The results of a poll posted on the travel website Real Holiday Reports have found that British women are considered the worst tourists, particularly in terms of their physical appearance. The study finds that British women are often loud, drunk, and fart in public, all qualities that are supposedly the preserve of men. Also mentioned are the fact …
Outcries of sexism in advertising is not a new thing. In fact, companies from McDonald’s to Hardee’s have taken heat for playing to very specific target audiences. Perhaps the most egregious offender in terms of sexist ads, however, is the beer industry.
And now it’s going international.
The poster campaign features three bare-naked woman covering their cleavage with beer mugs – with the brews’ colours fitting the colour of their hair.
Caroline Kröpfl, a spokeswoman for the Hirter Bier brewery based in the Carinthian town of Micheldorf, claimed: “The poster shows three self-confident beer drinkers.”
Yes, I bet they were confident. I don’t know, maybe it’s me, but I’ve certainly never hung around naked drinking beer with a bunch of girlfriends. Well, not that I remember, anyway (I have a tattoo I don’t remember getting, either, though).
At any rate, that visual image wouldn’t shout out “confident” to me. It would instead scream “DRUNK”. Although maybe that’s the point, and “self-confident beer drinkers” is just more PC than referring to them as a bunch of …
A new post by Salon’s Riddhi Shah examines the ways in which food is gendered to be consumed either by men or women, with the other side shunning that which does not conform to their gender. The classic example that Shah focuses on, as evidenced by the post’s title, is that meat is for men and chocolate is for women. In the United States, meat is particularly associated with manliness and strength, whereas chocolate is “the exclusive preserve of premenstrual women and post-breakup slumber parties.” However, in many other parts of the world these ideas do not hold true, as it is men who often prefer chocolate, and in some cultures salty foods are far and away the dominant favorite regardless of gender. What this leads Shah to conclude is that the United States is a highly food gendered society that exacerbates and perpetuates biological stereotypes.
Stereotypes, however, are often fractured exaggerations of some basic truth. There is scientific evidence that shows that women prefer foods that are sweeter and more colorful, while men show a strong preference for bitterness and colors that connote density and robustness. This is why in the beverage world, women are associated with sugary “girlie drinks” like cosmopolitans and red wine, and heavier more unpalatable whiskeys and beers …
So you think women don’t know good beer? You’re wrong! The Wall Street Journal is reporting that women make better beer tasters than men, as they are more adept at recognizing complex chemicals that affect flavor. This skill is considered extremely important, not only in order to discover the desirable flavors, but also to discern which unwanted chemicals make the beer “skunky.” While some people (mostly male) have disputed women’s palate prowess, I tend to agree with this logic.
In addition to the science that shows women may have a biological edge when it comes to tasting, it has been suggested by many (including some professional female tasters) that women are also socialized to do more complex tasks related to smell, taste and pattern recognition (the world’s top female taster, Joanna Wasilewska of Poland, claims that a lifetime of memorizing perfumes gives her an edge). One of the top male tasters (who listened to women’s advice to improve his own abilities) put it this way: “sometimes guys will see red or brown and women will see shades in it.” As a man who tends to like beer and will drink just about anything that doesn’t taste like dishwater (and yes, there is such a beer), this makes perfect sense. One of the drinks that I cannot stand (wine) is often preferred by (and heavily marketed towards) women over beer, precisely because it has a more nuanced blend of flavors. One “amateur” drinker agrees with this sentiment: “I think we have a better sense of what tastes better in all aspects, food, clothes, beer.” According to one blogger, this may be why Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper chose to receive a case of notoriously awful Molson Canadian from Obama after he won a bet that the Canadian hockey team would beat the USA in the Olympics (for the record, Obama picked bilgewater Bud Light for the “beer summit” after the Henry Louis Gates arrest).
So what do you all think? Are women really the better tasters? They may as well be. They kind of invented it, so they must know what they’re talking about, right?
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