News

I couldn't help but wonder: Would anyone promote Lady Gillette razors at the premiere of the Transformers movie?

The release of the Sex and the City movie tomorrow has ushered in a whirlwind of hype, product placement and the clatter of manicured hands preordering tickets en masse.

But the movie has also been adopted as a marketing vehicle for male-oriented products meant to appeal to men who are too macho to get excited about seeing Carrie and the girls again.

This week, Moosehead Breweries released a survey of 477 men that announced: "Men prefer beer over Sex ... and the City."

"Subjected to messages of stilettos, couture and feminine empowerment, Canadian men can take charge and get back in touch with their manliness," said a release from the beer company, which noted that only 4 per cent of its male survey respondents planned to attend the film on the release date.

Instead of confronting pesky feminine empowerment, Moosehead says, 36 per cent of men "will be drinking beer or watching the hockey playoffs, while 28 per cent plan to walk the dog and 12 per cent will reaffirm their masculinity by pumping some iron at the gym."

On Friday, Canadian Club Whisky will host a spoof protest outside Toronto showings of Sex and the City to "protest the rise of the pink, girlie cocktail and the demise of the masculine cocktail."

The planned protests will be staffed by young men hired by a promotional company, who will stand outside movie theatres throughout the day holding signs saying "No Pink Drinks" and chanting such witticisms as "Hey hey, ho ho, girly drinks have got to go."

"It's kind of reminding people that there are other options," said Ginny Homewood, brand manager for Canadian Club Whisky. "You can have a sophisticated cocktail that doesn't look like a martini."

But isn't promoting whisky in front of a crowd of avowed cosmopolitan drinkers a bad idea? Would you go to a Big Lebowski festival and make fun of people who drink white Russians?

The campaigns will probably be ignored by those who attend the movie this week, an audience that is expected to be almost exclusively women.

"A lot of guys have no intention of seeing the movie," says Joel Levesque, of Moosehead Breweries. "Not what you'd call guy's guys - guys who play in industrial hockey leagues and the guys who are sitting down with their buddies shooting pool and watching the playoffs."

Dawn Johnston, an instructor of film and communications studies at the University of Calgary, said Sex and the City always confounded men because the show spoke a uniquely female language.

"It was almost unapologetic about not targeting men," she said. "So in that sense, I think men have felt left out of that television phenomenon since its beginning."

Even with Manolo Blahnik-weary men avoiding theatres, the movie is likely to be a massive summer blockbuster, a rare feat for a chick flick.

"This is something that's going to be a success just by being about and for women," Dr. Johnston said. "And that's not what summer blockbusters are meant to be about. They're meant to be big, action-flashy, huge-budget films that are trying to pull in young men. This movie almost doesn't care whether men show up at the theatre, and I think that is so out of character for movie marketing."

But she said advertising campaigns that play on stereotypical male and female reactions to the HBO series could be effective. "I think it's kind of clever to cash in on how exclusively female this is positioned as," she said. "I don't think it's going to alienate women, I don't think women will care."

That's because every woman she knows already has plans to attend the film, whisky protests or Moosehead-guzzling boyfriends be damned.

But will men ever watch the film version of Sex and the City, perhaps while drinking a masculine cocktail of their own?

"Absolutely," Dr. Johnston said. "In the safety of their own homes."