Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

So, to summarize: a 'masculine' relationship with alcohol is founded on unfussiness and sloshedness, whereas a 'feminine' one aims to please an aesthetically sophisticated palate. Or something. Doesn't account for craft beer, although you could view the entire phenomenon with masculinist suspicion and just continue chugging your Coors Light or Molson Canadian or whatever.

post If you like sancerre and alsace pinot gris, you will like Pouilly Fume, alsace riesling and italian vermentino, verdicchio, pigato.

Oh my thing about wine above and men thinking it's effeminate because they don't know about it is more about the knee jerk reaction of men to poo poo stuff they have no knowledge about.

what abt yr beard-oil applying single malt connoisseur with his expensive cigar cutter and many many opinions?

I remember being advised once that any wine with an animal on the label is for girls.

I guess if you add power (whether real or merely performed) to the equation, it suddenly becomes legitimate. But it works better with whiskey and cigars than it does with cognac or wine.

xp

So, to summarize: a 'masculine' relationship with alcohol is founded on unfussiness and sloshedness, whereas a 'feminine' one aims to please an aesthetically sophisticated palate. Or something. Doesn't account for craft beer, although you could view the entire phenomenon with masculinist suspicion and just continue chugging your Coors Light or Molson Canadian or whatever.

― pomenitul, Friday, 18 January 2019 15:53 (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

dont think that holds true when you consider eg whiskey either tbh

the type of man this thread is comfortable making yknow broadly negative handwavey comment on is just i guess a dumb man who wants uncomplex stuff that everyone else wants idk its hard to parse rly

I think there's also an element where people think stuff like whiskey has a strong masculine flavor or some bullshit when in actuality it's more sugary and carmely than a bunch of other drinks

all the craft beer manliness was manifested in the endless race to see how many hops they could shove into there

like the main manliness thing with drink aesthetics is "nuance bad, bold good"

god bless darragh for also going straight to whiskey

Part of it is ancestral too: it stems from the desire to replicate a bygone model from your own cultural/linguistic frame of reference.

xps

i always go straight to whiskey

Wine with animals on it is "critter wine". It's basically because australia realized they had a winning combination on putting animals on wine labels (yellow tail). It sells like crazy. That's it.

did they not make a can of wine designed for men (as in: MEN!!!!!) or did I just imagine that

looks deems we don't understand men so we can only pooh-pooh them

canned or boxed wine is good because you can take it to the beach

post If you like sancerre and alsace pinot gris, you will like Pouilly Fume, alsace riesling and italian vermentino, verdicchio, pigato.

― Yerac, Friday, January 18, 2019 10:53 AM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Riesling is too sweet for me but interested in trying the others.

More broadly, agree that the bottom line is that men are not supposed to be too "fussy" or nuanced about their drinking. However I think it's interesting how successful the craft beer boom was, suggesting that there was actually a lot of pent-up thirst among men for drinks that, you know, tasted better? And it seems like that in turn has led to the craft whiskey boom etc. There still has to be this sort of playboy-esque air of "sophisticated manliness" to the whole thing sometimes, and that gets a little tedious.

this stuff!!

https://metrouk2.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/mancan1.png?quality=90&strip=all&zoom=1&resize=644%2C261

now THIS, I can get into

that really gets at the fucked-upness of all the masculine marketing though: selling the idea that men are uncomplicated and just want a big old bar of soap that smells like soap should smell, and they market that by creating a completely new brand with its own high profile marketing campaign

frogs we were just discussing that, it's MANCAN

I was in a bar and ordered wine and the bartender gave me a Man Can to taste. It was basically a decent house wine and, theoretically, is a good idea in that it will save you a trip to the bar because it is two glasses worth. What isn't a good idea is calling it the Man Can. The bartender was looking for feedback so I told him to change the name because it's a stupid name. It's a Cleveland invention (where I live) and I think the bartender knew the owner or something.

Riesling is only sweet from certain regions. It's dry everywhere else. Normally from alsace it's dry.

whiskey is basically distilled beer.

You've had mancan! Yeah I am fine with wine in cans. It's lighter and more easily transportable.

xp by ingredients, kind of

before it's aged a bunch of it is basically just pure grain alcohol

pretty sure the cheapest well whiskey is equivalent to everclear that's sat in a barrel for two years to make the legal distinction and then tinted with food coloring

well i mean look

and the poo-pooing line to clarify, is that instead of listening or admitting to not knowing something it's the reaction to degrade instead of being open to learning about it.

there are gatekeepers of masculinity, and other men emulate them, including their irrational drink gendering. sometimes these men are grandfathers, or magazines.

yea if I liked wine I'd totally be down with the MANCAN just so long as it was called something else

can't get past the name so it's MANCAN'T

though really you gotta credit Mike's Hard Lemonade for coming up with that angle first. used to love the end of those commercials where the big hand gripping the can would just slam it down on the table and imagining the director yelling "CUT!!! Harder!! Slam it harder!!! Ah fuck too hard!!!"

