Mad Men was about advertisers being incredibly sexist @$$#()!%$ over half a century ago, and modern advertisers still think it was an educational program. Which is either a tragic shame or a terrifying example of how powerful the media has become. Gird yourself against advertisements which couldn’t have done a worse job of proving their manliness if the advertising executives had just filmed themselves fondling their own scrotums. Which was the exact planning process used.
Axe Says Stop Being a Friend
Axe says men should “stop being a friend,” which is pretty easy when you’re buying chemical weapons for an imaginary battle of the sexes.
This ad has more worrying levels than Dante’s Inferno, and is even older-fashioned. It starts with the assumption that women are slightly less complicated than deer, since they can be hunted with nothing but the right scent.
This is exactly where the term “Axe-hole” comes from. (Source: Axe)
The scent says the only point of knowing women is to try and mate with them. An Axehole is always picturing their female friends having their clothes torn off, and considers it a failure if it’s being done by anyone else. Well done, Axe, you’ve captured Eau de Friendzone. Pressurized aerosol tears of the creepiest kind of @$$#()!%. If society truly worked like this no one would have any money to buy the scent, and all Axe employees would be too busy fashioning crude sticks to defend their factory from roving hordes of Mad Max-style barbarians crazed by the industrial quantities of alpha musk.
Sex(ism) and Death
This one isn’t an ad, it’s an entire horror movie in one poster.
The Saw guy gets into advertising (Source: Reborn to be Alive)
Organ donation is one of the easiest and most selfless things you can do, but this ad tries to make it hard and selfish. First they insult women by ignoring them, leaving straight men, then insult all the straight. Cunning strategy. The ad flat-out tells the reader that they’re not good enough for this woman and that as far as she’s concerned they would be better off dead.
The real horror is how this ad wants you to ogle someone as they die. If you have a chance of ending up inside her as a donor organ, that means she’s on the waiting list for a donor organ. She’s not only waiting to die–and on a list of sexy things that’s below Donald Trump’s crevices–but lives in a dystopian future where women are forced to strip in public for even a chance of survival. That’s not just an ad, that’s a brutalist dystopian satire of all advertising.
RELATED: The One Thing that Truly Makes a Man
Snickers Sexism as Standard
Snickers” “You’re not yourself when you’re hungry” campaign had a clear message: female is the failure mode of humanity, and if anyone is unaccountably missing testicles they should plug the resulting gap with a Snickers bar. Their locker room ad turned one man into a whining, nagging harpy until he was fed, turning him back into a guy. Because there’s no one friendlier or more supportive than a man in a locker room.
“Woman, you need this thing inside you.” (Source: Snickers)
Their construction site advert had workers shouting positive messages at passing women on a busy street, and ending with “You’re not yourself when you’re hungry.” Implying that this men in the street not being terrible to strangers was both a fantastical imagination and an error condition which Snickers could solve. They didn’t film the final scene where a construction worker chomped down on a Snickers before shouting “Haha, sweet-boobs, it’s good to have a dick!,” because the campaign had already done that.
Schick Quattro
The “United We Shave” campaign was a brilliant idea, a fake battle for clean-shaven men to engage in ridiculously hyperbolic praise of their facial baby’s behinds. Unfortunately Schick pissed that idea away, routing it entirely and only through their dick to make it as poisonous as possible.
“Remember, little, billy, you’re not racist if you have exactly and only prominent black and asian!” (Source: Schick)
Instead of soaring free of the confines of standard advertising on a jetpack of burning beard hair, they used their freedom and budget to go “HAHA LOOK AT THOSE LOSERS IN ANY WAY DIFFERENT TO US.” The ad mocks bicycles, anyone who wears different clothes (because nothing says rugged manliness like insisting on conforming to fashion), and takes the piss out of service workers. Which is the loudest way to announce your assholishness short of using an air horn in a maternity ward.
And they still weren’t done. They took to social media to make things more excruciatingly clear than shaving with a lemon-soaked straight razor.
They moved on to mock craft beer and anybody creative. Wait, what? Beer and making things are bad for men now? Instead of advertising an alternate world joke, this ad accidentally revealed the real mission of marketing companies, convincing us to be clean-shaven cogs in a corporate consumer fantasy where everyone buys the same pre-approved clothes and mass-market beer.
The only good part of the ad is where the main man says “Spoiler: we’re guys. Real Shick Quattro Guys.” Because five and a half syllables into that, it sounds almost like a moment of self-awareness.
RELATED: Six Things that Make You A Man
Dr Pepper 10
Dr Pepper ’10s ad starts with by telling women they don’t enjoy action movies. It doesn’t get any better from there.
“Our second mistake was thinking people would want to look at me!” (Source: Dr Pepper)
“Dr Pepper 10 is our soda. It’s only ten manly calories,” and they’re desperately trying to make it sound like a casual parody while making it clear that’s what they want to tell you. They’re claiming to be manly while lacking even the guts to admit that they’re worried about their weight.
“Even we don’t know if we’re joking!” (Source: Dr Pepper)
The ad fails on every conceivable level. It’s so bad at parodying action movies, at one point he casually throws a can over his shoulder while being chased by a jeep of gun-toting bad guys, and it doesn’t explode.
This era of “Ook ook are you tough then buy our stuff” isn’t manly, it’s a crude corporate simulation of manliness. This is what you get when you have a room of suits prodding “manliness” like it’s a sample in their laboratory. A crude hairy ape they’ve recovered from the jungle and are trying to research and sell to. And just like any story which starts like that, it ends in chaos and disaster.
Luke McKinney writes about games, drink, science, and everything else that makes life amazing. He’s a columnist on Cracked and writes for several beer magazines. He’s also available for hire. Follow him on Tumblr and Twitter @lukemckinney.
Luke examined more misdirected masculinity in Not All Men’s Health Magazine.
Just men with faux-hawks.
