Pruebas de integración

10.3.1 Beer commercials as a “manual on masculinity”

Mass media play a role in sensationalizing links between alcohol and male bravado. The manifest function of beer advertising is to promote a particular brand, but collectively the commercials provide a clear and consistent image of the masculine role. In a certain way they construct a guide for becoming a man and behaving appropriately as a male, in short a manual on masculinity. Of course, they are not the only source of knowledge on this subject, but according to Strate (1992: 79) “nowhere is so much information presented in so concentrated a form as in television’s 30-second spots, and no other industry’s commercials focus so exclusively and so exhaustively on images of the man’s man.”

Brosnan and Ewan McGregor, while even Madonna’s husband Guy Ritchie and reality TV star and real estate big wheel Donald Trump get a look in.

Postman (et al. 1987) studied the thematic content of 40 beer commercials and identified a variety of stereotypical portrayals of the male role that were used to promote beer drinking:

reward for a job well done; manly activities that feature strength, risk, and daring²¹⁶; male friendship and esprit de corps; romantic success with women. The researchers estimate that, between the ages of 2 and 18, children view about 100,000 beer commercials.

Kunkel (et al. 2006) engaged in an experiment that assessed the effects of exposing college students to beer commercials with images of activities that would be dangerous to undertake while drinking. They found that those students exposed to the advertisements were more likely to believe in the social benefits of drinking than those not exposed, particularly among males.

Those participants who reported seeing people engaged in risky activities as well as drinking beer had an increased tolerance for drunk driving. Their findings suggest that the imagery in beer commercials can contribute to beliefs about alcohol that predict drinking and to an increased acceptance of dangerous drinking behaviour.

Who play the roles in beer commercials? Rock stars, pick-up artists, cowboys, construction workers, and comedians - these are some of the major ‘social types’ found in contemporary American beer commercials. The characters may vary in occupation, race, and age, but they all exemplify traditional conceptions of the masculine role. Clearly, the beer industry relies on stereotypes of the man’s man to appeal to a mainstream, predominantly male target audience.

This is why alternate social types, such as sensitive men, gay men, and househusbands, scholars, poets, and political activists, are noticeably absent from beer advertising. The advertisements can be analysed as a form of cultural communication and a carrier of social myths, in particular the myth of masculinity²¹⁷.

216 See also Capraro (2000: 307-315)

217 Myths, according to Strate (1992: 78-79), are not falsehoods or fairy tales, but uncontested and generally unconscious assumptions that are so widely shared within a culture that they are considered natural, instead of recognized as products of unique historical circumstances. Myth, as a form of cultural communication, is the material out of which such structures are built, and through myth, the role of human beings in inventing and reinventing masculinity is disguised, and therefore naturalized. The myth of masculinity is manifested in myriad forms of mediated and non-mediated communication; beer commercials are only one such form, and to a large extent, the advertisements merely reflect pre-existing cultural conceptions of the man’s man. But in reflecting the myth, the commercials also reinforce it. Moreover, since each individual expression of a myth varies, beer advertisements also reshape the myth of masculinity, and in this sense, take part in its continuing construction.

Myths provide ready-made answers to universal human questions about ourselves, our relationships with others and with our environment. For the most part beer commercials present traditional, stereotypical images of men, and uphold the myths of masculinity (and femininity).

Thus, in promoting beer, advertisers also promote and perpetuate these images and myths. The myth of masculinity basically answers the question: what does it mean to be a man? This can be broken down into five separate questions: What kind of things do men do? What kind of settings do men prefer? How do boys become men? How do men relate to each other? How do men relate to women? The central theme of masculine leisure activity in beer commercials, then, is challenge, risk, and mastery – mastery over nature, over technology, over others in good-natured

“combat”, and over oneself. Beer is integrated into this theme in obvious and subtle ways.

(Strate 1992: 78-79, 82)

The theme of challenge (around which masculinity revolves in beer commercials), is an association that is particularly alarming, given the social problems stemming from alcohol abuse (and since beer commercials are a prominent subject in television’s curriculum, and although targeted at adults, are highly accessible to children). The myth of masculinity does have a number of redeeming features (facing challenges and taking risks are valuable traits in many contexts), but “the unrelenting one-dimensionality of masculinity as presented by beer commercials is clearly anachronistic, possibly laughable, but without a doubt sobering.” (Strate 1992: 92)

11. CONCLUDING REMARKS

In all the above-mentioned mass media messages that were analysed and mentioned in this chapter there is a tendency to convey double meanings. On the one hand men are nowadays expected to be in touch with their ‘softer feminine side’, and on the other hand they are simultaneously challenged to remain potent and hard, ‘essentially masculine’. Given this projection of double messages – power and vulnerability simultaneously – it is not surprising that many men seem confused and uncertain about their masculinity and male sexual identity!

Nothing seems to be constant, in contrast everything is fluid and contradicting²¹⁸.

218 According to Feona Attwood (2005: 97) one of the most interesting things about the ways in which representations of heterosexuality - in the media (and in men’s magazines specifically) - are changing is an

Furthermore, the analysis of the MHM’s explicated the underlying problematic which the mass media in general represent for our interpretation of masculinity today. The problem is not (just) situated in the content that MHM presents, but in its intention of commercialising manhood.

This creates an ethical dilemma, seeing that masculinity can become toxic and destructive when its illusionary and unattainable ideals of manhood is used to feed the consumer-mentality and branded masculinity, in stead of life-giving intimacy and vitality.

In light of these above-mentioned trends the researcher therefore contends that most men (within a Christian religious framework) need another interpretation scheme except for the secular and the popular culture’s trends to go by, in order to understand themselves as men and find meaning and real intimacy within a technocratic culture. Although the researcher is cognisant of the fact that the mass media also in some ways - as was concisely indicated by referring to the health and aesthetic ideals of many new trends - present a constructive element to the formation of meaningful and healthy masculinity, men need more than the dominant images and interpretation schemes produced by the mass media.

In essence, most men need a new type of Christian spirituality and relationship with God that can facilitate a more balanced and integrated manhood amidst the fluidity of a globalizing culture and post-traditional society. This is the challenge which will be taken up in the last part of this dissertation. But before that can be done the next chapter will focus on embodiment and power as challenges to a pastoral anthropology, seeing that men first primarily need to re-position themselves in relation to their own bodies and to the commanding power relations within which they function, before they can re-construct alternative ways of being men.

uncertainty about the extent to which they seem to be new and the extent to which they simultaneously appear to stay the same. She suggests that there are clear indications of new figures of masculinity, of emerging sexual styles and sensibilities, and of increasing variety in the forms of presentation used to construct male heterosexuality. Yet, as with contemporary representations of female sexuality, a recycling of traditional notions of sexual difference is evident, thus at the same there is time a bricolage of those familiar and rather old-fashioned signifiers of masculinity,

‘tits and ass and porn and fighting’. Subsequently she identified a need to develop far more situated and careful analyses in order to interpret and contextualize contemporary constructions of male heterosexuality.

CHAPTER 4: EMBODIMENT AND POWER – CHALLENGES TO