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How Manly

When you were in middle or high school, did you ever have an extremely immature, shit-head of a classmate return one year from summer vacation unexpectedly mature and sophisticated? Well, that's Axe right now. That's right, Axe is back and looking shockingly, pleasantly, different. Here, see for yourself: https://vimeo.com/166549357   The latest ad from Axe […] Read more

The past five-plus years of male targeted advertising have been pretty painful to watch. Yes, I know that ads are always painful to watch, but they've been particularly excruciating for a while now. You can blame this on the glut of advertisers trying just about every tactic imaginable to convince us that modern men have some sort of masculinity deficit disorder […] Read more

I play video games, I don't develop them. But thanks to Ubisoft and the ongoing Assassin's Creed: Unity controversy, I learned something about the process of developing playable video game characters last week. Wait, I take that back I didn't exactly learn something new, as much as I had one of my long-held suspicions finally confirmed. […] Read more

Manly Ads 2013

2013 was a strange and interesting year when it came to advertising. There were, as there have been in years past, plenty of ads encouraging men to act manly typically in the most regressive of ways. While some of these ads were humorous and full of irony, others were aggressive, bullying and in some cases […] Read more

1800 Tequila can kiss my ass. Actually, Proximo Spirits (the makers of 1800) and the folks who make their ads; The VIA Agency are the ones who should be kissing all our asses. Have you seen their latest ad? Stylized bullying, that's all it is Proximo and VIA started down this path a couple of […] Read more

Dumb Men, Hotter Women

Dear readers, Do you realize that the world is currently facing one of the biggest crises in the history of ummm well, history?  I didn't either until I stumbled upon this: Thanks to the mystery speaker, who we know is smarter than us because of his gray hair and British-esqe accent, one of modern history's […] Read more

Last week, in Part 1, I focused on the game Batman: Arkham City as an example of video games presenting low expectations for male behavior. I have more examples of this practice to share, so lets get to it! I'll start with Binary Domain, a distopian future game with killer robots. Early on, I was […] Read more

Imagine this scenario; you go to the store and pick up the newly released, gritty superhero game that you've been dying to play. You get home, rip open the packaging, turn on your gaming system and throw the disk in. Grabbing your controller, you sit in your well-worn gaming seat (that spot on the couch […] Read more

Announcing: How Manly!

It’s with great pleasure that I announce the launch of my blog: How Manly! The goal of How Manly is to shine a critical light on masculinity in the media and other parts of our culture, but mostly in the media (video games, TV, movies, advertising, etc). As the creator of How Manly, I’ll be […] Read more

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