Hetero Jan 10, 2018 at 3:34 pm

Comments

1
I don't get it Dan. It's a business designed to separate people from money and introduce a new gift idea. Seems fun. Particularly for Dads. People have no idea what to get, and most of the crate is consumables you don't have to hold onto.
2
@1 agreed, and I bet some strong women would get a kick out of it, too! Just seems like a fun gift. It's not like they said, "Fags/girls/queers Not Allowed."
3
Jesus... one of those crates comes with a motherfucking axe
4
My brother was stationed on a repair ship in Da Nang during the Viet Nam war and regularly sent gifts home in wooden boxes, nailed or screwed shut - we had a blast getting them open! Sounds fun to me.
5
This sounds awesome and storage too!
6
This would be far better as a Mudede article about how capitalism creates identity anxieties which it then ameliorates by selling you useless junk.
7
Why does the product need to be called Man Crates, though? What's wrong with just calling them Crates? There is a "women need not apply" vibe.
9
DUDE WINE. It's wine... for DUDES!
10
At a quick glance, I thought the first one was an "erotic" crate. Which seemed to send a bit of a mixed message, though I was probably more intrigued by it than when I realized it was "exotic" meats.
12
el que hambre tiene, en pan piensa.
13
How is this different than Goddess Provisions, Beauty Box or any of the approximately one zillion gift boxes marketed to women?

Remember the ridiculous Yoplait commercials that marketed exclusively to women? After they successfully pigeonholed yogurt as a female food, it wasn't long before people were like "Why don't eat men eat yogurt? Stupid sexist men."

And then a few companies starting marketing yogurt to men and people were like "Why do men need yogurt marketed to them? Stupid sexist men." Sheesh.

Newsflash: Gender is part of identity and marketing exploits identity to make people buy shit.
14
@7: Because androgynous is boring.

15
Before I zoomed in the phone picture I was totally hoping for the puppy training version of a crate. Boooorrrinngggg.
16
I am going to use my current axe to open my Cock Crate so I can get my calloused and thick veined hands on my new axe.

@13: Everyone's identities have fragilities, it is just that we are only allowed to mock certain identities. Someone must be mocked, and the rules are what they are.

17
@7: “Why does the product need to be called Man Crates, though? What's wrong with just calling them Crates? There is a "women need not apply" vibe.”

See, you actually read the article and aren’t being pissy and dismissive. The rest seem to be missing the point.
18
@13: Newsflash, The success of hard gender stereotypes commercially is not self-justifying.

Especially all this kneejerking from the already fragile.
19
@7 & 18: On a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the worst - how much does this type of marketing bother/annoy/irratate you?
20
@19

On a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the worst - how much does the type of comments you are asking about bother/annoy/irratate [sic] you?
21
I would gladly settle for a pink cardboard box from the lingerie store.
22
@20. On a scale of 1-10 where 10 is the worst, how much of a micromanaging cunt do you look like when you take someone else’s humor and try and turn it back on them with a super weak reconstruction of their joke written in passive aggressive snark?
23
@ 20
That person often comes across as a serial irratater.
24
and muffy supports them. micromanaging cunt is much preferred.
25
@1 That was my response too until I read the descriptions below the items. Unless they are being heavily ironic, Dan is 100% correct in his characterization. No better way to separate the men from the boys than to see how they handle the heat of grilling a TBone? It has to be ironic right?
26
@19 is a serious question worthy of a serious response.
27
@19 might be a question ask seriously, but it's hardly a serious question.
28
@27: No, it is a question meant to quantify the intensity of a point of view.
29
@ 28
My apologies, I thought it’s nothing but yet another pathetic attempt to save face.
30
@29: No reason for avatars to save face, but your apology is accepted.
31
Great headline, Dan. Great statement, too.
32
OMG, I so want a man crate filled with exotic meats. Hard, mouth-watering meats in their tough, rigid containers.
33
Am I the only person to notice that the the Moscow Mule crate comes with Cock&Bull ginger beer?
34
Ms Rand/M? Cinner - What article? Mr Savage's paragraph ticked off the company for excessively hetero-flavoured advertising (a bit overdone, but more gay than his usual stuff). The link just led to the company site. Was there an article?

A quick breeze down the page showed that there's at least one male-specific crate with grooming products. I thought the page on the silly side, but not worse than deserving the old FTWL. It really seemed almost camp about the whole thing, which is an aspect that people who see "no girls" before they see "no gays" might likely miss.

My first thought about fragile masculinity was in a different direction, though. Ms Rand might think this a bit frivolous, but I rather wonder if sending such a box ("crate" sounds so Crate and Barrel) to the sort of male who does such things as use "zir" as a default pronoun for others (I've no objection to gender-neutral pronouns, but dislike arrangements that use one word as both objective and possessive; "zem/zes" would be infinitely preferable) would turn him into a total dudebro because his masculinity might be too fragile to withstand the effect. (This feels like a very Strindberg idea, and I generally greatly favour Ibsen, but Strindberg did pull off a couple of neat tricks.)

That reminds me; about a couple of years ago, "gaybros" seemed to be on the path to becoming an actual thing. They weren't anti-women, just the sort of men whose natural presentation would get them almost universally taken for straight, and who felt a bit at a loss in general gay culture; think the flip side of metrosexuals, only a bit less annoying. Mr Savage kinda-sorta on occasion used to acknowledge that such people existed, though not by that name. Now they seem to have vanished, which is rather too bad.
35
must suck having all that money that can't buy back your rapidly waning name recognition
36
Dan. The crates come with their own gay jokes. Yours are just redundant at this point.
37
@34, yeah. To be gay now you must be flaming and a semi cross dresser. If you're not you're a piece of shit.
39
What @23 said.

@37 - Actually Cato, in your case, you're just a piece of shit regardless.
40
It's nice Dan was able to get this off his chest.
41
"Gift Crates" have been a thing for like a decade now, they used to be sold to video gamers. Nice try tho, Dan!
42
@18 given how readily you get all bent out of shape at my comments to the point where you get upset when i'm agreeing with you, i can only conclude that you are the most-fragile mother fucker around.
43
Real Men must pay extra for shipping, and use Real Men's tools to open gifts!
44
@34 can someone who's basically invisible/indistinguishable from the rest of us unwashed masses really ever disappear?
45
Mr Landia - Well, they had a web site with discussion boards and regular meetings, at least on the East Coast. People wrote articles about them. One didn't have to think they would be the saviours of gaymanity to be pleased that they had social options other than being a token in a room of Wainthropps.

What I fear is that many of them may have fallen into the clutches of the Treacherous Right, that wing that likes to be super-nice personally to people like poor Dave Rubin while doing nothing to purge themselves of their anti-gay element but pretending that that element is irrelevant. My image for this last year was that of Lucy pretending she would really let Charlie Brown kick the football this time.
46
@39: I suggest anger-management.
47
@39 - And there you go proving it.
48
Er @46. Long day.
49
Oh no, item #1 is literally a joke from It's Always Sunny.

@34:
I've no objection to gender-neutral pronouns, but dislike arrangements that use one word as both objective and possessive

Her? (Thank you for the best set-up I've ever had to use that Arrested Development joke.)

That said, the entire venture also strikes me as camp-adjacent gender absurdism a la The Man Show, but I'm not sure if that's because I find social gender inherently absurd or because the representation is particularly exaggerated. It's Poe's law, for gender.

The company's aim appears to be exploiting masculine fragility to resell third-party products at an absurd markup - the crate gimmick and 'manliness' of opening it with a small pry-bar is the entire point.

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