In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Miller Lite Ads Say Teh Wimmenz Are Stupid, Wrong and Boring

Cara

I have no idea when this ad was made — though it looks to me that it was created in recent years under an attempt to make it look older — but I do know that it’s not nearly as cute as director Errol Morris apparently thinks it is:

So not only do you have the same boring yet offensive notion that there is no greater punishment for a man than being forced to listen to the horrifically mundane and stupid nattering of women, but you’ve also got the line “there are times when even the most misguided opinion is best left uncorrected” (emphasis from the commercial).

So, I’m sorry, they’re not just saying yet again that a woman will basically castrate a man for daring to disagree with her — they’re actually saying that there is no “disagreement” only right and wrong opinions, and that men always have the right ones and women always have the wrong ones.  Well yeah, strangely enough fellows, us evil uppity women might just take issue with that particular approach.  I imagine that just as many women as men are fine with debate — but being corrected on our misguided opinions?  Surprisingly, we take to that just about as well as men do, too.

See more from this series of ads, which also promote outdated, unhealthy and essentialist views of masculinity, over at Sociological Images.

13 thoughts on Miller Lite Ads Say Teh Wimmenz Are Stupid, Wrong and Boring

  2. i went over and looked more of these adds, and followed a link there to more commercials by this guy, and most are much worse.

    ugh.

    fuck.

  4. At around 0:21 I think it says “2002” in the bottom, so it looks like these aren’t old at all.

    Errol Morris lost me with “Standard Operating Procedure,” which tried really hard to be “edgy” and “hard-hitting” by lingering for what seems like hours on pictures of torture victims.

  5. This was directed by Errol Morris? As in “The Thin Blue Line”? That Errol Morris?

    Yeesh. What a disappointment.

    I’ve found that the less there is to distinguish a product (raise your hands if you can tell Miller from Budweiser), the more inane the ads tend to get. Which is probably why they try to “push the envelope” with annoying motifs like nattering womenz.

  6. Yup, you’re right panqueque! I never would have noticed the copyright notice on my own, but it definitely says that the copyright is 2002.

  7. I’ve been known to want a beer (or several) when my brother makes a misguided opinions on what’s going on with my life and lectures me for minutes on end. But wait!!!! I’m female! I can’t possible form opinions on my own.

    I find this Miller beer absolutely disgusting. Keep making these ads, Miller. I won’t start buying you anyway.

  8. Jesse, they AREN’T still making these ads. That’s the point. This is from 2002.

    If you guys wouldn’t keep pulling these ads out of the archives, everyone would have forgotten about them by now. Let these crappy ads die the death they deserve.

  9. I was working in a marketing research office several years ago when I saw previews of several other commercials in this series. The entire concept underlying them seemed to be, “You — the intended target of this campaign and of our product — are suburban, male, not well educated, probably white, married, a blue-collar homeowner, and completely self-satisfied. You, in fact, are a young Archie Bunker, and proud of it.”

    In one, we see a man rinsing out a beer bottle, refilling it with water and putting a single long-stemmed rose in it. The implication from the voice-over was that he was going to Get Lucky, because he had brought his wife (ooo) a rose.

    In another, the voice-over tells us that the one thing the man’s wife asked him to do before he left the house was empty the trash. The entire thirty seconds of the commercial is devoted to showing, in loving detail, how he puts his foot atop the trash in the can and tromps it down, so now the can is half-full instead of full. There were two implications in this commercial: that instead of wasting all of two minutes taking the trash out, he could now use that two minutes productively, drinking The Sponsor’s Product; and that this was the sensible and necessary thing to do, precisely because it was his wife who had asked him to empty it.

  10. Oh, the Errol Morris Miller High Life ads. It is so weird that they’ve eclipsed all of his documentary filmmaking work, a lot of which is quite good — Gates of Heaven, the Thin Blue Line (which actually got Randall Adams off of death row), Fast Cheap and Out of Control, First Person. I guess it’s not surprising given that he made like 80 of these commercials, they aired in 2002-2003 during football games meaning more people probably saw them than any of his documentaries, and even he has been saying that he expects to be remembered most for these commercials.

