Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

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.

Yeah I was wondering if the UK is so tedious about the scotch and irish whiskey brand they drink. I mean I think it is pretty niche all around? Depending on the person?

men drink like THIS
women drink like THAT

red wine with ice on a hot day = delicious

I don't know much about the Irish stuff but there is oodles of insane snobbery about Scotch.

Conversely, there's quite a bit of xenophobic snobbery about wine in France, but it never struck me as particularly gendered.

Yeah I was wondering if the UK is so tedious about the scotch and irish whiskey brand they drink. I mean I think it is pretty niche all around? Depending on the person?

― Yerac, Friday, 18 January 2019 16:28 (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think, and its hard to be general about it, but its like you said about wine, really

if you know enough to know what you like you can go by style, brand, profile

if you just want to drink whiskey to drink whiskey you buy a pricey one and hope you enjoy it while showing it off

if you just want to get pissed, tesco brand or w/e

(the ppl you see acting most like what mh describes are, quite appropriately in context, probably gonna be american men)

but its gotta be skewed also by the "big tourism industry get em in" noted re vineyards above too

Do Irish men generally pay more attention to these details than Irish women?

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

Pretty sure it was on the west side, but I can't remember. I usually stick to Forage or Mahall's when I'm over there so maybe one of those?

gah, my memory

men drink with their lips women drink with thine eyes

It's funny because scotch probably seems snobby because it has some similarities of why people think old world wine (french/spanish, italian/etc) is snobby. You have to know a little about the region listed on the label to know the style of wine/whiskey you are getting. Isley whiskey is a lot different than one labeled HIghland. Chablis is a lot different than white Burgundy.

It's funny because scotch probably seems snobby because it has some similarities of why people think old world wine (french/spanish, italian/etc) is snobby. You have to know a little about the region listed on the label to know the style of wine/whiskey you are getting. Isley whiskey is a lot different than one labeled HIghland. Chablis is a lot different than white Burgundy.

fucking hell

Do Irish men generally pay more attention to these details than Irish women?

― pomenitul, Friday, 18 January 2019 16:35 (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

irish women dont drink

is that true?!?

there are a few local dudes who I enjoy running into at the bar who, for some period of time, we bartenders themselves at a local music venue

one now works for a local craft brew place and generally just has one of their standard beers if he's drinking a single beer

otherwise I typically see many of them drinking a can of cheap beer with a shot of whiskey, very granddad-style

however, after bartending at a local music festival they were drinking "the festival cocktail" all summer which was a shot of vodka w/ice and then topped off with White Claw (basically the newest "flavored sparkling water with booze in it" product)

of course I'm like, sure, why not and poured myself a few

lol

no it is not true

Feels like the single malt companies have decided on a blizzard of one-off bottlings so there's no chance of knowing what the hell you are getting, forcing you to buy based on name and price.

the equivalent irish woman to irish whiskey dude does it with gin, is my narrow experience

xpost damn you! the most shocking thing you have ever said.

lol

the french and their wine, I don't know if it's xenophobic. I think they are just protecting their product. They have so much of it, how dare you bring another country in.

Like when Cono Sur was sponsoring part/all of the Tour de France and the french got PISSED.

if you reframe ppl thinking the perceived french snootiness is less about a bourgeois superiority and is more about a populist pride in the fruits of their labor a lot of things really make more sense

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.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Friday, January 18, 2019 11:00 AM (thirty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I saw an ad for Bud Light where one guy in a bar was like, "no no, I don't want Bud Light; I want such-and-such craft beer!," pointing out what an effeminate nonconformist schmuck he was. Later I saw an ad for some obviously-corporate-but-trying-to-be-craft beer ("we use the finest hops from Old Man Wilson's privately curated reserve...")

... and it was made by Budweiser (and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the exact same marketing dipshits worked on both ads).

Oh I meant more in the sense that some tend to assume that foreigners already know everything there is to know about oenology, as though all climes were equal or it were mandatory to read treatises on France's terroirs in elementary schools the whole world over. It's doubly ridiculous when you realize that very few French people know all that much about wine beyond a handful of vague appellations.

xps

as long as we're detouring through marketing of masculinity (although we have a thread for that) I had to figure out how the aforementioned White Claw is marketed

their instagram feed has pictures of waves, some healthy cooking recipes (?!) and whatever this is (man holding drink while his shadow boxes):
https://www.instagram.com/p/BgorlKTHs63/

I guess the market is "millenials"?

competing hierarchies of beer masculinity, all monetized