marketing of masculinity

http://i276.photobucket.com/albums/kk34/feministing/Picture1-15.png

fucking hell

what clothing company is that for?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFj3FJlBT8Q

that commercial : /

5 seconds after it ends a bunch of russian mob dudes come in blazing

looool

That ad makes me want to cut off my own dick.

http://www.us.dockers.com/season/landing.aspx

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN

* Men
* Women
* Fit Guide
* Man-ifesto

dos equis most interesting man commercials to thread

xp btw Hoot thinking that thought makes you cRaZy

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh thank you for bringing this to my attention

dos equis ads are at least pretty tongue-in-cheek

http://contexts.org/socimages/tag/gender-masculinity/

Holding Doors Open For Women

being a man is about being a good human being imo

maybe dockers will help u

this makes me think of some of the things Susan Faludi talks about in her book Stiffed, which is like ten years old now, about how men were the next great unexploited fashion/beauty market.

Aren't Dockers for middle-aged fat-asses?

idk but the point is to feel cool when you buy them

Aren't Dockers for middle-aged fat-asses?

― uninspired girls rejoice!!! (Hoot Smalley), Tuesday, December 8, 2009 7:22 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

u are the target audience

"actually -- little known historical fact that, when men were men, prior to disco, khakis were only worny by the ruggedest of bros"

Virtually the same style:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl6ZAXytvjY

this is the point at which everybody who made "ironic" lol sexism joaks in the 90s & 00s now has to pay for it by gouging their eyes out and dancing on them

ow my eyes

thank god i was an adolescent and actually sexist, whew

that khakis ad is so preposterous i cannot imagine taking it srsly on any level

the real question it poses--when will derisive "latte" comments become passe?

when will it be ok for men to eat salad again? how do you guys live on these all steak diets

just had my 17th heart attack tbh

i had a (bison) steak AND a salad for dinner tonight i will have you know

so you are like 50% man now

killed a man, too

This does remind me of a thread i wanted to start, about how the only time I ever use the phrase "men" or "women" seems to involve marketing pitches for Boomers, or gay bars. It's like "Magazine for Men" or "Bars for Men" I automatically equate to "gay-targeted". I mean, almost all of the males I ever encountered above the age of 18 fall into the category of "dudes," "guys", "fellas", "bros", or "homies".

I worked with a guy who talked about how they'd go on a "men's retreat" every year, which was pretty much just a chance to head out to the Oregon deserts and bro down with buddies with dune buggies.

stole his salad

wait so is driving dune buggies in the OR desert w/yr "bros" a gay thing????

8[

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bQlSr9YjLc

here's to young white dudes and maybe firefighters can earn their way in maybe

here's to assholes

lol what is that music?

gbx, what kind of fork did you eat with?

if its plastic you're down to 45% man

being a man is about being a good human being imo

Psshaww I bet you enjoy eating salads

... with a PLASTIC FORK no doubt!

the real question it poses--when will derisive "latte" comments become passe?

― call all destroyer, Tuesday, December 8, 2009 6:04 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark

i guess when derisive salad and disco comments become passe. which if judging by the durability of hairy lesbian comments = never.

ha lol everyone already made that joke i see

xp

wait so is driving dune buggies in the OR desert w/yr "bros" a gay thing????

No, it's a perfectly acceptable bros thing.

that ad at the top is a take-you-aside-and-be-serious version of a bad standup routine

Maybe you're not supposed to use utensils at all.

this IS desert season btw, no better time to throw a few cases of natty ice in the F-150, hook up the dirtbikes and roll out to glamis or gordon's well and fuckin BRO. DOWN. BRODER.

that sounds awesome but i guess i'm not invited

bro if you're heading out pick up some burreets or a double-double for the noshage

i guess his kid is some kind of vice journo bro

Vice psychedelics bro

The Morris High Life ads are very Hank Hill.

