I’ll admit right up front, I’m new to the beer game. It’s been a little over a year since I’ve started my beer journey, and though I’m enjoying craft beer as much as the next person, I’m guilty of drinking light beer on occasion—like when I want something cheap that I can suck down quick without “feeling it” after a couple of beers. Generally, my go-to has been Bud Light, which, while it’s certainly not the most delicious thing in the world, I found to be more palatable than Miller or Coors.
However, due to some carelessness, bad marketing, and (honestly) pure idiocy, Bud Light has lost me as a customer, and not because I’ve gotten to the point in my life where I’ll only drink beer from a micro-brewery, as many craft beer drinkers choose to do. I will no longer be supporting Bud by purchasing or drinking their beer, because of one of the latest phrases included in Bud Light’s #UpForWhatever campaign. #IHateTheNameAnyway #HashtagsHaveAPurposeOnTheInternet #NotOnBeerBottles #YesTheseHashtagsAreIronic. For those of you who are unaware, Bud Light has semi-recently started putting short, catchy sentences on their bottles, followed by the hashtag “up for whatever.” The purpose is supposed to be playful and lighthearted, though one of the latest installments is anything but. Currently circulating throughout bars, homes, and frat-houses all over the country are bottles with the sentence “The perfect beer for removing ‘no’ from your vocabulary for the night.”
If this were a video blog I would take a long dramatic pause and shake my head with my lips pursed, so just imagine that I’m doing that.
I’m going to start off tackling this issue by saying that I want to believe that the person who came up with this sentence didn’t have any malevolent ideas in mind when they slapped it on a beer bottle. They were probably thinking something along the lines of “Don’t say no to having one more beer with the friends you haven’t seen in months,” “Don’t say no to trying something new, and potentially exciting,” “Don’t say no to having a night out when you’ve been stressed and stuck at the office all week.” The point was probably to try to get people to have fun, de-stress, and live a little, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, the execution of those ideas by telling people to remove the word “no” from their vocabulary can have some idiotic implications at best, illegal at worst. Sometimes, the word “no” is good. Like when someone says something like “we should totally go pee on that guys car right now,” or “I think you should steal the wallet hanging out of that guy’s back pocket,” or “You should go slap that girl in the middle of this bar for sleeping with your boyfriend,” or “We’ve been here for a while, let’s have another drink or two and then get out of here and go back to my place.”
Of course, most people won’t read their Bud Light bottle and think “Yea! I’m gunna go pee on a car!” But that’s not the point. The point is that Bud Light is disregarding the importance of the word “no.” We live in a society where one in five women is sexually assaulted, with a countless number of those occurring on college campuses (and I feel confident is saying that college students are probably some of the biggest consumers of Bud Light in the country). We can’t have catchy slogans that tell us that we shouldn’t be saying no because “come on, lighten up, it’ll be fun” can turn into “I said no and they didn’t care,” and “just a few more drinks and then let’s get out of here” can turn into “I was too drunk to consent.” Because no means no, and yes only means yes when you’re sober and can give consent. “No” is not a drink away from “yes,” and getting people drunk so they say yes is sexual assault.
I’m sure there are people reading this that are rolling their eyes, thinking I’m too uptight because “that’s so not what they were actually going for. It’s not a big deal, lighten up.” However, I’m not the only one who read that sentence and thought it was kind of rapey. So, if there are numerous other people in the country who are reading it the same way I did, I guarantee you somebody somewhere who works for Bud Light read it as that way too, and just didn’t care. And that, in my opinion, is the problem here—that people just don’t care. You’d think, that when marketing is everything, a big corporation like that would never want to release something that could be read as having implications of sexual assault. Someone at Bud Light read it that way though, and thought “oh well, I’ll let it slide, it’s no big deal,” just like the person who sexually assaulted a drunk person thought “oh well, it’s not a big deal” because they didn’t use force. Just like way too many people hear the story of the person who was drunkenly sexually assaulted and think “oh well, it’s really not that big of a deal” because there was no bruises or because there may have been a drunken “yes.”
Well, Bud Light, to me it’s a big deal. Because choices are important. Because language is important. Because marketing does affect our attitudes towards things, even subconsciously. Because this campaign which was meant to encourage fun, shouldn’t have sentences that sound like it’s encouraging sexual assault.
I know I’m just one person, and Bud Light probably doesn’t care that they’ve lost me as a customer, but if they continue down this questionable path, I’m sure they’ll be losing more.
#I’llHaveAYuenglingLightPlease
