As a feminist, I know the long, arduous history of advertisements that actively work against women. There are ads for beer and cologne that literally turn women into things for a man’s consumption. There are ads that impose exaggerated ideals of femininity onto seemingly gender-neutral products, like the pink-ified Lego Friends for little girls. The list goes on.
Advertising is a powerful tool, and we’ve talked about it a lot as a culture. What we haven’t talked about, though, is the new trend in marketing towards men. Recently, companies that put out normal products we consume every day—deodorant, soda, body wash—have begun marketing towards men with aggressive and often comic depictions of masculinity. The latest example of this is “Powerful Yogurt,” the first yogurt “specifically designed” for men’s health, because obviously normal yogurt is only healthy for women.
As you can see from the website, this yogurt is among the manliest of yogurts ever to grace the earth. It comes packaged in the macho colors of black and red, complete with pop-out abdominal muscles on either side of the cup to remind men that they are working towards the real, tangible goal of “finding their inner abs.”
At first glance, this seems as off base as the Lego Friends campaign. Girls are going to buy Legos because they’re fun, gender-neutral toys; there’s no reason to make it look so fluffy. Similarly, health conscious men eat yogurt all the time without the reassurance of a disembodied six-pack on the side of the container. It seems that it would be just as obnoxious to market normal products to men by dressing them up in bullhorns as it is to market normal products to girls and women by packaging them with flowers and butterflies.
However, according to the company that produced Powerful Yogurt, both men and women responded positively to the advertisements. People are okay with the way this gender-neutral food has been doused in muscle, sweat, and sports references and rebranded as masculine. But what is so un-manly about regular Greek yogurt in the first place? Is it that the color of ground up fruit mixed with vanilla Chobani is too pastel? Is it that the light-colored containers feel too free-spirited, like you could pet a kitten or do yoga on the beach at any moment? Is it that John Stamos is in just too many yogurt commercials for another man to eat Oikos and feel secure?
Like those who create bro-isms, companies have basically taken regular products and put “bro” in front of them in the form of dark colors and manly images. All of these products are extremely dudely, even if they were once associated with women.
Marketing, at its most insidious, draws upon our fears and insecurities to make us believe we need whatever it’s selling. Products have always been marketed to specific gender demographics, and the idea of reaffirming gender stereotypes through these marketing campaigns isn’t new. What I find the most interesting about this trend, though, is that many of these hyper-masculinized ads have a sense of self-awareness, as almost all of them use an over-the-top depiction of masculinity. Old Spice commercials, for example, comically have musclemen chastising “lady-scented body wash” while flexing their pecs, and the new ones even have random things exploding at the end to further hyperbolize masculinity. Even the Diet Dr. Pepper Ten advertisements (yep, that’s the “it’s not for women” soda) showed men shooting guns in military garb in the jungle, saying tongue-in-cheek things like “catch phrase” instead of actually using a catch phrase.
While feminism has been trying to talk about the problems with advertising and gender relations, we’ve been ignoring what ads about masculinity say both about the feminine products they reject and the insecurity of masculinity as a concept. Perhaps these radical depictions of masculinity are told through jokes because we as a culture don’t yet understand how to talk about the problems they pose without pretending those problems are laughably impossible. Perhaps the jokes are one more way of denying that there is a problem with the pressure to be powerful, strong, and healthy in the way Powerful Yogurt wants you to be. These marketing campaigns use humor to show their “self-awareness,” but do so in a way that still asks us to run out to the store and buy Old Spice body wash, Diet Dr Pepper Ten, and Powerful Yogurt. This only reaffirms that we value those stereotypes.
Men who buy normal products dressed up in dark colors instead of the generic brand have come to associate normal activities—cleanliness, health consciousness, etc.—with femininity. It’s not that different from adding “bro” to the beginning of a completely normal word; it looks sort of funny and we laugh when we say it, but something feminine or gender-neutral that needs the word “bro” says a lot about the lack of security that exists within masculinity in our culture, and the lengths we are willing to go to reaffirm masculinity without actually talking about why that reaffirmation is necessary.
Rachelle is a WLP major from California. She likes coffee but also naps, which means she makes tough decisions on a daily basis, and should not be underestimated. You can find Rachelle on Twitter.
Images: theblaze.com, hlntv.com, metroman.com