Femme Up

You've seen those Bud Miller Light "man up" ads, right? Possibly the most misogynist (and annoying) ads on television now (and that's saying something), they feature a man declaring to a hot female bartender that he doesn't care what his beer tastes like, at which the bartender derides him for undertaking some stereotypically female activity (wearing skinny jeans, wearing a thong, excessive texting). The early versions were even worse, amazingly -- they had the bartender tell the guy to take off his girlfriend's skirt (and showed him actually wearing a skirt) -- I guess the literal statement by women that being a bad drinker = being a women (horrors) was a little too obvious.

Anyway, I was thinking -- wouldn't it be an awesome-yet-revealing parody to create a serious of "femme up" ads for, I don't know, sparkling wine? The women could ask for a glass of wine, the hunky male bartender could ask "sparkling or not", and the women could declare her indifference. At which point the man could mock her for being like a man: "Kinda like how your boyfriend doesn't mind you're borrowing his football jersey?" "But I actually like the Jets!" "Whatever -- femme up."

The point being that it's pretty difficult to imagine a female equivalent of the Bud Miller Light campaign, because we don't view stereotypically manly acts as humiliating, even (normally) when women do them. I guess you could pull it off if you had the women being staggeringly incompetent in their attempts at being masculine, but that's not the point of the Bud Miller Light commercials -- it's not that the dude looks bad in skinny jeans, it's that he deigns wear them in the first place. By contrast, it is difficult to think of a situation where a woman "performing" masculinity is considered inherently absurd or worthy of scorn, without regard to whether she's able to perform.