https://bsky.app/profile/kennedytcooper.bsky.social/post/3lynyq3rvuk2p

Okay no

It only just now registered that they called them DUMPkin spice wipes

I hate it so much

i don't think i want to wipe with clove oil

https://bsky.app/profile/pgourevitch.bsky.social/post/3mbzh5vt2t22r

Wasn’t there some book in the early 90s about men getting in touch with their rugged inner self called Iron John? A friend's of mine had divorced parents, and his dad was a huge bummer. I remember him going on about it.

https://i.ibb.co/mVDJPhpL/Screen-Shot-2026-01-09-at-10-26-32-PM.png

These are for little boys, to make their assholes smell like bubble gum.

If there's another thread I should be posting this in, let me know in the comments.

when u tell someone "eat my ass" but u r considerate

extra large lil' dude wipes

haha i think we've done the bubble gum dude wipes itt before.

re man cereal: i've noticed that masc has shifted in the last 10 years to include helvetica typeface and minimalism thanks i'm assuming to startup culture. huel et al. "not my masc!" i scream from the sidelines "take your ten thousand workout shorts and ascend into the background server humming noise that you clearly aspire to become!"

Wasn’t there some book in the early 90s about men getting in touch with their rugged inner self called Iron John? A friend's of mine had divorced parents, and his dad was a huge bummer. I remember him going on about it.

― Cow_Art, Saturday, January 10, 2026 3:32 AM (eighteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

iron john is bad but at least robert bly could turn a phrase. i was with a guy for a year who had a jack donovan book in his collection called "androphilia". i revisited samples recently out of curiosity, because while i'm definitely too queer to be straight i've often also felt like i was too into masc to be gay, and let me tell you, that guy is just a straight-up bullshit artist (but gay, but don't you dare call him gay, even though he is obviously a huge self-fellating queen). an early version of manosphere grifters but relatively laughable and batshit even compared to them.

someone should write a satire slash fic piece where he hooks up with andrew sullivan.

Wasn’t there some book in the early 90s about men getting in touch with their rugged inner self called Iron John? A friend's of mine had divorced parents, and his dad was a huge bummer. I remember him going on about it.

― Cow_Art, Friday, January 9, 2026 7:32 PM (two days ago)

funny story on that. according to robert evans in this episode of "behind the bastards", today's "manosphere" types are the intellectual descendents of robert bly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDjeo3hEpMg

i'm sure i've told this story before - i was involved in what evans terms the "mythopoetic men's movement" (at the time, we just called it the "men's movement"). my rich hippie uncle got really into it and paid for me to go to a weekend retreat of one of these groups when i was twenty. obviously it didn't succeed but i think the people involved were pretty well-intentioned... i suspect most of them would be pretty horrified at the idea that they had anything to do with andrew tate, haha. i know my hippie uncle would be. my memory, which is definitely fallible - it was nearly 30 years ago - is that it was a bunch of middle-aged white guys with daddy issues doing cultural appropriation. i was 20 years old and that was the first time i tried to come out as trans, haha. none of us had any clue how to make sense of what i was saying - including me. it was the 90s. none of us knew shit about that kind of thing. i think it's to their credit that they made a space where i felt comfortable trying to express this thing i didn't remotely have words for... honestly, looking back there _are_ a lot worse places i could have tried to come out. nobody shamed me or argued with me. they were just confused, which is reasonable enough, considering i was pretty damn confused about things myself.

coming to terms with queerness, i think, is one of the big challenges when it comes to masculinity. it's really interesting, map, to hear you say you feel like you're "too masc to be gay". imposter syndrome is about as close to a universal queer experience as i've found. so in my case i always felt like i wasn't masc _enough_ to be gay, although i really wished i was gay. which i think i just assumed was a totally normal heterosexual thing to do. one of the things i love most about being a woman is that, while we're not all "sisters" by any stretch of the imagination, _homosociality_ among women is normal, and differentiated from homosexuality. in fact, that's a problem in and of itself for me as a lesbian. it's pretty common for women, even lesbian women, to interpret romantic interest as homosociality! it's known as "lesbian sheep syndrome" among certain communities. it seems that ewes express sexual interest by standing stock still and not doing anything, and there is therefore a marked lack of lesbianism in sheep.

colorway naming mvp:

earth + forged iron

(green and grey)

is your iron even forged?