    I was never quite sure what to make of these when I first saw them years ago. Back then I kind of expected them to be in the snarky “super ironic” vein of the absurdist hipster advertising that was being done for Miller around that time. And there is a tongue-in-cheek quality to all of it, but it’s also deeply serious, and it’s a deeply serious manual for “how to be a man” in the most traditional, sexist, role-reinforcing way possible.

    Seriously, there is even a manifesto. It’s obviously not meant to be taken 100% in earnest, but that is the position of “beleaguered masculinity” these days, it’s taken refuge in irony because supposedly it’s been “outlawed” by feminism and it’s having a dying gasp like Clint Eastwood’s character in Gran Torino. I kind of have no idea exactly what Morris was thinking when he put together all eighty of these things but I suspect it was some kind of effort to do preserve a particular fading vision of American masculinity through a fusion of caricature, earnest homage, and quasi-documentary filming style. Like he wants to be Edward Hopper of the beer-macho culture, which it’s not surprising he’d want to preserve.

    Unfortunately I don’t think this is really worth preserving. Maybe it would be as an art piece in a museum. But not blaring out on Monday Night Football week after week, reinforcing actual dumbass macho dudes’ actual dumbass macho notions about taking out garbage, and how to get laid, and how irrelevant women’s “chatter” is, and 77 other hoary topics. (Not all of which are as bad as the rest, but they all have the same tone.) People really do read this as a manual on how to live, especially when it’s mass advertising, so it can’t just be excused as art. I sort of wish this stuff DID just live in a museum, because I would be able to appreciate it more. I kind of love the style (and I have to admit, it’s similar to stuff I worked on in the mid-90s) but the whole thing is clearly a little wrong in the head, especially as a commercial. And Morris’ overly subtle attitude kind of rubs me the wrong way too, as much as it works for his documentaries.

  11. No one who cares about beer would drink Miller, or Lite. Miller was a big donor to Jesse Helms, and to me that’s the brand.
    Try the local microbrew. In Rhode Island I recommend Trinity IPA. Magic Hat is a good bottled beer.

  12. I really hate these kinds of ads. I mean, I’m a hetero guy (well, str8/bi, I’ve had my fun with boys and I wouldn’t turn it down if the right guy happened along… but that doesn’t distinguish me from most of the High Life set, I dare say) and I hate the notion that because I like to drink beer and watch sports and whatnot that I automatically feel the need to assert my masculinity at every juncture. I meet these guys at the bar all the time and they always strike me as complete assholes. I think that if one company took the time to market itself as being down with guys who like opera, read poetry and other “feminine” lit, can listen to a woman and contribute to a meaningful conversation with her and just otherwise operate as a human being and not a macho man jerkoff they might corner a very lucrative market.

    This also goes to the Hollywood bullshit as to what gets guys girls. Usually they show desperate types who act completely inanely towards women getting the girls. This, in my experience, is highly ineffective. When they don’t they show guys who can’t stand women and who I would imagine women can’t frankly stand to be around getting with someone. In my understanding guys who can maintain platonic female friendships and who can hold conversations with women, particularly their partner and her friends tend to do pretty well for themselves. Guys who roll their eyes everytime a female opens her mouth end up lonely, and this ad hardly reflects that.

    Just in general I find these things lame and insulting not only to women but to normal, conscientious and comfortable guys. Any man who rushes out to buy a Miller High Life (which I had tonight before I saw this) after seeing this is “That Guy” and doesn’t deserve sex.

    PS–There was some beer ad a while back that showed guys at the opera sneaking beers to get past the boredom of the affair. It pissed me off. I LOVE opera (I’m about to go read some Foucault and listen to Puccini, cuz that’s how I roll) and if some girl as characteristically and conventionally beautiful as those in beer commercials wanted me to accompany her I’d be so excited I could barely stand it. Guys who can’t handle opera and other classical music, “chick flicks,” discussion of female health and biological issues, good literature and other sophisticated/feminine things are jackasses. I have a hard time believing they can sustain healthy relationships with mature female partners.

  13. See, around here, Nancy Green, buying Miller is (on a certain level) buying local and providing jobs, so it’s sort of a Catch-22, y’know? (International conglomerate, yes, but international conglomerate producing a lot of beer right here in Milwaukee and employing a lot of people.)

    I buy Leinie’s, personally. Except for the fact that Leinie’s is owned by MillerCoors. Crap.

Comments are currently closed.