Can Women Propose to Men on Leap Day?

Of course, women can propose to men on any day they please, provided they are willing risk rejection and/or strange looks from general society.  But according to a  tradition dating to the 18th century and popularized during the Victorian period, women are especially permitted to propose to their man on February 29.  Leap Day proposals are discussed as possibilities in the USA, UK and Scandavian lands (though, from what I gather, rarely practiced).  Urban legends sometimes claim that she-proposing harkens back to Sts. Patrick and Bridget, but Patricia L. Richard claims it was only in 1864, with the advent of mass advertising, that any noteworthy number of people actually defended the right of a woman to pop the question on the rarified February day.

Hitman Sniper and Zombie Blood: Drinking Masculinity

There was once a day – I’m thinking of the late 19th century - in which special drinks with dubious medicinal effects were sold on the basis of overconfidence in scientific breakthrough.  What has changed isn’t the wild claims and general quackery, but the kind of willful ignorance we as American consumers exhibit as we buy such products.  We know that 3 mg of Echinacea isn’t going to restore our entire psycho-somatic equilibrium.  But it sure feels good to buy a pretty can of sugar water labeled “Overdrive.”

As long as we’re buying 16oz containers of fantasy, why not market them with a gendered identity in mind?  With gender is more and more an ornamental accessory to our lives, we can finally drink ourselves into manliness.  Such has become the reality of 7-11 stores everywhere.  Marketers have pegged young males as the primary consumers of energy drinks, so much so that you’ll never see something advertised as “manly.”  That would unpoetic, stating the obvious.  Instead companies sell the feeling, offering something akin to the experience of primitive hunters amplifying their own power by consuming the life-essence from the slain.  Accordingly, we’re offered a veritable smorgasbord of dude-drinks with names like “Mountain Dew Game Fuel,” “Adrenalyn Stack,” “No Fear Bloodshot,” “TAPOUT,” and (my personal favorite) “Zombie Blood Energy Potion.” 

“Of course I’ve been awake for four days straight.  I’m an assasin-dunkmaster-executive-rockstar-bodybuilder-fratboy-ninja-warlord-executive who drinks zombie blood for breakfast.”

Not to leave anyone out, there are a handful of opened up for women’s energy drinks: “Redline Princess,” “Pink,” “Vixen Energy Drink.”  But the fact that these libations broadcast their femininity as loudly as possible just underscores the fact that marketers by and large have oriented sales to the peddling of masculine identity.  Kathleen E. Miller found that college undergraduate men on average consumed 2.49 energy drinks a month, compared with a modest 1.22 cans of the stuff among women (Journal of American Journal Health 56:5 [April 2008]). 

Miller does not claim a 1:1 correlation between energy drinks and irresponsible risk taking, but she warns that energy drink consumption is a good predictor of “toxic jock identity.”  I wasn’t aware that “toxic jock identity” was a condition, but, dear me, it sounds serious.  If only the energy drink industry would devise thirst-quenching technology with extracts to offset the symptoms of such macho ridiculousness in the first place.

Targets Your Gender Right Where You Need It

It made my day to find this gem in Good Shepherd Episcopal’s rummage sale, totally unused and only a dollar.  The receipt, dating to 1971, was even in the box. 

Doritos, Undesireable Women, and Dude-love

The Doritos Superbowl commercials were like Aaron Rodgers quarterbacking: some questionable decisions along the way, but dominant overall.  If any theme could be detected, it was a) the superiority of Doritos over all things, and b) the superiority of Doritos-fueled dude-love over relationships with women.  Consider with me the following.

Adam chooses Doritos over Eve and her apple: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4BaIDViPhM&NR=1

A woman is unimpressed with her boyfriend and his Doritos games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpjaOUjUPUc&feature=related

A man requires a girl to be covered in Doritos to fulfill his fantasy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMaAAsANcC8

Indeed, Doritos found a way to shock us with cheese-coated homoeroticism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBNnD5kuHUE&feature=relmfu

Tres homoerotique: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1yk85znbpY&NR=1

Not without being ironic about it, of course: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcfViklWRsU&NR=1

But yes, dude-love triumphs once again in the Doritos domain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO6v4Z3H3wM&NR=1

Praying to the Virgin… in a Manly Way

Even as a practicing Roman Catholic, David Calvillo had felt for years that praying the rosary was for old women.  But for men?  Manly men? 

