27. A Guide to Avoiding One Very Specific and Very Terrible Gift
Instead of advising you on what to buy, I'm ranting about one thing no one should ever buy; plus a positive-thinking beer for Pink Boots.
Let’s Maybe Not Give the Gift of Dehumanizing Women This Year
It’s the season of gift guides. You know this, as you have no doubt consumed, idk, 37 so far this year?
It is not that I have contempt for the gift guide, itself. Gift guides might seem like easily assembled fluff that feeds the content machine and greases it, too, with affiliate marketing, but some are literally and truly important because they guide traffic to, say, new authors, or diverse makers, or businesses owned by members of underrepresented communities. We need these gift guides! We also need gift guides that are remarkably specific, and side-splitting enough to tear through holiday-heightened existential dread, like The 2021 Bad Gift Guide for Heavy-Drinking Frenemies that Dave Infante recently sent out in his newsletter, Fingers—its searing wit a tidy example of why you should subscribe if you haven’t yet.
Personally, because so much of my career up to a couple of years ago was spent hunkered in the fashion, shopping, and retail space, I feel as though I have written more than enough gift guides for my entire lifetime. I have fulfilled the Online Media Drone Gift Guide Quota. I have surely written gift guides I have no recollection of, and gift guides that don’t bear my name, so you could say I’m the Stephen King of gift guides, if you’d like. I’ve never written a gift guide that includes whiskey stones, so I haven’t achieved maximum gift guide horror, but close enough.
I still assumed I’d write some sort of gift guide for this newsletter, but I think other people have already done a better job of it. My gift guide energy has been depleted, and is probably better spent sharing genuine gift ideas on social media. I know this because every time I’ve sat down to start an earnest gift guide, my thoughts have returned to a monstrosity I stumbled upon when actually looking for a gift for a friend. And so, in a very different sort of “guide,” an entire issue about what I hope no one ever gets for anyone as a gift ever again in the ten or 15 years we have left before this planet burns.
Which is this glass. And any other version.
I was Googling about for a very not headless-woman-shaped beer glass when Walmart did what it does best and upset me. Off the bat, I have no wise or witty criticisms for you on this glass. I just hate it so much. I hate it so much! I hate it so much.
But let me try to collect my thoughts. Or else, why am I asking you to read this, right?
I think there are two arguments someone could try to make for not smashing the entire inventory of these glasses and then rolling flag-flyers of the toxic patriarchy in the shards (I’m sorry, that just got unexpectedly violent). One is that there is a genre of art that celebrates the female form and is actually appreciated most by women because it is an embrace, a reclaiming, an empowerment. To that argument I’d say, let’s not kid ourselves, okay? Fans of artist Francine Dressler aren’t the target demo for this glass, which has presumably not been crafted by a feminist creator with the intention of helping women love their bodies. Call it a hunch!
The other argument could be that it’s not like there isn’t an entire bachelorette-party market of phallic paraphernalia, which detaches and objectifies a certain element of the male anatomy. I might not be the person to comment on this because I hate that shit, anyway, but I can confidently say this: Only when the female body is never prey, is never used as the basis for discrimination or assault, is never completely governed by men; only when the power dynamics aren’t imbalanced to a batshit degree; only when anyone identifying as female can walk through this world unafraid that a man might attack them—only then can we all together be like haha, dicks, haha boobs, it’s all fun!
Are you familiar with The Headless Women of Hollywood, a blog created by Marcia Belsky? Belsky started rounding up movie posters in which women’s bodies are fragmented or featured sans head or face—and the volume is staggering, would you believe—in order to demonstrate how the media dehumanizes, objectifies, and fetishizes the physical body parts of women. Women are not fully formed people. They are aesthetically pleasing bits and bobs, existing solely to fulfill the sexual desires of men. Scroll through the feed, and the Twitter feed, and you’ll soon find yourself numbed by image after image capturing the personalities of male stars framed by legs and butts and breasts without heads, because anything going on in the head of a woman, that makes her an actual human, does not matter.
How many times have you encountered some variation of this joke? (Very much not repeating it here.) Is it so much that you tune it out now, or does each new reference along the lines of how the ideal woman doesn’t have a head, or exists only to provide body parts that men can do what they want with, fill you with rage anew?
