marketing of masculinity

by doing the downward dawg

and frequent men-ditation

Chest-bumping dog.

this just showed up in my inbox - infantilising AND comically macho!

http://www.powertext.co.uk/account/106/units/885/BH_Father%27s_Day_2015%20middel.jpg

Buzzfeed's take on apparently real products.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/lukebailey/masculinity-is-strong-and-powerful#.xy1Ndo908

good lord @ "fragile masculinity" being a meme

like I know men's products are the dumbest shit ever but after reading the words "masculinity" and "fragile" in close proximity so many times they become meaningless to me

let's invert expectations by calling men fragile instead of strong. mind blown

yeah. i think 'fragility' can a useful way to frame the anxieties of masculinity, but not because it subverts your expectations and blows your mind. men are weak, DO YOU SEE?

like, masculinity brings with it many advantages except that it is vulnerable from every direction. practically anything can destabilize it and anything less than its perfect performance can be mean ridicule, shame, exclusion, violence. it's under constant existential threat to such an extent that even any passing connection to anything non-masculine can poison it.

so 'fragility' in that sense is an essential characteristic; but it's what motivates men to militate against those threats, to exploit those fears in other men, to submit each other so much heartbreaking cruelty.

but yea

"men are teacups lol"

okay

Anyway, another overhead shot of a cup of coffee in that steak thing. This seems to be a thing now?

i somehow doubt that's coffee tbh

no coffee only "bro fuel"

from that copy it almost looks like you're supposed to sit yourself at the grill and eat your steak straight off the grill as it's grilling.

i appreciate that the grill markings don't even match the grill plate that, for some reason, it's being served on??

^good eye

shared the ridiculous buzzfeed list on facebook. a friend who shared it had someone comment that most of the marketing is supposed to be funny.

I think there's some truth, but it's a cynical ploy assuming "man humor" is dumb as hell, like "hah hah, a loofah that is for 'detailing' a man, hilarious"

yet another friend posted a link to this Coke Zero article we might have mentioned before: http://www.ajc.com/news/business/coke-zero-becomes-a-hero-for-coca-cola-co/nQkHh/

I'm trying to cut down my soda intake as much as possible, but I drink Coke Zero about once a week. Nothing to do with marketing at all; it tastes a lot better than Diet Coke, which always tastes like aluminum even when it comes out of a bottle. And regular Coke is out of the question 'cause I'm diabetic.

yah, I think the fact it is a new product helped them, but tbrr the reason it is doing better among men than diet coke does is because it lacks "diet" in the name

the coke zero bottle is dimpled like a football. when i guzzle a coke zero it feels like i'm wrapping my sweaty beefy mitts around the very essence of manly sensation.

also the masculine bedroom in the buzzfeed thing has yellow and pink accent colors. wherever that comes from it's for bros who know what accent colors are.

like the apotheosis of masculine styling is a complete disregard for styling in the most slovenly way possible; styling a masculine bedroom is a tautological impossibility.

poor choice of targets is what i'm sayin

yea but nah, advertisers create & market to class & competence based anxieties around masculinity, gotta have the aspirational drive man, gotta have a cool pad ladies will relax in, gotta get some tasteful bed linens like a fuckin BOSS

so much tension. i'm up on my game, i got the details on lock like having the highest thread count sheets/ vanity is a feminine quality, i don't sweat the details like noticing thread counts. as an industry, how do we monetize this dissonance, is what yer saying.

i think

contemporary masculinity = purposefully utilitaristic but incidentally tastefully curated nonchalance? or always so?

it's not really so monolithic, imo, i just think there are tons of different varieties of masculinity used to sell to men of various demographics, the thing is they each do the "no true scotsman" thing to each other but along the lines of "NO REAL MAN"

so yea its confusing, which is i think partly why we get machismo in our fuckin yogurt these days

http://www.qualitylogoproducts.com/blog/scott-pilgrim-vs-the-world/

^ My first thought when I saw that we were talking about Coke Zero was "lol, like the smashing pumpkins song. Someone had to have at least thought about tying that in." And apparently...

styling a masculine bedroom is a tautological impossibility

hugh hefner disagreed

yeah, i meant that's why i can't take the "fragile masculinity" trope seriously in the masculine bedroom example. even if a fragile masculinity strawman picks out the manliest throw pillows possible, he's still shopping for throw pillows, which presumably he would consider an effete endeavor to be avoided, if he was that paranoid about his own masculinity.

uh a dude just buys the cheapest sheet set at a department store in a neutral color and like two pillows for the bed. I totally did this in my early years of living alone. I don't think I had any throw pillows unless you count the ones that came with my couch.

