“Get than man a….wine!”
I know I’m linking to a LOT of Sydney Morning Herald articles - but basically, it’s because I’ve found they publish more articles on issues related to gender and sexuality than most of the other mainstream local newspapers I’ve been monitoring. The News Corp papers really don’t focus on such issues as regularly.
Anyway, a recent SMH article titled A change is brewing examined the way the “sweating, beer-swilling Aussie bloke is dying out as wines creep into the market and women work up a thirst for the amber fluid”.
The article demonstrates how gender relations, characteristics and stereotypes, have changed, and also how Aussie culture has changed, by showing the changes in our beer drinking habits (a big part of Aussie male culture).
It explains that in the past beer was always marketed to men, using very true-blue male imagery, characters, music and phrases - the major themes of the ads were usually mateship, sport, hard-yakka and larrikinism. Perfect examples are the old VB ads, which portrayed images of sweaty men licking their lips in anticipation of a cold VB, while “John Meillon solemnly intoned the ways in which you could work up a ‘hard-earned thirst’ for Victoria Bitter”.
Although they now use the occasional throwback to these old ads, eg. the new ad featuring iconic cricket legend David Boon, the ads created for beer companies are now very different (as are the beer-drinkers) - they portray more metro-sexual type men as well as women drinking beer anywhere but in the pub. They have to develop new ways to market beer as they face stiff competition from wines and ready-mixed drinks. Plus, as the article states, “today’s Australian male is more likely to be pushing a pen than wielding a pickaxe”.
Apparently, women now account for a quarter of beer drinkers, so to reflect this, women are also playing a more active role in the ads, eg. the Tooheys New advertisement that features a woman opening the bottletop with her belly button.
On the same day, the Herald published another article about the beer market, titled Tapping a circle of care - for any occasion. It’s written by Julian Lee, the same person who wrote the first one, and although it provides different info, it’s about the same issue. The first lines read, “PITY today’s beer marketer. He must weep when he looks back at the days when an Aussie working man would spend as much on beer in a week as he did on his mortgage. Back then your choice of beer said as much about you as a man as the car you drove or the team you supported. Occasionally you might have a light beer — if no one was watching. There was little else on offer. Today, the average Aussie has at least six drinks in his “repertoire” and scores of brands of spirits, wines and beers.”
It analyses the “average” young Aussie male’s drinking habits, but unlike the other article, doesn’t mention women.
By publishing these types of articles that analyse changes in gender characteristic, stereotypes, relations, as well as changes to Aussie culture, the Herald is acting as a social commentator - drawing public attention to the way our society has changed over time.