These “jokes” are an act of violence. And that’s how I feel about this beer glass. Especially when you insert it into the actual context of our current beer culture. You don’t need me to recount the beer industry’s history of sexist marketing, of doing what those movie posters do and completely dehumanizing and objectifying women in order to sell beer to men. You don’t need me to remind you that since May of this year (and arguably before), it’s been officially impossible to claim ignorance as to craft beer’s pervasive culture of sexism, misogyny, harassment, discrimination, and assault. There are still breweries only now, under scrutiny, removing actual attackers from the company, like Hailstorm Brewing in Chicago (and who knows how many breweries we don’t know about where attackers are still very much employed or even in control). There are still in this scene people like this:
The body glass would probably delight FatBoyGotSwagger.
I find it so upsetting to think about anyone drinking beer out of this glass, but obviously it is especially so when it comes to imagining it in the hands of misogynists who happen to love beer, of which we know there are many. Beer merch like this says everything we’ve been pushing against, like that beer and objectifying women are all in good fun, and that, like beer, women’s bodies exist for men’s pleasure.
I should note before I leave (to walk into the sea) that Walmart does sell a men’s body glass. But you see these far less frequently than you do women’s body glasses. I’d wager not as many people are buying them. And, as I mentioned previously, there is no equality here. There’s no comparing the dangerous dehumanization of men and women. Men are also of course the victims of discrimination, abuse, and assault, and really, we do not need these glasses at all, period. Let’s smash them all. But when you’re talking about sweeping, ubiquitous, pervasive, relentless objectification and danger, and when you’re talking about the issues facing anyone who identifies as female in the beer scene, I think it’s a hard claim to make that merchandise like this is cool because at least there’s a male body counterpart.
Besides, these glasses are obviously not for true beer geeks. I mean, look at this pour.
Plus, they are an unimaginable 50 bucks.
Beer Tarot!
This week, I pulled the Ten of Swords.
Well, this one looks fun, doesn’t it? Who among us does not feel like my dude here?
Swords as a suit speaks to intellect and decisions; this card in particular to painful endings, loss, crisis, wounds…yeah, I know sometimes tarot is all like, “It’s Death but it doesn’t mean death!” And here, it’s a little more, “What you see is what you get.” Take a sip of beer (or tea or something), we’ll get through this together.
There are a couple of things this card can signal for our lives. Something may have come to an end—a relationship, a job, a project, our favorite TV show—but specifically, an abrupt ending that’s rather jarring and upsetting. Or, equally fun, we may have been hurt by something—betrayed, cheated, lied to. This is also an ending of sorts, of course, even if you start on a new road to repair with someone who hurt you.
What the Ten of Swords wants to tell you is that you must accept these circumstances but try not to wallow in them. This card has major “go to therapy” and “meditate” and “self-care” and “be kind to yourself” vibes. Something shitty happened and it’s okay to be upset. But the only person you are now hurting is yourself if you dwell—do the best you can to figure out your road forward. Let yourself get excited about a different path or new journey. Take some lessons from this experience, and start the moving-on process by finding what will bring you joy.
Some positive affirmations would be a great way to get going on that road, right? Go find yourself some Affirmations NEIPA, brewed by Sloop Brewing Co. to benefit all New York state chapters of the Pink Boots Society. The worthy cause will get all those good feelings flowing on its own, but the meaning is special, too, and worth being mindful about. Take the advice of the NYC Pink Boots chapter and, while you sip this delightful IPA, say something meaningful, nice, and positive to someone—and to yourself! Let this brew be a reminder to support and elevate each other.
This Week’s Boozy Reading Rec
Thanks to Sam O’Brien and Gastro Obscura, I now know about “hell banquets.” “Before Haunted Houses, There Were Hell Banquets” is my kind of content. O’Brien weaves together different examples of these macabre feasts in different periods, looking at what they may have represented, statements they may have been making, and the good old fashioned diabolical sadism of their hosts. Short of actually scaring my guests into thinking they are in actual danger, I am itching to host a Hades-esque dinner party now.
Until next week, here’s a young Darby very excited to be Rushing Duck Brewing.
