And then there’s Anheuser-Busch, with its oh so funny slogan for Bud Light beer: “The perfect beer for removing ‘no’ from your vocabulary for the night.”
GEDDIT?
The slogan, which was captured in a photo and posted onto Reddit Monday, sparked a wave of anger from social media users who took to Twitter to blast the language for promoting a culture of rape.
What could possibly go wrong?
I wonder which Anheuser-Busch executive put their foot down against going with the original slogan: The perfect beer for removing “no” from THEIR vocabulary for the night.
Anyone remember one of the American beers, I think miller, running ads 5 or so years ago with a bunch of Guys sitting around coming up with Man Laws? Most of them were eye roll worthy or very mildly amusing, but one had them coming up with the Man Law of “you poke it you own it”. You know, the beer can, if you put your finger in the open tab! It was pretty disgusting.
Wholly Crap! What on earth were they thinking? Is a “beer goggles” one next?
Well, there’s also that pesky question “You ok to drive?” Drink responsibly.
Really, I think it’s the “whatever happens” line that adds that certain special something.
Well, I’ll say “no” to Bud Light because I don’t waste my personal alcohol allowance on horse-piss like that. But I also signed the Change.org petition that came by earlier today.
It might not be a very sensible slogan, but the point here is that it will help the drinker lose his/her inhibitions, not make them vulnerable to rape. I think it is sometimes forgotten that many adults do choose to use alcohol like this and that, of course, mudddies the waters of the drink/consent debate.
@ Bluntnose: Yeah, right. Thank you for the mansplaining. Our silly ladybrains are clearly incapable of analysing an advertising slogan with multiple meanings and interpretations, the most harmless one of which you have determined to be the one true and intended one. If we can see the tacit encouragement in that slogan, then so can and do (potential) rapists.
Go educate yourself a bit more and stop it with the Devil’s Advocate-ing.
Bluntnose, #6
Yeah, sure. That’s what it means. That’s some Dawkins level of Thinking™ right there. I guess the rest of us just need to go away and learn to think logically.
Yes, I get it, sorry, GEDDIT. They’re promoting their beer to me, an adult old enough to buy beer, and while I’m sober, as something that will make me say “Yes” to bad ideas, i.e. get me drunk. As someone who has said “Yes” to bad ideas when drunk before, that’s funny. It brings a wry smile of recognition. It says to me “Drink this… ‘cos you know if you do, you might end up doing something stupid. And that’s fun, right?”
If it had said “The perfect beer for removing “no” from THEIR vocabulary for the night.” that would have been unarguably terrible. But it doesn’t say that, I don’t see a link in post #1 indicating where that was ever suggested, and the meaning is so completely different that the suggestion is ridiculous.
But hey, don’t let’s let facts get in the way of the OUTRAGE.
And it’s not the first time Bud has done something like this:
http://consumerist.com/2015/03/17/bud-light-deletes-tweet-suggesting-you-randomly-pinch-people-for-st-patricks-day/
OUTRAGE!!1
When will Ophelia learn to consult with sonofbluntnosesplainlogic before wording?
One of these things is not like the other.
One of these things is suggesting you might like to render yourself suggestible by consuming alcohol.
The other is explicitly advocating assault, possibly/probably sexual assault, of other people.
If you think the one is in any way comparable to the other, you may be too drunk to be posting on the internet.
Cut the bullshit, sonofjrblake. You’re a blight on Ophelia’s blog.
Sigh. I seem to recall an old Colt 45 malt liquor ad featuring Billy Dee Williams wherein he suavely intones the tagline: “Colt 45. Works every time….”
Jeezis. Bluntnose, sonof – I know the ad can be read the ways you read it. We all do. Of course it can. It can also be read other, more sinister ways – and those ways are not deeply hidden or obscure. Have you never heard of dog whistles? Deniability?
Antagonizer-Bu**sh**. Nobody is that stupid, it can only be intentional.
