Field Theory by Hadyn Green

Are you a man who wants moments of manhood?

The 132 page blurb channels a mix of the Mad Men TV series and up-market mens' magazine FHM, featuring black and white shots of Moa's all-male board and management striking macho poses in sharply cut suits, while attractive women in black skirts, white blouses and ties fondle cigars and bottles of Moa.

"It is somewhat Mad Men," he said, appealing to "men who want moments of manhood*."

You can barely tell it's written in shit.

I don't mean the financial stuff. As someone who can barely balance his bank account, I am the last person to criticise a company about shares and stocks and what-have-you. Instead I mean the disgusting way that Moa conflates manhood with the ownership of women. See the image above to get a vague idea of what I mean.

The prospectus starts: "Your guide to owning a brewery and other tips for modern manhood". Modern manhood ironically means some sort of Mad Men fantasy from the 1960s. The tips in the prospectus are along the lines of 1000 rules for my unborn son, but much crasser and surrounded by men who are posing with what they believe is "swagger".

From the marketing section:

Moa needs to offer both rational and emotional reasons to make Moa the super-premium beer of choice… The personality of the brand offers the emotional reasons. For Moa this should be a sharp wit, without political correctness and an eye for those activities and styles that make up the lives of our aspiring drinkers – those in the super-premium end of modern manhood.

And just if you didn't understand what they meant by "without political correctness" they follow up by explaining that their marketing team is "experienced in getting attention in the marketplace with minimum spend and have utilised online media very effectively". Yes, they will say controversial stuff and you silly people will get riled up. For a prospectus built on an idea of modern men, and a Mad Men theme, it does seem to enjoy pushing the idea that creativity is nothing when you can just piss people off.

As a side note: Tip number six tell you to "Close your social media accounts. Open books are easy to read and unlocked homes are easy to steal from".

In what seems like an odd step, halfway through, directly before the human ashtray photo, the marketing gurus have included an advertisement for a $197,000 Aston Martin. The ad is the intro to the section on the directors.

CEO Geoff Ross is pictured holding a magazine. On the front is Peter Sellers, on the back a woman pushing a pram. Geoff has a slight smile on his face like he overheard you tell a dirty joke and wanted to tell you one of his own. Scanning his profile you discover that he is a man's man who killed animals as a child. He is also a terrible Christmas gift giver: "Ecoya for the ladies, Moa for the gents".

Josh Scott is the founder. He learned about brewing and winemaking so that he could sell alcohol to his classmates to improve their dating skills. It's hard not to appreciate the casual way his biography implies not only his early criminal activity but also the way that drinking makes you better at scoring. I'm not going to infer that they mean you should get your intended partner drunk.

The photos aren't bad. The guys look good in suits. But the overwhelming air of arrogance and simple misogyny is hard to shake. I understand the market that the prospectus is aimed at. They want to capture the type of person who drives Aston Martins and wears bespoke suits. I suppose that can't be a woman though. Because women don't have money right?

It's a slightly different way of looking at an IPO than, say, the Boston Beer Company (aka Samuel Adams).

“It’s good for a company if its shares are in the hands of the people who really believe in it — and for us that means the people who really love Sam Adams beer…

“I wanted to take care of my Sam Adams drinkers. They were the people who were really important to me and who were going to continue to be.”

So [Jim Koch, founder of the Boston Beer Company] improvised, hanging fliers on six-packs of beer that very carefully informed customers that they might be able to buy $500 worth of shares in an eventual public offering. “We were limited to what you could manage to say on a six-pack, and also by what the lawyers would let us say,” he recalls.

Moa are pushing for the super-premium market. They want to push Heineken and Steinlager off the top of the pile. So they want to bring over those drinkers. This is why they are pushing for the douchebag market. They are the people who, as I mentioned, drive Aston Martins because, oh, you drive a BMW, I'm sure that's a good car too, hey wanna hear a dirty joke, it's a little un-PC though. As a craft beer drinker I would never want to be this guy.

For all of the sales information that fills the latter half of the prospectus, none deals with the possible ramifications of pissing off female drinkers. There is nothing in here that makes women think that Moa wants them to drink their beer. If I was a woman reading this I would assume that Moa can do without my money.

