\0xC0El Licor M\0x87s Fino

¿ El Licor Más Fino? | Shaindel Beers

Like most women who look beyond the surface of things, I've always had a bone to pick with misogynist advertisements. I've learned to look at supermodels as clothes hangers with legs, to accept the given lie that if the models wearing the clothes had curves, one would pay less attention to the line of the garment than to the model. And this approach has managed to keep me sane (except for a few attempts at bathing suit shopping which I won't mention here). But what are thinking women supposed to make of the sexist alcohol ads portraying "real" women as shrews, and bubbleheads as the ideal? And something which, perhaps, has not been looked into (because it honestly isn't as important as the misleading link between alcohol consumption and the implicit promise of sex that is marketed to young people) -- what are thinking women supposed to drink while successfully avoiding handing their money over to beverage companies whose advertising belittles women?

This trend in alcohol advertising first reared its ugly head to me directly with the Corona series of radio spots in which the man is the helpless victim of his wife's nagging, until he drifts off to fantasyland, where he is frolicking on the beach with bimbos, one of whom eventually purrs "Oil my back." Until this point, I was probably one of Corona's best customers. In fact, I don't even think that I realized that limes existed before Corona. Now, I realize that others may have complained before I did since Corona has completely changed its tack, but other alcohol ads are portraying women just as unfairly.

In fact, I just went to the Miller Brewing Company website (http://www.millerbrewing.com/home.asp) to see if they were the company running a particular ad of which I was going to make an example, and the first image that popped up was a woman in a bikini announcing a promotion that one can "Win a Trip to the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Shoot." Now, certainly Miller Brewing Company knows that they have thousands of female consumers--after all, they make Miller Lite, and what kind of "real man" would drink a lite beer? Of course, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Shoot give-away is mild compared to their Beachin' Times campaign, a sixteen page glossy insert distributed in college newspapers in 1989, in which Miller gave advice to hormone-ridden adolescent males on how to "turn spring break into [their] own personal trout farm," but their sentiment nearly fifteen years later is hardly going to win them honors from the Feminist Majority Foundation.

I probably could give hundreds of other examples--Captain Morgan Rum's Morganettes, the Stroh's Bikini Team, the Bud girls--and perhaps this is just the problem, all of these ads glorify girls--fluffy, vacuous-headed beings who cannot possibly be threatening to men because they are the empty-headed-open-legged objects of stereotypical male fantasy. But the question still remains, what am I supposed to drink? And what are you, the thinking woman, or you, the enlightened male, supposed to drink? Well, so far, I'm still doing my research--but my current stance is to stick to my traditional Pint o' Guinness--a drink so secure in its masculinity that it doesn't need to flaunt its machismo by featuring tight, naked female bodies in every ad.