Canadian Club: A View of Masculinity

These ads for Canadian Club are undoubtedly attractive and catchy. The color of the photographs are warm and saturated, the typography is aesthetically pleasing and attention-grabbing, and the message is strong and demanding. What’s interesting about this ad is that the product is at the very end of the message; in other words, it seems to be more of an afterthought than anything else and it is the trail of thought the viewer must follow that gives strength to the product itself. The success of the ad is contingent upon the associations that the viewer gleans from the ad—associations that are superimposed upon the product later: sharp, masculine, smart, and sexy.

In this ad campaign, Canadian Club is relying very explicitly on a narrow and categorical definition of masculinity, a view of heteronormative masculinity that involves sex, fishing, shaving, and cocktails—all of which—for a real man, according to these ads—are effortless. What’s not included in this definition of masculinity? Metrosexuality. Pilates. Moisturizing. Pink cocktails. And certainly not abstinence, says Canadian Club. These are modern buzzwords that Canadian Club relegates to femininity, suggesting that their whisky drink is both classic and masculine—because YOUR dad (also classic and masculine) drank it. That’s “damn right”—your dad—who slept with other girls before your mom, who got two numbers in one night, who went fishing instead of doing pilates—drank whisky cocktails, and they tasted good. So if you want to be as manly as your dad—the manliest hero of them all—do the manly thing and drink some Canadian club.

The aesthetics of these ads command a dreamy nostalgia of an imagined past—because the audience they are addressing must be young—given that the people in these 70s-era photos include “your dad.” This assumes that the viewer has not lived in the 60s or 70s but have parents that did. And despite this constructed fantasy of masculinity and the contrived photos that come along with it, nostalgia is (and may always be) trendy. Nowadays, people fetishize past decades, associating particular aesthetics, bands, fashions, and attitudes with the 20s, the 50s, the 70s, the 90s—you name it. This yearning for a past we never experienced is comforting in the face of accelerating technology, I’m sure—and it’s why we revel in Instagram and Hipstamatic, mobile apps that create sepia-toned and faded photos reminiscent of Polaroids; it’s why we are advocates of vinyl and find vintage fashions novel. And Canadian Club smartly capitalizes on this nostalgia.

Pilates? Metrosexuals? Moisturizing? Pink cocktails? Those are sissy creations of the 21^st century. You really want to be a man? The kind of man who existed in the 70s? (Yeah, those were real men). Well then, you better drink up—because Canadian Club is the way to manhood.