Kiss My Bass
Bass Beer is evidently trying to narrow its target audience to include only upwardly-mobile misogynists. The brew’s new commercials feature young, conventionally good-looking white guys in neutral-colored clothing pontificating to the camera about their philosophies of life. In one ad, a guy simply enumerates the things that women do to attract him in bars. "Bring on the flirtation," Mr. J. Crew challenges. "The hair-toss, the unbuttoned button, the leg cross, the licking of the lips, I know you see me, I see you."
It’s hilariously presumptuous of Bass to imagine that this guy attracts women using that crap—but the apparent belief that all women in bars are posing and preening on his behalf is not as funny, given how many men explain away rape by claiming they were "led on" by a woman’s clothing or behavior. It’s a small step to imagining that if you’re in the same bar with this guy, talking with friends and occasionally crossing your legs or smoothing your hair, he’ll assume the two of you are engaged in some sort of urban foreplay.
Another commercial in the campaign offers us a second clean-cut white guy—this time with a basketball as a prop—with his own observations, among them "If you’re going to draw a map of your life, do it in pencil," and "There’s a difference between the right girl and the right-now girl."
Both commercials make plain that for Bass Men, women are disposable, sexualized objects that entice and attract, but certainly aren’t equals. The difference between these and other misogynistic beer ads would seem to be that the beers marketed as working class are more obvious in their imagery, their sexism more honest. These Bass ads frame their spokesdudes as the kind of man every khaki-wearing college graduate should aspire to be, and this makes their sexism all the more insidious. Personally, I think I’ll be switching to Pabst.
—Gretchen Kalwinski