Then, at a retreat, he went through the 59 beads (53 “Hail Marys” and six “Our Fathers”) with a large group of men.  It changed his attitude, and now he is trying to change other men’s minds about the vital importance of praying to the Virgin Mother. 

Calvillo, himself an accountant (and champion of his fantasy football league, he is quick to mention), encourages men to take up their rosary as part of the solid platform for being a godly man.  Praying to Mary, rather than being a capitulation to feminine power, is actually “a weapon of spiritual warfare” to help men overcome their temptations (Wall Street Journal, 2 Apr 2010, A5). 

Catholic men are taking notice, sometimes trading in their unused, feminine beads for newer, manlier ones.  One man has made a rosary out of ball bearings.  One manufacturer has come up with novelty designs for boys, including a rosary with football-shaped beads.  Calvillo, who himself has been known to use an iPhone rosary application, sells products and encourages this masculine subculture on his web site, RealMenPraytheRosary.org

Whose Depression?

On American television this month WebMD.com has been targeting depression sufferers.  Their commercial features a middle-aged woman who describes a difficult situation: her marriage had been struggling, her husband wasn’t communicating with her, he threatened to leave, she begged him to stay, that she would do anything; he left anyway.  The commercial then switches to the WebMD web site, which features a quiz to see whether you are depressed.  The person (not pictured) clicks on “excessive crying.”  The narrator encourages viewers to log on in order to determine whether one is suffering from depression.

The interesting thing about this commercial is that it is unclear all along exactly who they are describing and who they are targeting.  In this unfortunate situation, is it the woman who is depressed?  Or is the commercial saying that her husband, acting wholly irrational, is the one depressed?  After watching it several times, it seems the commercial is targeting the former, viz., the unfortunate woman who is left to fend for herself after being abandoned by a man.  She is sad, no doubt, but he manifests the more acute signs of emotional distress and perhaps mental illness.  Yet the clicking of the “excessive crying” box in the commercial seems to have reference to her, not her despondent husband. 

As someone who has been in men’s support groups for over a decade, I have had exposure to numerous cases of male depression.  It isn’t nearly so obvious as one would hope.  Men tend to be less willing to describe themselves at being depressed, and tend to attach it less to communal stresses, a recent study by Stacy De Coster found (“Depression and Law Violation: Gendered Responses to Gendered Stresses,” Sociological Perspectives [summer 2005]).  Men will, however, attend more to “agentic stresses,” that is, stresses caused by others calling into question their own personal competency.  Men respond not through overt depression; they break the law. 

If WebMD really wanted to help people who are unaware of their condition, they would have made some kind of effort to underscore the fact that it is the husband who is probably suffering from chronic depression.   As it is, this commercial (like most advertisements advertising for depression through stereotypical displays of sadness) will find themselves reaching women far more than men.

Husbands Need Wives…

This month in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a number of billboards went up in town, featuring homely looking men and reading simply, “Husbands Need Wives.”  It got the whole town buzzing. 

A pro-family message?  An anti-divorce message?  Something to do with peace among the sexes?  A traditionalist message?  Or something progressive?  Everyone was stirred up by them.  Within a couple of weeks even the gay rights activists had contacted the newspaper, anticipating some manner of discrimination afoot. 

The punchline came out later this month.  “Husbands Need Wives… to Get an Annual Mammogram.”  It is breast cancer awareness month, after all.  The billboards were funded by Avera McKennan Hospital, and their spokesman assured everyone that there were no subliminal messages intended in the billboards (there was, he reminded everyone, a billboard reading, “Boys Need Mothers.”  Men simply need to get invested in the health of their wives, especially when it comes to breast cancer.

Kudos to Avera McKennan on this one.  Aside from staging the most successful publicity ad campaign in Sioux Falls years, they also managed to get men invested in women’s health.  More specifically, they opened up the door for men to talk with women about breast health.  Admittedly, it’s difficult for us men to dialogue about this.  Mentioning this intimate body part seems to be socially inappropriate.  Talking about breasts this was also seems to demystify them; men can admire them or even giggle about them, but discussing metastasis of cancer cells in them seems unholy in every way.

But the truth is that breast cancer is an unholy reality.  My aunt’s early death is just one example of this most unwelcomed fact.  Men need their these women in their lives.  And women need their men to be committed and aware.

