I just saw this ad.

I wonder - if we compare this ad to a recent ad ( Hanes - were two women security guards make men strip down to enter there office) if this is considered equally sexist and demeaning to men as this ad is to women. If you watch TV closely in the US now ( granted - not an easy thing to do ) you will find a lot more shows and ads anti-male than anti female. How many shows now show the stupid husband and smart wife ? Pretty much all of prime time - think "The Simpsons" as the extreme stereotypcal example.

Let's face it, if this ad showed in the US, there would be an uproar here. Strange that there is no uproar when men are treated as sex objects. Just another double standard ?

To answer your "double standard" allegation:

"But worse, this insistence that "we're all the same" leads to all kinds of equivalences that just make no sense at all. That is, "blue hair" discrimination does not even come close to rivaling racism. And if one more punk asks me to explain the difference between calling someone a "whiteboy" and calling someone a "nigger" or "chink," blood is seriously gonna flow.

***It's called history, people.***"

http://www.worsethanqueer.com/slander/pprace.html

And "It's called history" is my answer to your allegation that there is parity between men treated as sex objects in ads and women treated as sex objects in ads. Feminism has been around for, oh, 150 years, most? Care to calculate how long sexist patriarchy has been around? One person suggested that the ad is homophobic. Would it still be if it were recreated with a beer-drinking woman attending an all-male ballet class? Don't tell me that you (or anyone else for that matter) would "read" this latter version the same way as the actual one because I don't think so.

For "laughs":

"To make up for what's happened so far in art history, every show should be 99% women and artists of color, but only for the next 400 years."

http://www.guerrillagirls.com/interview/index.shtml

As for the rest of the thread on the Beer-ad:

Interesting how barely anyone here relates this type of artistic debasement to the inability of companies to get funding. This is what artists have to resort to when they can't get funding. For me, this advertisement is the face of the supply and demand for money in the arts.

Tex. [and yes, I think the ad is utterly sexist. But I would say the same thing of most ballets, so the marriage "ballet + beer ad" doesn't surprise me one bit. Especially when a company is in dire need of money.]

A few posts back, Azlan made the case for a cultural relativist approach, which seems to hold sway in some academic fields and other areas:

This issue certainly comes up in the letter writing and campaigning I do in the field of human rights. There are a number of discriminatory and sometimes gruesome or even murderous practices against women that do form part of local cultures, and I campaign against these.

Cosmetic cultural differences and traditions are fine, but male perceptions of women underpin a lot of the problems in macho societies, so I do not see the ad as an innocent example of local culture.

On a general point re. gender equality - notice anything about EVERY medal ceremony at the Olympics? And I don't mean the fact that 90+% of those handing out the gongs are men.

<small>[ 24 August 2004, 11:15 AM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

The one thing I've noticed about every medal ceremony is that they're been held without my watching them.

You're right Maria, in that arts funding is hard in Argentina and perhaps this ad reflects that. Even ABT's Julio Bocca struggles to keep his Ballet Argentino afloat.

But does it tell us anything about arts funding for ballet in, say, Holland or the UK?

<small>[ 24 August 2004, 02:02 PM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

Whatever the country is, the underlying message is "SEX SELLS". My view of this ad was this:

"Drink this beer and you'll have the balls enough to face the not so macho image of men in ballet, go to class, and get to handle the bodies of all these hot babes"

All ads appear to our "desires", or how to "better ourselves".

I don't think the ad people thought once, or even cared about the ad being demeaning to women.

The roles in these ads are way more mixed today, women demeaning men, men demeaning women, men demeaning men, whatever, as long as it tempts us.

Now to bring up racism or feminism, we've come a long way in the last hundred years, let it go, move on.

