Dorks, Dr. Pepper, and the Demise of Men

If you’re a man and regularly watch television, there is a strong likelihood that you are suffering a crisis when it comes to your masculinity.  What’s that?  You’re not??  Then you’re even worse off than I thought, and are clearly in denial.  I say this with great confidence, because as a man that watches a fair amount of TV (in between chopping down trees and breaking hearts, of course) I’m utterly convinced that every TV show and advertiser has conspired to engage in an all-out assault on what makes us, well…us.

Gentlemen, I can’t speak for you, but it seems like just about every TV show or commercial is determined to make us guys feel like either giant pussies or just losers in general.  On one channel, there’s a truck commercial featuring an overly-masculine voiceover guy that sounds like Sam Elliot after he just chain-smoked four packs of Pall Malls.  The commercial tells me in no uncertain terms that I’m clearly not a real man unless I can literally drive my truck through a river of lava flowing out of a volcano.

I flip the station and The Big Bang Theory is on, and two nerds are pissing themselves over how to behave around a moderately-attractive woman.  Most sitcoms in general have no problems shitting on men and making them out to look stupid, weak, lazy, and forever dependent on the woman of the house to save them from their own messes.    For the most part, I’ve let this slide without comment because bitching about it is a decidedly un-manly thing to do and I’m certainly not the first to think this or comment on it.

 

Then we come to Dr. Pepper Ten and I can’t hold my silence any longer.  In case you haven’t heard, Dr. Pepper Ten is a new no-girls-allowed soda for those guys who want a soft drink that tells the world how tough they are.  I actually started laughing uncontrollably when I first saw this commercial, thinking it was brilliant piece of satire.  Then I was met with the chilling and disturbing realization that they’re actually serious.

As you can see from the photo, this soda is clearly not for women.  And yes, it has 10 calories but fear not — they’re manly calories.  Thank God for that, because I was worried they might be little girlie calories that would shrink my testicles and fill me with an uncontrollable desire to learn how to do needlepoint.

How far have we fallen as a gender that we now need our own male-only soft drink to reaffirm that, yes, we do actually have a Y chromosome?  First of all, if you find yourself drawn to this advertisement and actually thinking “Yes, that’s a soda that speaks to me” you are already so far gone that it’s probably best to just invest in a pair of pajama jeans and sip some decaffeinated tea before bedtime and legally change your name to Nancy.  No real man is going to give a shit about what his soda says about him, let alone how many calories are in it.  And if you’re the type of guy to hang around people who do criticize your soda choice, you need to first punch them in the face and then find some new friends.

The definition of a ‘real man’ is a bit like the definition of pornography.  You don’t know exactly how to define it, but you know it when you see it.  But I do suspect that most ‘real men’ don’t drink sodas that cover their insecurity, or allow them to be persuaded by a commercial with a gruff narrator.  Looking around TV these days, it seems the real men are becoming tougher and tougher to find, which is a shame.

-Bill Henry