@sonofrojblake #9: Are you really unaware of the common English usage of “you” to mean “one”? Is this something common only to the USA or a particular region thereof? For example, if I say, “If you jump in a lake, you’ll get wet,” I’m not necessarily talking about you personally but about any random hypothetical person, i.e. “one”. For all I know, you personally might have coated your body in a layer of polyurethane and will not, in fact, get wet if you personally jump in a lake.
But we still normalize the use of alcohol as a ‘persuader’ for sex. From Doris Day getting flirty on champagne, to all the Salon and Jezebel writers howling at the suggestion that booze puts women in danger.
Yes, ‘don’t get drunk’ is missing the point, and dangerously patronizing. But ‘beware of being GOT drunk,’ is important.
Still glad Im a teetotaler
@Bluntnose, sonofrojblake
so you’ll never buy beer for anyone else?
I have to say that #6’s explanation was the first one that occurred to me, but then again, I’ve never worried about people trying to get me drunk and take advantage of me. Regardless of what the Bud folk’s intent was, they should have realized the implication of that slogan, and canned it quick.
#17….You’d be surprised at just how stupid some people can be…..
Yeah, the way I read it was ‘if you drink [enough of] this beer you won’t be able to hear/understand the word ‘no’.’
There were an awful lot of people involved in the creation and production of this thing. It is entirely impossible that none of them thought of the connotation of getting a woman drunk enough to have sex without her resisting it. The null hypothesis is not ignorance, it is that it means exactly what it looks like it means. To try to argue that the baseline is ignorance is to try to plead that everyone involved in the creation and production of this beer advertisement is entirely unaware of a) a hundred years or more worth of beer advertising and b) a hundred years or more of women always being blamed for rape because they had something to drink.
@Josh, Official SpokesGay, 14: I feel your pain. When you have to post something, but you’ve nothing substantive or relevant to say, no argument to offer or points to make. Hooray, then, for content-free abuse! There’s always that. I was going to call it “ad hominem”, but that presupposes the existence of an actual argument: “X is wrong because Josh is a poopyhead” is an ad hominem argument. “Josh is a poopyhead” isn’t even that.
@OB, 16:
And have you ever heard “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”?
@ Deepak Shetty, 20: Beer for the fella, glass of white wine or fruit-based drink for the lady.
@ guest, 23:
That’s fine – but you surely must realise that that reading would only even occur to the tiny, tiny minority of the population who are primed for rape-culture dog-whistles? That the vast, overwhelming majority of its audience will read it as “This beer will make YOU, the person the advert is addressing, drunk and stupid”?
And I can believe that among the advertising creatives and execs and AB reps who all approved this, there was probably the odd one or two who thought of this interpretation. And if they were empowered and confident enough to voice it, I can picture a room full of people turning to them incredulously and saying “Really?”.
We’ve come a long, long way in policing the speech of advertisers since I was young and my local supermarket had a poster in front of the checkouts advertising “STRIPPER FOR HIRE” (steam-generating wallpaper stripper) illustrated with an alluring picture of a semi-clothed woman. But criticising a beer advert for telling its customers that beer gets people drunk? I think we’ve a way to go yet.
sonofrojblake, #25
Nice try changing the message. I’m sure you thought no one would notice.
In real life, not being able to say “no” when drunk means sex. But keep up the Dawkinsing. It’s cute.
sonofrojblake, #25
Oh, excuse me if I actually consult the advertisement instead of your stupid interpretation of it.
This beer will make you unable to say “no” and it will make you unable to say no “for the night”. We all know what that’s a reference to! Skydiving! YEAH!
Whenever I see these commercials where some pretty girls offer a guy a beer in exchange for being “Up” for anything that will happen afterword, I cringe. His night is always fun games he never would have thought of playing, or a concert by a currently hot band. He doesn’t worry that there’s worse than beer in that bottle. He doesn’t have to worry about pictures of him naked on the Internet being sexually abused showing up the next day. These commercials remind me just how many things men just don’t have to worry about.
So I take it that, when Ogden Nash wrote
Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker
all those years ago, it was only a small group of dedicated ideologues who thought it “droll” rather than everyone who ever saw or heard it.
Maybe in your life.