Mr. T to British Men: “Get Some Nuts”

In July 2008 Snickers launched a new campaign, featuring the one and only Mr. T (from A-Team, Rocky III, etc.).  In the ads Mr. T harrassed men who somehow lacked the macho vibe needed to be  a “real man,” such as speedwalkers and soccer players who fake injuries.  Driving a tank or some other destructive vehicle, the mohawked hero would procede to throw or shoot Snickers bars at these pastey counterparts, finishing the ad with the blatant double entendre, “Get some nuts.” 

Within weeks Snickers yanked it off the airwaves, in response to outcry that the ads, particularly the speedwalker one(the walker is portrayed as especially effeminate), were targeting homosexuals.  Statistically speaking, these protesters were right.  Say what you will in defense, but it doesn’t take a cross-dressing rocket scientist to figure out how many people would, rightly or wrongly, interpret the speedwalker’s outfit and demeanor as stereotypically gay.   Snickers had to have seen this coming. 

But let’s consider what else is going on here.  An interview done around the same time (see here) struck me as particularly humorous, and particularly important for understanding the broader context.  Mr. T procedes to rant against any perceived weakness in men: wine bars, pouting, yoga, non-contact sports, fake tans, tight clothing, man bags and fashion in general.  When asked about how he would address the men of Britain?  “Just be tough.”  Of course, he also advocates going to the pubs less, and making a greater effort to be romantic with one’s significant other.  “Treat the ladies with respect.”

It’s hard to say how much Mr. T buys into his own binary model of gender: men should be tough, women shouldn’t.  Sigmund Freud taught a similar monoessentialism, built around the idea that masculinity was the exercise of proactivity, whereas femininity was receptivity.   Men are characterized by self-assertion, boldness, even aggression.  Women, they, well, respond.  Feminist scholars have rightly pointed out that this kind of oppositionalizing construes women in terms of deprivation more than mere “difference.”  Not that Mr. T seems to be concerned about all this.  His point is more straightforward.  Aside from buying Snickers, men need to pursue life with more vigor – and bigger biceps. 

I’m especially interested in why Snickers felt this would fit so well in the United Kingdom.  While the LGBT community took offence, heterosexual men (even softer, more sensitive men) there did not.   Is this because British men in general are secure enough in their own conception of masculinity that Mr. T provides an opportunity to laugh at a bygone code, one especially rigid (and perhaps American)?  Or do British men feel a need for an archetypal presence to shame them into greater mental and physical toughness? 

Don’t all of us men all need a little Mr. T in our heads, driving us toward ballsy excellence?

A Taxonomy of Guys for Christmas Gift-giving

Leave it to high-octane capitalism to remind us that no, damn it, we men are not all alike. 

Gifts.com has provided a very clever campaign for choosing gifts for the man you love here.  There’s even a section of archetypes representative of senior men.  Take that, hegemony!

Gatorade and Androgyny

A Gatorade ad being run this year in the UK features a topless man, a swimmer, bronzed and gleaming.  He has been digitally connected, however, to a woman in a lab coat, clearly a scientist of sorts.  The advertisement, of course, seeks to assure athletes that they are getting the maximum amount of technological research with every swig of their sugarwater.  Why not do so with an eye-grabbing way androgynization that may even express a kind of equalitarian sentiment?

 

The ad is unsettling, however.  The man and a woman are set up as comple a kind of hieros gamos, a kind of yin-yang which works together as non-competitive complementarity.  Yet the man-half makes up 60% or more of the human hybrid in the picture.  Moreover, I find it striking that the man is presented as the archetypal athlete while the woman plays the technical – but supportive - role.  Or, in a kind of post-Victorian expression of modern college enrollment patterns, is the binary oriented around the male-brawn and female-intellect?  Or is it actually reversing the pattern of the sexualization of the female body and the authoritative garbing of the male in a uniform?  I’m not sure if there are other ads in circulation reversing the roles. 

 

Perhaps the bigger question regards the social function of such product images.  Slavoj Žižek notes how the multiplication of “couples” in the West may be, after all, an attempt to gloss over the unspoken dualism at the core of our society.  The he-she unity of the Gatorade ad may simply help “introduce a balanced duality into the minor spheres of consumption,” just like restaurants pair blue and pink packets of artificial sugar, displaying “an attempt to supplement the lack of the founding binary signifying couple that would stand directly for sexual difference” (The Puppet and the Dwarf, pp.25-26).  Have we really dealt with identity and difference by smashing the two together, or is this precisely the avoidance of such questions?