It tells us that we (here in the Netherlands) have a government at the moment that, for example, denied half a million of euros out of the requested budget of the Dutch National Ballet and NDT:

Translated:

huidige subsidie/current sum: € 4.620.090,-
gevraagde subsidie/ requested sum: € 5.144.000,-
geadviseerde subsidie/ advised sum: € 4.620.250,-

Source:
http://www.cultuur.nl/cultuurnota.html?cult_content4.php?id=2266

Same goes for Nederlands Dans Theater:

huidige subsidie: € 5.542.690,-
gevraagde subsidie: € 6.333.000,-
geadviseerde subsidie circa: € 5.427.750,-

http://www.cultuur.nl/cultuurnota.html?cult_content4.php?id=2436

Lots of companies however lost the whole sum. You can visit the page below

http://www.cultuur.nl/cultuurnota.html?cult_content2.php?deel=7

Just click on the name of the group in the list in the middle-frame and check the euro-numbers at the top of the right-frame. The ones that get 0 euros are the ones culled.

Does that answer your question? Yes, it is a very generous system, no it isn't as generous as it was before because of the recession. But that does not mean I am happy if any of these culled companies make it into an Amstel beer ad :-/

Tex.

As crude as this ad was, I would put it a notch above some of the superbowl ads this year. ( Although i will admit that is a VERY low standard ).

I wonder if from a sociological perspective, do these TV ads tell us more about ourselves than either the shows they are in or even the products they are advertising?

This ad cracked me up. I guess for me it was okay for the following reasons:

1) the women were portrayed as pretty serious artists -- they weren't trying to impress him.

2) the guy was not actually groping, just raising his eyebrows, which struck me as funny more than anything. i guess this resonated for me in part because it's one of those "what everyone thinks but no one says" moments -- I haven't done much ballet partering but I've done other forms and, as much as everyone plays it professional, sometimes your breasts end up square in someone's face and there's something funny-awkward about that. the ad played off that for me.

3) per aslan's discussion above, i would've reacted a lot more strangely if the women had been...objectifying themselves? trying to sexualize themselves? more like the woman #3 in his(?) examples. i'm unsure how to put it. there are a couple of significant glances, but for the most part the humor in the ad comes from the guy's loutishness. the women don't even care that he's there. they seem to have their own agency here and that agency appears, to me, to be completely disinterested. so he just looks, to my eyes, like some stupid guy. it makes me laugh.

years ago i remember seeing an advert on TV for i think it was for Levis where a female security guard tried to get a man to strip in order to search him, even though it wasn't necessary. no one seemed to mind that advert, yet people seem to be offended when it is the other way round! i will admit that a ballet class is perhaps not the most appropriate subject matter for a beer ad.

Ballet has a long history of portraying women as sex objects: sometimes subtly and sometimes not so subtly. For example, it has been noted repeatedly that ballet is constructed for the MALE HETEROSEXUAL audience. A more recent (and more daring) assertion from:

http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/6-1/html/scott.html

It would be interesting to examine this ad in the wider context of the portrayal of women in ballet in general. Feminism was from the very beginning, and still is, a driving force behind modern dance.

Foster is certainly not the only one to come up with this insight in the "Freudianism" behind the ballet's obsession with verticality/linearity...

I once made a collage (for private use alone, mind you) where I cut out pictures of ballerina's extended legs (either from doing a pointe tendu, a develope or grand battement) and combined them with cut-out cartoons of, yup, you guessed it.

I called this collage "Tendu = Penis Envy", after the condition described by Sigmund Freud, because there really are some striking "formal" similarities between some of the pictures of the legs and some of the you-know-whats.

Tex.

WTF?

I thought the commercial was hysterical! Get over yourselves everybody. It's all about dollars and cents. If it makes money for the Arts, I'm all for it. On the otherhand, if it doesn't make any money, it couldn't make funding for the arts any worse these days.

Obviously you all haven't ventured too much in the hip hop community where sexism is rampant and played with and is as lucrative as it gets. Work in a hip hop show and find the majority of the male dancers are straight walking horndogs as well as the choreographers who also try to flirt with the female dancers to get them to dance better or feel allegiance to them.

When it happens consistently, no one thinks anything of it. The reason why a lot of those men continue to perform professionally or learn other classic dance styles is to be around women, satisfy artistic expression, and feel like macho kings from all of the female attention or homosexual male attention (Female attention artificailly out of the desparate artistic need of male dancers to perform with the group or an unprofessional social need). And, the women, just like in the commercial, are not phased by any of the male attitudes. They are just happy that they are there and putting the "muscle" behind their performance.

