I’ll never forget my first beer, I was sixteen. Now, every sixteen year old knows that there are two things you have to have to get your hands on a case of beer. You need a tall friend named Brian with a pubescent beard and a cheap fake I.D., and a liquor store with a lazy cashier. Luckily for my friends and me, we had both. With victory achieved, and our case of warm Natural Ice in hand, we retired to my friend Tadd’s basement where we planned to hang out, play video games and, thanks to Brian, drink in the orange light of the awful 70’s era wood paneling. As we sat, huddled around the TV, spoiling our innocence playing Vice City, Tadd cracked open a beer and handed it to me. I stared at it, unsure of what to make of its shiny round exterior. Inside the can was this mysterious liquid, it looked like urine, and smelled like it too. I looked up from the can to see Tadd looking at me with an expectant look on his face; so without a second thought I tilted up the can and took my first drink. It was awful, just awful, my previous estimation of it’s smell turned out to be all too true. The strangest thing about my first experience with beer is that I didn’t stop with one, but had four or five throughout the course of the night, and have been drinking it ever since.
My story isn’t unique. A person’s first beer is a kind of right of passage in America, this especially true for teenage males. There is a cultural expectation placed on teenagers by their peer group to drink, and to drink beer. In this case, beer serves as a symbol for masculinity. When we were drinking in high school, we weren’t drinking beer, we were drinking masculinity, because “men” drink beer. As teenagers, boys construct a view of what is masculine from any number of sources, popular culture, peer influence, or the action and tendencies of their father to name just a few. Fabio Parasecoli discusses societies conceptions of masculinity in an essay called “Feeding Hard Bodies: Food and Masculinities in Men’s Fitness Magazines.” Of the shifting nature of the perception of masculinity, he writes, “Masculinities are not fixed or defined once and for all; they do not represent embodiments of discrete states of being. They vary in time and place, in different historical, social and cultural environments”(188).
Cultural perceptions of masculinity are not always accurate. Beer is a perfect example of this. If one were to take a random survey consisting of an equal number of men and women, it is not at all unlikely that the number of people who claim to enjoy beer would be roughly the same. However, beer continues to have a predominantly masculine cultural conception. Take for example a phrase we’ve all heard, “girlie drink” which is generally used to describe any mixed drink which is not in its majority, beer or whiskey. Teacher, writer, and semiologist Roland Barthes, author of essay “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption” offers some help explaining these kinds of cultural labels. He writes, “Food [or drink] serves as a sign not only for themes, but also for situations; and this, all told, means for a way of life that is emphasized, much more than expressed, by it. To [drink] is a behavior that develops beyond its own ends, replacing, summing up, and signalizing other behaviors”(Barthes 33). I didn’t drink my first beer because I liked beer, I drank it because I wanted to be perceived as masculine. I was engaging in a behavior, not enjoying a beverage. From this perspective it can be seen that the consumption of beer, and its culturally gendered connotations have little to do with taste in actuality, but with an expected set of behaviors. The image of beer in the U.S. is one of incredible masculine stereotypes, from advertisements with giant, scantily clad women astride the the Rocky mountains, to millions of dollars in sponsorships of activities like Pro Football, and Nascar. When beer is marketed to women it is usually in the form of the beer/fruit hybrids that are growing in popularity. This is because beer, as it is traditionally brewed, is assumed by the culture to signify the masculine, and to market it otherwise would undermine its supposed gender significance.
I kept drinking that night at my friends house because it felt good, it made me feel like a grown-up, and it made me feel like a “man”. Mostly however, I drank because I felt like I should, like it was what I was expected to do, because I was a man. In my mind, men drank beer. So I drank, and even though I hated it, I kept drinking it, and i kept drinking it, and I drink it today. The most unbelievable thing is, I now love it. As I sit writing, next to my computer a cold bottle of Samuel Adams Octoberfest, a seasonal brew that is one of the highlights of my fall, sits slowly sweating onto the coaster that my wife makes me use. I’ve had a beer in every state I’ve ever been in, and I’ve sampled exotic beers from around the globe, from German Lagers that go down smooth, to Indian brown ales that will pucker you for hours. I never would have experienced any of them, if I hadn’t made myself learn to like beer. I don’t know that the cultural gender bias of beer is a good thing, it is certainly not an accurate thing, and it may be changing. Even if it does change, young adults will likely continue to force themselves to drink that strange yellow beverage called beer, and learn to love it, and that is not such a bad thing.
.jpg)
