What happened to the manly adverts of old?

A ‘man crush’ is a very 21st Century TV term. It is another one of those Americanisms that is working its way into our consumer culture.

The term ‘man crush’ was originally associated with idolisation of celebrities and something that I associated with adolescents.

That is when young men would admire older men on TV so much that they started to ape the way they walked, talked, dressed and acted.

A man crush is the new politically correct way of saying, “I like a guy because he is cool but in a brotherly way and not in some homo erotic manner”.

It used to be possible to have a same-sex infatuation without suffering a major sexual identity complex.

But nowadays they are so many shades of sexuality, one feels the need to make themselves explicitly clear about where they stand. Hence the necessity of a term like ‘man crush’.

Fledgling masculinity

Therefore, when I saw the slogan “The Only Man Crush You Are Allowed to Have” it sounded more suited to an evangelical, hip church strategy for attracting youth to the ministry of Jesus Christ.

That would pass for witty and catchy. Instead it was attached to the established Pilsner beer brand.

We will just call that slogan what it is, sissy! If the intention of the ad guys was to inspire some fledgling masculinity ideals then they missed that boat by a river.

“Imara kama Simba” was cheesy but bearable. We expect beer brands to push false bravado and we can live with patronising slogans like “My Beer, My Country”.

Beer ritual

Beer ads are supposed to have some muscle. That is why animal symbolism tended to resonate with consumers. A lion, an imposing elephant or at least a snow capped mountain.

Previously, beer marketing stemmed from the ideal of mastering the challenge of work to get the reward of beer.

The theme of challenge was common and a man had to undergo a stress test like Michael Power in the Guinness ad, to get a cold one.

Beers have since time immemorial been commercially packaged as a man’s how-to-guide to growing up. There is the first beer ritual, which has become a rite of passage for boys graduating to men.

It is a universally shared mark of adulthood and a way of saying you are now old enough to sit among men. Beer is a symbol of equality and a social license that like visa is accepted everywhere.

The ability to appear stone sober even when bleedin’ drunk is proof of self-control, an ideal that men live for.

Beer is also a symbol of patriotism. You probably need to see how Kenyans in the diaspora react when they run into a beer from ‘home’.

That said, from the look of things, beer adverts are getting soft and metro, possibly because they are more women in bars drinking guys under the table and this new demographic is influencing the way beer brands are positioned.

Beer bottles are getting slimmer, more feminine and smaller. The iconic brown bottle is losing shelf space to long necks.

When long necks bottles were first introduced in my college years, most guys thought they were great as they offered good grip in case a bar fight broke out.

Soft drinks

Beers that were packaged for the female market like Redds were classified as soft drinks and only touched when one did not feel like ‘drinking’.

A story was told of a man who crashed into a street lamp. When the police man asked him if he had been drinking, he confidently replied, “Of course not. I just had a few Smirnoff Ices”. Man crushes are just not what they used to be anymore. Sigh!