Maybe women's products are also "anthracite" but idk.

i guess this shit has been going on for 40 years now, but

'epic fury'

grow up ffs. 'overlord' and 'torch' and 'cartwheel' were good enough for the *warfighters* you idiots fetishize

https://www.metropoliscomics.com/coverimages/gallery/sgt1.149a.jpg

Operation Ep-stein Files is our generation's Operation Iraqui Liberation and I'm here for it

Semi-former ILXor nabisco has a good piece on the rise of 'tactical' as a marketing hook.

There’s a comedian (and former Coast Guardsman) named Jim Tews who does an amusing bit about trying to get his father to drink more water. The trick, he decides, is to buy him a “tactical water bottle,” which he displays for the audience: It’s swaddled in a desert-drab carrier with copious attachment points and, Tews jokes, room for a few magazines of ammunition. Amazon, he points out, is full of products like this. There are tactical pens, a tactical kilt, even tactical dog food. For $56.99, you can purchase a tactical diaper bag, “in case you get deployed on the weekend you have the kids.” The guy in the product photo does indeed look like his nanny bailed on him right when he was supposed to show up for the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

also recently had a piece about 'chud'

My supervisor at work recommended that piece to me, and I was like "oh yeah I know that guy." He thought it was very funny.

(the "tactical" piece, that is)

fun article.

i've been really into this subreddit recently called Men of Purpose, it's kind of a goldmine

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Flife-v0-seqtbnfls50h1.jpeg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dc68ccadf26647d5b203a7f5d3136ae9bf7b33ad2

https://i.postimg.cc/GmZj3v6B/man.png

i guess it doesn't have anything to do with marketing apart from being a window into the kind of online identity formation that leads people to want to buy tactical diaper bags, although even that's being charitable because i don't think any of the 13 yr old boys on this subreddit are getting laid or having babies

reeeeeeal men of purrrrrpose

lol yes i do that too!

Why 'Ballmaxxing' May Be More Dangerous Than You Think

the year of ballmaxxing dangerously

the irony is a lot of these ballmaxxing dudes are probably anti-vaxxers

I don't know what it is, and I refuse to click on the link.

yer missing out

yer maxxing out

all the maxxing stuff just makes me think of tj maxx and yeah they know about it

forget looksmaxxing, we've been tjmaxxing since 1976 🤭
Instagram · tjmaxx
500+ likes · 3 weeks ago
One thing @tjmaxx is going to do is serve us a good spring / summer staple! You don't need to spend a fortune to look put together, ...

can't believe the photo in op is still functional. kills me the way they had the gall to stick "Shop for Women's" after all that

Cronenberg's next film is about ballmaxxing taken too far

He'll reuse his old title Stereo

https://i.postimg.cc/c1Yc8H6S/gruntstyle.jpg

defending casual wear for 250 years bro

shaving my pits for the summer heck yeah gonna smell less like fat guy sweat

I guess Filson talk was in the other masculinity thread but these are going to be so popular with white guys who own technical gear but haven’t slept outdoors since that Phish show in ‘96.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRwW9CMAQzg

i think whatever that is might be my least favorite aesthetic

It's like they paint matched a '90s Lexus sedan but made it gaudy.

I saw a Filson wool vest at a work wear store last weekend and it was... $260

Their twill briefcases look cool but I've never had enough stuff to carry on a daily basis to need a bag.

Just read that men are now the primary customers of Botox injections in my country.

Gotta keep the balls nice and tight.

Botoxic masculinity