I am picturing bottles of Zima being poured into Mike's Hard Lemonade bottles in a screened-off part of the brewery

don't worry yerac you're coming over loud and clear

f. hazel otm, half of the masculine marketing crap is "your granddad's cologne" or "grandfather's best whiskey" or whatever because masculinity is liking what old men liked and forever disdaining the new

I also love you all for bringing up Mike's Hard Lemonade, which came out when I was in college, and also bears my name

haha. zima is really popular in Japan. It's weird.

wine culture in the US can also be really overly tryhard -- the whole wine tasting tour culture where you swirl the glass and stick your nose in and try to come up with eccentric descriptors for the different "tasting notes." I mean IMO that shit is dumb irrespective of gender and not what enjoying wine should be about. I think there's something very American about that too in a way, like we have to overcompensate for the insecurity that we're not cultured.

I mean to walk that back a little it's not necessarily "dumb" I guess but it just seems more like a specialized interest and in no way essential to enjoying wine

But that wine tasting tour culture is everywhere/global.

Probably now because tourism is like bursting at the seams and wineries have to put more money into hosting tourists.

Going back to the whiskey thing for a second, it really is acceptable to discriminate aesthetically as a man as long as it matches your forebears' presumed preferences, which implies some amount of nationalist sentiment, whether avowed or not. 'Presumed' is key, though – I wouldn't want to piss off the historicists.

brownie what bar, if you don't mind my asking?

I once got invited to a friend's house for a "wine tasting" which ended up actually being one of those in-home sales parties, irritatingly, but part of it was that shtick

the joke was that, while the wine was decent, all of the tasting queues were insanely obvious

so after a couple glasses, I'm still irritated that this is a sales pitch so it became a game where I'd blurt out the answer as soon as the wine seller said their cue

"This one is from blah blah region and has a fruit taste that.."
me: "It's strawberry!"

*tasting cues, not queues

The whiskey vs wine thing in the us though, like a lot of places is more effected by environmental/history. Wine grapes were only really being successfuly cultivated in very few areas and then prohibition happened. You can make moonshine/whiskey whatever anywhere. You can only grow grapes in certain places. And the wine that was allowed during prohibition had to be for religious purposes. And then after prohibition they had to replant all those vineyards and it takes years to get them profitable again.

yerac otm:

and the poo-pooing line to clarify, is that instead of listening or admitting to not knowing something it's the reaction to degrade instead of being open to learning about it.

...it's OK for men to like craft beer because it's expertise in a domain they are already comfortable with (and in a pinch you can always still play the "real men drink a dozen bud lights from a can, not three imperial stouts from a snifter" card)

as a linguist I think of implicit gendered hierarchies of types of alcohol, containers, and flavors... like the order of adjectives in English, all native speakers know the order but few can enumerate the rules explicitly

have we just spent 50 posts discussing Al Murray's catchphrase?

beer for the gent, fruit-based drink for the lady

my husband drinks way more wine than me though

So maybe wine just got too identified with "effeminate" coastals whereas whiskey/beer is more heartland. Who knows.

Wine's foreign stuff that only posh people drink, basically.

now i'm remembering the "girl drink drunk" kids in the hall sketch

*starts up blender in work supply closet*

in-home sales parties

revoke 1776 this damned instant

somebody write the guns, germs, and steel for cocktails

cant really deny the general charge pomenitul, hard to separate whiskey from nationality in the instance

but men- you know, "men" qua thread- in ireland ime are rarely discerning about whiskey in that fashion as a group

so youd really be talking about

men interested in whiskey cos manly whiskey- horsin jack down you at a bar in athlone, probably after a hape a pints, these men are stupid but maybe less likely to have v curated beards and arent going to be guilty of the aesthetic discrimination you describe but as likely as anyone to join a norse power group on fb sure

men interested in whiskey cos seduction of useless/rare knowledge and guile of interestingness as markers of a depth of personality will be guilty of these behaviours but im not sure theyre going to be in any way swayed towards nationalism vs dressing hipstery and getting their beards oiled

real nationalists from the forebears tradition drink paddys and dont give a fuck whether it has an age profile or not and they just want to shoot thr brits up rly.

There is good wine in the UK now. But yeah, spain, italy, germany, france, you could probably make decent wine from grapes you grow in your backyard so it seems more accessible/everyday/part of the fabric of the country. Didn't have that in the US or UK. Chile makes sooooo much wine and chileans don't drink it. All exported.

I love girl drink drunk.