Heineken's Perfect Woman by Johanna

Wow this is weird. I totally forgot about the whole thing but I ended up starting my anthro paper and writing about the trigger I forgot I posted. This is a very rough beginning, don't judge. I've got a lot of work to do.

Heineken’s ad depicting a robot-woman with a keg in her stomach has been dubbed “the most sexist beer commercial ever” by Bob Garfield, writing a column for AdReview. According to Garfield, the ad’s creator, “Berlin Cameron United has essentially animated the Perfect Woman joke.”[1] This opinion generated quite a few antagonistic comments in addition to those in agreement. I would argue that the hostility with which people have responded to this deconstruction of the ad suggests that the ad’s symbolic language supports our culture’s mythological mediation of an underlying tension: woman as object with which man can do whatever he wants vs. the reality that woman is a fellow-human. The former is a myth that is necessary to uphold in order for patriarchal societies to survive. Levi-Strauss demonstrated a similar mediation through mythology in his analysis of the Oedipus myth cycles. The tension that needed to be mediated in this case was the apparent reality that women are needed for regeneration, which conflicted with the societal idea that women are expendable. From this tension arose the myth of autochthony, wherein men, like the Thebans born from dragon’s teeth, can create themselves without help from women. In fact, in this creation myth and many others, men are created by the destruction of a feminine dragon-like monster.
Garfield finds the ad’s ultimate betrayal of women in what he sees as the replacement of the woman’s uterus with a keg of beer. Several people argued against this claim, noting that if the keg replaces the uterus it should be located lower on the body. The keg actually takes up all the space on the fembot’s body between the breasts and pelvis. It seems that the ad is suggesting a use man could find in this space between useful sex parts that he has previously found useless. The area of the stomach and rib cage is useful to a live woman as a place to digest food and houses other organs important for life, but not to anyone outside of her. Heineken has created a woman with no wasted space. The robot woman needs no space for food and other organs that aren’t useful for sex. The uterus analogy seems to be accurate in the sense that the place where a woman would normally nurture a baby, the robot woman stores a beer keg. She produces beer for the man instead of children. This brings to mind the tension between woman’s procreative power and the need for autochthony in a patriarchal society.
The ad suggests a segmentation of woman into various body parts and shows how each part can prove useful to man. The first obvious example of this is the cut to the torso, which is shown from breast level to pelvis, cutting off the hands. From the space between the breasts and pelvis emerges a keg of Heineken. Then the robot reaches her arms out and two other robotic arms emerge just below them. All four arms prove useful as the close-ups of the process of tapping the keg show. The robot woman’s body is further segmented as one of her “human” arms detaches and a metal robotic looking extension allows it to reach a far away glass. The shots here show the arm close-up, the camera cutting off the rest of the body, and then cutting the forearm from the upper arm.
The ad symbolically provides the solution to the conflict between the reality of woman as person with power and the need to treat woman as object in our society. Heineken’s new and fantastic technology creates a woman that can be cut into various useful parts; moreover, Heineken has replaced the part of the body where a woman holds procreative power and produces dangerous menstrual flows with a keg of beer, rendering her powerless except in her ability to serve the man beer and look beautiful, and replacing all bodily functions and fluids with beer. This new woman of the future serves perfectly the mythology of a patriarchal society. Technology, or culture, has conquered the dangerous female power in the same way Marduk conquered Tiamat and Zeus conquered Gaia. The ad ends with the words of the electronic music connecting the brand name to the god who has conquered: “Innovation. Heineken.”
[1] http://adage.com/garfield/post?article_id=120078