Wondering what this is about? Well, Michelle Schwartz has started a delicious subvertising project, in reaction to a series of ads for Canadian Club Whisky.
The whisky campaign is called “Damn Right Your Dad Drank It”, and show a variety of white men “doing manly things”, as Michelle Schwartz puts it:
There are several of these ads. One reads “Your Dad Wasn’t A Metrosexual,” another reads “Your Mom Wasn’t Your Dad’s First.” The one that really annoyed me was “Your Dad Had Groupies.”
Michelle goes on to point out that it’s not just that the ads are exclusively aimed at white men (fuck anyone else who might drink their whisky), but the tactics used:
Basically, they are appealing to men who miss the days (whether or not they were born yet) of grabbing the asses of their secretaries, playing a few rounds at the all-white private golf club, and then going home to their wives, the happy homemakers who would mix them drinks, cook them dinner, and wait on them hand and foot. None of this women’s lib, civil rights, limp-wristed liberal bullshit that men are expected to follow these days. No, let’s go back to the days of rampant sexual harassment, before women could expect to be seen as equals and before the gays turned all those masculine men into pansies with waxed eyebrows. Let’s return to the days when men were men. Please.
Anyway, Michelle had a brilliant idea to do something about it – composing alternative posters, and inviting everyone else to do likewise. You can see some of the results above, such as “Your Mom Had Groupies”, “Your Mom Was a Pilot” – click through to her blog or Racialicious for more, including “Your Dad Was a Real Man” (showing a man playing affectionately with a baby) and a different take on “Your Mom Wasn’t Your Dad’s First”. Basically the ads strip away all the heteronormative, white-as-the-standard, gender roles claptrap. She has mocked up a template so you can make your own. Brilliant.
