I think it's gross, but most women don't.

For some reason, I've been paying a lot more to advertisements lately. Dan and I have a habit of making fun of them, particularly TV commercials, pointing out the messages they're not-so-subtly conveying - men are stupid/incompetent, women like shoes (and yogurt!), buying a Prius will make everything look like blooming gardens, it'll make you poop (and look like those women)! You know, stuff like that. Maybe it's because we're watching more actual broadcast TV now that we have cable and I'm noticing stuff. Maybe it's because I've never given much thought to marketing or advertising or branding and I'm really thinking about it these days because of my flower venture.

Last night I was watching commercial after commercial try to sell beer. But none of them try to sell beer to women. After a while, I tried to think of a TV commercial or print advertisement that marketed beer to women, and couldn't remember a single instance. Yet of my friends, I know that most of the women I know who drink like beer just as much as anything else, if not more. So what gives, beer companies? Why ignore a huge portion of potential market share? It seems to me that it's an example of a company shooting itself in the foot - I mean, instead of competing with all the other beer companies for men's money, why not try to sell your beer to women? It can't be a holdover from prohibition or a "women don't drink" mentality, because wine is pretty much marketed equally to men and women. The same for hard alcohol (what advertisments I've seen, anyway; it's rare to see the hard stuff advertised). Even the flavored malt beverages like Smirnoff Ice and Mike's Hard Lemonade are pushed at both sexes. What makes beer something that only men should want to buy?

Riddle me this, internet. Why don't beer companies want women to buy beer? Why are seemingly all ads for beer marketed toward men, with the scantily clad women and the cars and the men screaming at a walk-in refrigerator full of Heineken? Why don't the beer companies want me to be a beer drinker? I'm not a fan of beer, but that has nothing to do with advertisement and everything to do with having tried beer on multiple occasions and just not liking it.