. I mean, macro beer is just a manufactured item built to spec for an intended purpose. The liquids are no different. Hence, their advertising usually has nothing to do with the product and far more to do with brand strengthening. I liken it to an overzealous teenage girl who just HAS to be followed by 1000 people on Facebook. She needs to build her personal brand to appeal to the largest audience.

Craft beer celebrates diversity and complexity, which isn’t the path of mass production, it’s the path of the artisan. And, given how awesome it is that tons of craft beers are produced by hand, and are a genuine reflection of the people at the helm, craft can stand simply on the merits of the liquid. In a sense, it’s something real. So, craft beer ads are usually about the product itself and don’t need kneejerk ads to increase sales. Also, the craft market is steadily growing, so brewers aren’t really fighting violently in the ad world for for a slice of a largely spoken-for pie, as macro lagers are.

I don’t look at raunchy ads so much as an issue of feminism but of stagnance and complacency. Life is change, and many of these macro products haven’t changed in a very long time. These brands are dying giants in a very real sense. They don’t have anything new to advertise besides a toilet bowl bottleneck and color changing cans. But, because their only motivating factor is profitability, they still are required to go out and fight with whatever bullshit tools they can think up to grow their share of market. So their ads play off of the genetic makeup of humans.

People know what macro beers are. They’re everywhere. So they advertise with “primal instinct” triggers like humor and sex to get us to identify with the brands on an emotional level. It’s like McDonald’s featuring salt, sugar, and fat – the key primal instinct ingredients. Everything they produce is based on featuring saltiness, sweetness, or fattiness, or some combination of them, because humans are subconsciously drawn to seek out those things. Beer advertising is no different, they show people having good times, relaxing, appealing women, jokes, and a bevy of other tools in order to lead consumers to identify with the “reasons” people buy their brand.

Take Miller’s new set of commercials, whose formula features one oddball being ostracized from social settings for drinking the “wrong” beer. Each oddball also features one thing that is socially unacceptable, from the wrong barhopping outfit to the wrong swimwear to, for some inexplicable reason, having his mom sitting a table away as he is out with friends. These messages play off of people’s instinct to belong to a larger group. To me, I don’t buy in to the emotional attachment to a company’s message. But a ton of people do. That’s why ad firms keep generating these types of campaigns.

So yes, degrading women is bad, but to be honest, most marketing schemes used to advertise macro beers are bad.