The weird thing is Moa beer is still good, taste-wise. It confuses me why they would bother doing this. Why piss off a pretty liberal group of drinkers? Perhaps Moa should have read Tip number 8, included seemingly without irony: "The best advice comes from people who you are not paying to give you advice".

 

*Moments of Manhood is now an excellent twitter meme.

Don't think for a second that you can have an article like this and that will not say something about it.

…the All Blacks' shorts and jersey sleeves could be carrying the AIG logo as early as their tour to the United Kingdom, which starts with a test against Scotland in Edinburgh on November 11.

At time of writing the Herald's digipoll on the subject have 71% of people voting that they would be fine with another sponsor's logo on the All Black Uni. I voted that it would be "unsightly". Yes the jersey has had sponsors on it before (beyond the manufacturer's brand): Steinlager, New Zealand beer. Say what you will about the taste, it's a New Zealand brand. Would we have been happy with a VB logo?

AIG is an American insurance company. If anything says "we have decided to suck corporate-dick", this is it.

Currently we have the most logo-less jersey in professional rugby. It is not a "sign of the professional era" that teams have to be covered in garbage advertising. The NFL fights hard to keep its jerseys clean and they make a shit-tonne of money from sponsors (yes, yes bigger market etc etc).

The fact is we could continue to have the best – the fucking BEST – jersey in professional rugby or we could have something that looks like this. Think how ugly the South African jerseys look. Or this trash. Or worse.

Black is cool. We look cool wearing a simple black jersey. Fonzie never wore an insurance company's name on his jacket. C'mon New Zealand Rugby Union, be cool.

Cheers to Rich at sportreview.net.nz for the awesome concept art!

AUSTIN, Texas - August 23rd, 2012 - There comes a point in every man's life when he has to say, "Enough is enough."

These are your words. The words of a man who has been hounded and persecuted. Dogged by accusations of cheating simply because he was able to beat people who were cheating without doing so himself. A man who is "finished with this nonsense".

And if you are finished, and facing losing all your titles and being banned for life, the best thing to do is to tell people you are giving up. That the odds were always against you and you could never win. Call it a "witch hunt" and a "charade" started "out of spite", then when you stop fighting you can still say you did it for pure intentions. You can say you didn't lose, you just gave up the fight.

Live Strong; Give Up. That's the spirit.

"The toughest event in the world where the strongest man wins." That's what you said. I think you meant the event where everyone said you cheated. And to be fair it's not like cheats haven't won it in the past. In fact between 1996 and 2010 only two winners weren't cheats.

But you're not giving up really, you're refocusing.

"We have a lot of work to do and I'm looking forward to an end to this pointless distraction." You will no longer lay awake at night with that itch. That awful nagging feeling that people don't believe you. That no amount of yellow bracelets and fundraising will shake the idea that you weren't the all-American hero. That sinking feeling in your gut that comes in the middle of the night and interrupts your sleep. You are a cheat and the only argument that you aren't has passed you by.

Well this is interesting. Valerie Adams is promoted to the gold medal position after Nadzeya Ostapchuk tests positive for a banned steroid. Cue people lining up to say "I knew she was cheating! I mean just look at her!"

Yes look at her. Look at all of them. All the shot putters, male and female. Then look at the other athletes. Look at the fucking swimmers for Christ's sake. There is no athlete at the games who looks like a normal person*. They are all freaky mutants and, in part, that's why they are there.

Tell me again how you have the ability to eyeball someone and know they are using performance enhancers.

Of course you don't and nobody does, except may be a long-serving doping official who has seen their share of overly muscled people and fake penises (potentially NSFW). What you actually saw was a woman who looked unlike your usual expectation of femininity and you conjured up images of East German athletes from the 1980s.

There is a shitstorm in that direction of thinking.

Steroid use can make women look more masculine. Metenolone, the drug that Ostapchuk tested positive for, has a weak androgenic effect. According to the Association Against Steroid Abuse (whose website sure does give a lot of information about how to use steroids): "The largest concern for most women and anabolic steroid use is virilization; however, with responsible use this is non-existent in almost all females."

