My man card was declined

I'm a drinker. Every once in a while I've been known to imbibe an adult beverage or 12. I thoroughly enjoy alcohol. I like all the different varieties, I like the feeling of satisfaction I get for being knowledgeable about different wines/beers/whiskeys, and I like the way booze makes me suave and sophisticated in the eyes of the fairer sex.

One of the interesting things about drinking, especially out in public, is that there are connotations about the drinks that you choose. If I was sitting at a sports bar sipping a Cosmo I'm pretty sure everyone in the joint would be making fun of me or at the very least drawing some conclusions about my sexuality. Likewise if you offered to buy a girl a drink at a bar and she asked for a boilermaker you would come to some quick conclusions about her, most notably that she's not a lame girly girl and that she probably has a drinking problem. It is pretty well established that there are "girl drinks" and "man drinks." Examples:

Girl Drinks: Cosmos. Flavored vodka. Champagne with a strawberry. Anything frozen. Smirnoff Ice. Any shot that sounds like a dessert.

Man Drinks: Scotch. Boilermakers. Bourbon. Everclear. Irish Whiskey. Malort. Canadian Whiskey. BEER. Any shot that is lit on fire.

Please note, I did not say light beer and I sure as shit didn't say Bud Light Lime, I said beer. This is why I am particularly enraged at the recent Miller Lite commercials. In these commercials you will see a bunch of fellas hanging out and one of them makes the horrible social faux pas of ordering a generic light beer. Then his friends belittle him for being less of a man since he didn't order a Miller Lite by saying it was the second unmanly thing he did. At this point the commercials show a guy on a scooter, a guy freaking out on a rock wall, or a guy crying while leaving his girlfriend thus proving that he was less of a man. In order to regain his manliness he will order a Miller Lite and then everyone has a good laugh. I'd hate to break it to these fellas but I have some bad news for you, YOU ARE ALL PUSSIES.

Drinking light beer is one of the least manly things you can do because light beer does everything it can to taste like nothing. Water has slightly more flavor than Miller Lite does. Let's look back at the list of girl drinks and man drinks, do you notice the common thread binding them all together? The girl drinks do everything they can to hide the taste of alcohol. Man drinks taste like booze, or in the case of Malort, jet fuel. If you are going to drink a beer drink an Arrogant Bastard from Stone; it has a bitchin' name, amazing flavor and I'm pretty sure it puts hair on your chest. No one is going to question your manliness when you have a 22oz bottle of something called Arrogant Bastard in front of you. (I'm hoping I can land a Stone endorsement deal from this blog.) Yet these so called "men" stand around looking like they just came out of a J Crew catalog sipping their Miller Lites. Those are not men. Men have facial hair. Men drink outdoors in the winter. Do you think that Teddy Roosevelt would cool down after boxing a bear with a refreshing light beer? NO. He drank pure grain alcohol after pouring it on his wounds to disinfect them.

I have found that these ads have influenced me in the polar opposite way than they were intended to. I want to do everything I can to not be like the Miller Lite sipping morons. So if they frown upon riding scooters I'm going out to get a scooter. I'll scream my head off on a roller coaster if it means I don't have to stand around being smug about my (barely) flavored beer substitute afterward. The ad that bothered me more than any of the others was when the guy is mocked for asking his friends to come to the bathroom with him, it hit particularly close to home. I often ask my friends to come to the bathroom with me when we are out at a bar. Not to gossip or fix our hair like women. No, we go to the bathroom as a group to drink single malt scotch out of our flasks and shoot dice because we are MEN, something a bunch of Miller Lite guzzling sycophants will never be.