1. All of the bartenders and caterers which work for your party are gorgeous women dressed in incredibly revealing clothing.
2. The tagline at the close of the advertisement is that they offer "a place for men to be men."
Now, this blog's focus on language thus far has discussed the implications of words such as 'yob,' 'hooligan,' or other decidedly negative nouns. The radio advertisement here, however, poses an intriguing problem. Here, we see an assertion that being masculine involves the following:
- watching sports
- drinking copious amounts of terrible beer
- spending time with women dressed in very little amounts of clothing
- not spending time with women which they are 'attached' to, such as a girlfriend or a spouse
What is noticeably absent from this model? Performance. It now, apparently, does not require any sort of performing aspect which asserts one's masculinity, individual cunning, or any other such aspect of the Stalky model. Rather, any man can still remain masculine by reclining in an armchair and, perhaps, gesturing lewdly at a woman in a short skirt. Equally, the advertisement infers that men are only 'masculine' while doing things such as these, and not while attending the opera with their wives, or walking the poodle around the block.
Clearly, this blogger ought to stop listening to the radio.
4 comments:
Well, to be fair, that's true - I find lewdness and laziness quite masculine. Rawrrr.
In that sense, it's amazing how we ('we' meaning males) have devolved from the Stalky model, in which performance generally involves actually doing something, to a point at which eating chips and brushing the crumbs off a beer belly is now (somehow) 'masculine.' Yikes.
I wouldn't say they are not performing their masculinity though. The performance itself may seem less useful to actually accomplishing something tangible but the beer swilling, gawking, football party is most definitely a performance.
Now Adam lets you and I go drink some good beer (or maybe even... wine) and walk our poodles/terriers whilst discussing theatre. Take that modern masculine gender stereotypes!
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