Here's a shot of Ostapchuk in 2007, at the Olympics in 2008, and here she is in 2012. I'm not sure she look more muscular or masculine. Just older.

The Steroid Abuse site also mentions "Most will find Primobolan to be best served in a cutting cycle; while it will not promote muscle tissue growth to any great degree it is a fantastic steroid for the use of preserving existing muscle tissue." So you can keep being as good as you are for longer.

Ostapchuk threw 21.36m ahead of Adams' 20.70m. If anything was going to make you suspicious it would be a throw 60cm further than the person who has been beating her consistently. With Ostapchuk removed, 50cm separates first from third place).

Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen was also under suspicion when she swam the final length of her 400m medley faster than Ryan Lochte. The suspicion was raised not so much because she was faster than a man, but because the time was a statistical outlier. (By the way there is no evidence against Ye beyond this and I am not suggesting that she cheated in any way). It's a bit like a bank robber waiting before spending his loot, so they don't tip off the police.

If you are consistently good, then no one notices, but if you suddenly pull a giant performance out of your overly-muscled backside, then people get suspicious.

People may have been suspicious of Usain Bolt’s incredible performances at first, but now that he has won the 100 and 200 meter sprints for two Olympic Games in a row (not to mention his incredible performance as an anchor in the 4 x 100 meter relay) and his times have been consistently phenomenal, we can easily form internal attributions for Bolt’s superior running skills rather than suspecting that he is secretly doping….

However, this lies in stark contrast to the case of Ye Shiwen, the Chinese swimmer who was slammed with drug abuse accusations after her record-breaking 400M Individual Medley win. The main causes for suspicion were her unprecedented acceleration during the final 50 meters of her 400M race and the fact that she beat her own personal best time by a fairly large margin. In fact, most Olympic feats that cause suspicion are similarly unprecedented or far superior to that athlete’s previous performance, suggesting a low level of consistency for that particular athlete.

Of course it may also be that Usain Bolt is Usain fucking Bolt and makes up 90% of all Olympics coverage and is a worldwide sports star. Ye Shiwen is far from a household name.

Of course none of this is why she was tested. Ostapchuk was tested because she won gold. She was tested the day before because she was one of the group leaders. That's how drug testing works.

So if you knew Ostapchuk was cheating, you really didn't. You perhaps suspected, perhaps you had sour grapes, but no one knew. Until now.

Adams has to wait for the formalities and the appeals and so on before she gets that pretty gold medal. Congratulations to her. Her 20.70m throw was 20cm further than the gold winner four years ago.

Finally, I must only know wonderful people because, while I have seen numerous angry rants about sexist comments directed at Ostapchuk and her appearance, I have not seen any of the comments themselves. These incredibly unfunny "jokes" are then defended with the "steroids make you look like a dude" line of reasoning. Of course this is just the blanket excuse they have pulled out because they wanted to make the joke before but felt a bit ashamed about doing so. They should still be ashamed.

 

*I will entertain arguments about team athletes, (football, hockey etc) and then say they aren't real Olympic sports and we can have that argument.

Fuck you Olympics for making me cry.

Fuck all of the athletes who cried at winning and those who cried with their families. Fuck the athletes that just couldn’t contain the pure emotion that comes from the climax of years of training all to reach that gold medal.

Fuck the athletes who embraced their competitors with pure joy at having been bested by the smallest increments of time or distance but knowing that being the second best of 7 billion humans still makes them a superhero.

Fuck the smiling happy faces and fuck the uncontrollable laughter that comes with realisation. Fuck the primal screams and fist pounding and air punching and hands forming hearts and jersey ripping. No hakas.

Fuck the celebration.

A big part of the reason for the emotion was the super beautiful slow-mo cameras that captured the action as pretty as any Nike ad. For all the complaints about the coverage (and I was one of many complaining from time to time) that stuff we did see was amazing.

And, naturally, all of the worry that things would go badly never eventuated. Even the empty seats were quickly filled.

Well done London, it was a bloody nice ride.