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?