Listen up, guys: I don't know about y'all, but my future bitch better meet the following criteria:
1) She better be fine. I don't mean border-line MILF-ish or with a sufficient healthy glow. I mean she better surpass at least a 7.5 on the scale of Hotties. I should add that I would except a fixer-upper; for example, a girl with an 8.0 personality and 6.8 looks, with some surgery, can easily average out to a 7.5. It's imporant to foresee the un-tapped potential in a female. Double-meaning.
2) She better be naked, at least partially, for most of the time. Let's assume she'll spend 70% of her day inside my house. I need her to look sexy as hell in case I come home from work for lunch and decide I would like some dessert. Double-meaning. Therefore, at least 50% of her day should be spent flaunting her credentials. On a personal level, I will be more fulfilled knowing my fine-ass woman is sexually comfortable with herself, and also that her comfortability is devoted to inflating my confidence. At least a double-meaning there. This is just what a girlfriend does. In return for her fidelity, I spend some cash: put her in the SUV, if she wants ice, make her freeze, etc.
3) She should be fine with the fact that I'm a genuine, hairy, stanky man. No real woman can be satisfied by some Guido, metro-sexual, spiked-hair havin, popcorn-muscle flexin, polo-wearin, no-talent ass clown. No. Real women appreciate a portly mate - how else will they know that their cooking is making us fat and happy? They also don't mind excess hair because it gives them something to grab onto. And it keeps them warm.
4) She better tolerate lots of beer consumption. Sorry, bitch. Beer was my first love. Accept it or get your broom and your cookware and get out.
5) When I go out with my friends on the weekends (because believe it or not I don't want to watch movies with her and "talk" all night), she better be damn encouraging about it. When she needs a break from being naked, she can put her clothes on. When I need a break from her, I should be able to get my cake on. I believe in the "you can look but you better not touch" rule. The strip tease is just that: a tease - pregame. The girlfriend is for the actual game. Also, ladies: no guy ever minds a postgame show.
And there you have Jim Beam's latest whiskey commercial summarized. I don't know if the people at Jim Beam's advertising division truly have never studied the concept of alienation in advertising, or if they're smarter than I am. There are probably statistics which show that a minority of women drink whiskey (or that the ones who do aren't clever enough to recognize mysoginism). Therefore, the folks over at Jim Beam are just laughing about their commercial, saying, "Ladies, if you don't like it, well then don't buy the product. Oh wait, you already don't so who cares."
The point is this: beyond trivializing the role of a woman in a relationship, Jim Beam is also taking away the female voice by using a girl as a male mouthpiece (double-meaning?). This rhetoric is not new, but it is apparently effective because, in the whiskey market, her opinion does not matter. And, sadly, there must be enough men out there who are still receptive to this kind of ideology - just like the good old days of Jim Beam's beginning. But some males are receptive to the insuniations of such a commerical. Women are not the only customers alientated by such a bold statement. Whiskey is a specialty purchase; if I'm going to spend the money, I'll buy any one of the other readily-available top shelf bourbons who make their money by sticking to quality distilling, and not by trying to invent lame cultural catch-phrases, like "The Girlfriend," to be circulated in "The Frat House."
But "The Girlfriend" will have some success precisely because it's taboo. We like to laugh at racist jokes and homo jokes because we aren't supposed to, but it's important to do so with some irony or sense of self-deprecation. I saw no evidence of such irony in Jim Beam's latest attempt.
Here's an alternative slogan for Jim Beam: "Some things never get old. They just taste more bitter."
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