All pillows can become throw pillows with enough arm force

i'm not talking about how people really behave, i'm mocking the fragile masculinity strawman construction. like the men's tea thing, the strawman who won't buy tea unless it's a MANS tea probably wouldn't be buying any variety of yogi tea anyway because of chakras and crystals and all that.

good lord @ "fragile masculinity" being a meme

― example (crüt), Thursday, June 18, 2015 5:21 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

like I know men's products are the dumbest shit ever but after reading the words "masculinity" and "fragile" in close proximity so many times they become meaningless to me

― example (crüt), Thursday, June 18, 2015 5:22 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

let's invert expectations by calling men fragile instead of strong. mind blown

― example (crüt), Thursday, June 18, 2015 5:24 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah. i think 'fragility' can a useful way to frame the anxieties of masculinity, but not because it subverts your expectations and blows your mind. men are weak, DO YOU SEE?

― gwyneth anger (patron sailor), Thursday, June 18, 2015 6:03 AM Bookmark

Huh, I've mostly just seen "fragility" in conjunction with "whiteness" lately although used to describe masculinity it makes more sense tbh

also given the choice between Coke Zero and Diet Coke I will always go with C0 cause DC is some New Coke garbage

How strawmanny is this strawman, though? I don't think that many ppl would be ~consciously~ nervous or angry abt buying "lady" products but I do think that there are a great many ppl for whom it would not even occur that they, like, even have the option of buying these "lady" things, like "oh that's girly, that's not for me", and this sort of OTT "joke"-masculine marketing of masculinity provides sort of arm-around-the-shoulder "HA HA HA exaggerated comical manliness, right guys?? (no but rly fellas, it's safe for you to buy this thing now)"

like I feel like it's maybe used to "humorous" effect just to put ppl at ease

every time i see one of those ironic "masculine" advertisements. (surely old spice and whatever that iteration of dr pepper was are the paradigm for this) i think of the "irony bribe" idea:
http://commstudies.utexas.edu/sites/commstudies.utexas.edu/files/attachments/cloud/ironybribe.pdf

(as in, you can find a salve for your masculine anxiety in this product but of course you don't really suffer from any masculine anxiety it's just a goof you're totally manly the way you are)

there are entire categories of products that some men feel weird about buying. idgi. like men will not buy lotion even if their skin is gross because it's somehow feminine? there was a dude who maintained the warehouse area at my dad's workplace who wouldn't buy toilet paper for the restroom. I guess he'd never bought toilet paper in his life?

I think 2/3 of men's face lotions have to specifically claim they're "after shave" or "after shave lotion" even if it's just normal face lotion because why would men need lotion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPyNEbLnZh0

How strawmanny is this strawman, though?

it's not really so monolithic, imo, i just think there are tons of different varieties of masculinity used to sell to men of various demographics

i think what patron sailor said was otm: there are different ways to be male or masuline-identitied in this culture and marketing largely reflects that. "i'm not a chick" is def one of those demographics, but not the only one by far. the fragile masculinity trope is kinda tone-deaf in that it doesn't differentiate; it just finds anything marketed to men in general and reduces it to a convenient singular stereotype of the brutish mancave dweller. that's just lazy, and it's not smarter than the marketing it supposedly skewers.

can't believe someone marketed something pls hlp

darragh do u even man

irl lol

actually

:)

there was a dude who maintained the warehouse area at my dad's workplace who wouldn't buy toilet paper for the restroom. I guess he'd never bought toilet paper in his life?

didn't realise that using toilet paper was a feminine thing to do but well i guess if i wanna remain masculine i must make sacrifices

just manscape when it gets too clumpy

real men use bidets.