Yes, there are incidents of foul play and even "showmances," but when your group is open to sexual connoting comments and movement inuendos, you usually are uninhibited to knock somebody down for sexual harrassment in the studio or through management. The only time that you are in a really precarious situation is when it is the choreographer or artistic director. You can either take it, leave, or risk the choreographer feeling they can't use you the same way anymore or you feeling left out of the "cool group." Only certain diva personalities or dancers with status can walk away clean from charging a choreographer with sexual harassment and still be respected. I've done it and I'm respected for that and these individuals I continue to work with today.

Anyway, I really don't understand why anybody is acting all high and mighty anyway. You all know darn well in a concert dance company whether it is ballet or modern, that the men and women, whether gay, straight, or bi are constantly groping each other, hugging extra hard, pinching, patting each other on the butt, etc. We as dancers are very comfortable with our bodies and haven't it "handled" more readily than a non-dancer; that is probably why this behavior is so wide and open. It's only when we have to partner that we buckle down to business because our lives are in each other's hands and we want to put on a good show. But, in between . . . dare I say what really goes on!

Can I talk about road trips! Showmances, Friends in every city, Hotel hopping - - stairwell escape plans! Please . . . Don't get me started.

Don't want this site stuffy, heh? I'll keep it clean.

But, seriously folks, don't kid yourselves. Especially when you are working with our impressionable young talent and mix them with some of the so called senior professionals that are suppose to be our "responsible heros," anything goes.

So, I think the commercial is funny, yes its sexist, but I believe the majority of the world is num to what we do as dancers anyway. They still think we are people acting like fairies doing some great tricks that they as layman can't do. I think the pointe shoes around the neck was stupid, but worked in context because it looks funny. We as dancers need to stop acting so serious and allow people to have fun with us.

Notice how I said "fun with us." That commercial was not making fun of ballet dancing --the girls were performing what they were suppose to do in the correct way. It was only the male student who we were suppose to be laughing at. We weren't laughing at that girls' crotch, we were laughing at the male's dumb reaction for a dancer doing a interesting dance move, a move I know I have performed (with no reservation about the male handling me) countless of times. As far as dancing goes, that girl was doing her job. What more can you ask for? As far as the male dancer, he was doing his job, he just was not keeping his reaction to himself and that is the artistic liscence of the commercial producers. Don't fool yourself and believe that a straight male dancer never at one time never in his life leered at a female dancer. I have taught pre-professional kids and it takes forever to get the boys num to partnering with girls.

This commercial is just like a play. It's not for real. It's overexaggerated on purpose -for laughs! And, at the man's expense (making him look like a stupid horney fool). If this was a play on a stage, we wouldn't say anything about it because we know it is intended for comedic diversion -the female dancers play the "straight" character and the male dancer plays the "village idiot." What does it teach? Nothing! Who cares? If anything it teaches (like one of the post's) men can drink beer,dance ballet, and "pick up" women, and it doesn't make them any less straight or horney.

Look, folks. TV is in our house so much we think it's reality and not staged TV! Get over yourselves, everybody. It's Funny!

c

Hahaha... well, NOT!, actually. Sexism is not that funny at all. As for rap-music, and whatever companies do backstage or frontstage or under the stairwells... speak for yourself alone please.

Some of us are not happy with this rampant sexism in dance, and yes we are going to complain about it. If it's your "freedom of speech" to be a sexist under the guise of "art" and "culture" and "tradition" and "biological determinism", it is my "freedom of speech" to accuse you of being a sexist, and to point out why your arguments that it's "natural", it's "accepted", it's "a biological imperative" are flat-out wrong. Don't like it? Don't be a (pro-)sexist, and I will stop complaining.

Here is something I wrote a while back from my own anti-sexist perspective:

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=eae8129.0407020825.2f32b8e6%40posting.google.com&output=gplain

(this from someone who just downloaded a whole radio special on Eminem, has Eminem music, and listens to Greek hip hop and Dutch "Nederhop", which can get as sexist as American rap. I like this music because it's aggressive and funny, not because it's sexist. Unfortunately people can't keep these things separate.)

Tex.