Half-Naked Hot Chicks and Beer: The Sexist Guyland of the Super Bowl Beer Commercial

In guyland, beer is the official drink, beer ads are the constitution and the Super Bowl is the annual holiday.  

Yes, it’s beer day on Sunday. It’s the second biggest eating day of the year after Thanksgiving, and I’d put a Vegas wager on it being the biggest beer-drinking day. It’s also the biggest celebration of beer ads, which unlike beer’s buzz, live forever due to YouTube. It’s a day that brought us Wassup, the Budweiser Frogs, and of course, the Cat Fight.  

After watching dozens of beer ads over the last few days, I can report that the land of beer is a fun and raucous place. It’s a land where drunkenness, laughing, burping, irresponsibility, pranks and rule-breaking reign supreme. There are no awkward silences, no need to speak in words, no need to remember to say or do anything in particular or face the consequences. Heck, there are no consequences. It’s a world where women have fun entertaining men. It’s an escape from the tyranny of work and manners, from the ill-fitting harnesses of the digital age on our inner human cave animal. Can’t you just hear the whole nation sighing in relief? 

I understand the merits of the golden liquid, with its bubbles on a quest for freedom. But beer ads don’t really bother with that. They sell an escape to fantasy masculinity. And boy, while there might be more women drinking beer and watching the Super Bowl than ever, and more ads directed to them in some ways, most beer ads -- especially the sexy ones -- are like masculinity on steroids.  

Beer ads have always been about sex. In the beer ads of my youth, long-haired women in skimpy outfits danced to rock music, while guys stood around holding beers. Women smiled at men, and the men grinned at each other. (When I went to my first parties, as a teenager, I actually wondered if I was going to have to behave like that.)

Those ads look pretty tame today. In last year’s Miller Lite Cat Fight, which got over six million views afterward, women leave a lunch table to rip off their clothes and fight in their undies, mud-wrestle, then make out. “The first beer commercial that starred actual soft-core porn actresses," is how the TV Munchies blog hailed it. “Bravo Miller Lite! We’ve never been thirstier!” The follow-up Cat Fight ad features a scantily clad Pamela Anderson joining in a pillow fight.  

Sportswriter Robert Lipsyte points out that "Because of their insecure young male demographic, ads tend to be so aggressively and cartoonishly hetero that 1) there is no orientation issue, and 2) there is no threat of actually having to perform. You can watch sexy women the same way you watch football players -- from a superior remove.” 

There is another change from the sexy ads of a few decades ago. Today's ads are so over the top it’s clear they’re somewhat ironic. At the end of the cat fight ads, for example, the women, who are also drinking beer, roll their eyes. The ads create a knowing wink fantasy bubble that’s enhanced by the fact that everyone knows they’re getting away with something naughty. Mmm, delicious. 

It’s also surely about advertisers giving a nod to the "other” audience. They know women are in the game now, and are figuring out ways of keeping them drinking too. Women account for 25% of beer consumption, and almost half of the Super Bowl audience. Given that almost 96 million people watched last year’s Super Bowl, the second-most-watched broadcast ever, that’s a lot of women. According to Forbes, even back in 2005, 10 million more women watched the Super Bowl than the Academy Awards.