07 July 2015

Dear Slate

You are morons.

In essence you're saying, "this is successful in marketing beer to its intended audience, you must stop doing it because people who are outside that demographic may become offended."

This is akin to demanding that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic be taken off the air because it's known to offend middle-aged bikers through the existence of Bronies.  Hasbro will cater to nine-year-old girls and Bronies with MLP:FiP, but will ignore the offence to bikers because the bikers typically don't buy the product.

The target demographic for the "offensive" beers isn't people who would get offended at the off-color humor.

The real message in the article is, "why don't they make a beer that caters to MEEEEEEEEEEE?"  Actually, someone probably does...  I remember the white cans with the black "BEER" label.

Here's something I can say with reasonable certainty.  I am the housewife in my household, The Lovely Harvey is the "man" of the house with the job.  What I get to do is hang out with the other wives at work social functions while the men talk shop.  Guess how many of those girls are drinking beer.  Go on.

Me and maybe one other (not 32%).  Wine is the preferred drink of the person who's most likely to be offended by these "sexist" labels followed closely by sweet cocktails (or is it sexist to say cock now when referring to mixed drinks?).

If I go to these women you're apparently trying to shelter with your demand for more sensitive beer names, I think you're going to find they're going to laugh at both the humor on the labels and you for thinking those names are so offensive they need to be removed from the market.

Something else that bears mentioning is the women I know who drink beer, aren't the same sort of women who drink wine.  Entirely different mindset about lots of things.  Humor included.

I think what we have here is the brewers understanding their market better than a writer at Slate and catering to it, rather than worrying that they're missing 1/3 of their market from that pandering.

We don't really need to go too far here in the blogs.  Tam is a beer drinker, we could ask her if she's offended.  Tomorrow I'm going to a local nano-brewery and I can put it to both the owner and the beer-drinking female portion of the customers.

2 comments:

  1. Did you try anything from Scarlet Lane while you were in town?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I did not. Just Sun-King. My host wasn't familiar with the local beers so didn't know to suggest them.

      But I might just plan for The Bloomington Gold next year.

      Delete

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