Hopping Mad : In Canada, Controversy Brews as Ontario Bans Sexist Beer Ads

TORONTO —  Time was, a man in the province of Ontario could flick on the tube, slouch back on the sofa, put away the better part of a six-pack and wait for one of those near-naughty Canadian beer commercials--the ones with the pretty girls in the skimpy costumes. He could leer. He could hoot. Shiny and addled with drink, he could drool.

No more. Now, Ontario has a socialist government of a moralizing bent, and the louche male chauvinists of the province are having to clean up their act. Big Sister is watching.

In March, the Ontario government announced its intention of banning sexist advertising--starting with beer commercials, which are notorious north and south of the 49th parallel for their raunchy insistence on alcohol’s place in the realm of male happiness.

Implementing such a ban has turned out to be a bit of a chore, though. No sooner did the provincial cabinet minister with the portfolio finish a news conference on the ban than he appeared in a newspaper beefcake photo, stirring no little doubt about the depth of his commitment to the war on sexism. And not long after that, a top ministerial aide charged with drafting the new regulations was found to be a convicted wife beater.

In spite of these setbacks, the campaign appears to be moving ahead.

“Women are afraid of walking in the streets,” says Debbie Wise Harris, Ontario representative of MediaWatch, a group that monitors women’s portrayal in the media and that has lately achieved unprecedented access to the government’s ear.

“Women are being beaten in their homes,” she adds. “If this isn’t enough to make people say we’ve got to change our attitudes toward women, then there’s something wrong with our values.”

Not since the great Maidenform set-to of the 1970s--when American women rose up against a line of ads featuring models in bras next to fully dressed men--have feminists made such a successful assault on product promotion that objectifies the female form.

But while American feminists took their protest straight to Maidenform Inc. and persuaded the lingerie maker to delete the men from the ads, their Canadian sisters have decided to go the government regulation route.

But how can a government define what is sexist? One viewer’s sexist outrage, after all, is another’s witty thigh-slapper. To many, the Ontario initiative gives off the poor odor of censorship.

“There’s no such thing as an inappropriate idea or image” in American advertising, says John Kamp, vice president of the American Assn. of Advertising Agencies. Across Lake Ontario, the First Amendment protects everything from triple-X movies to the public burning of Old Glory--to say nothing of brewers and their wily calculation that warm flesh sells cold beer.

American brewers are coming under increasing pressure to de-sex their advertising, Kamp says, especially during college spring break, when breweries have traditionally sponsored beachfront beer tents in Florida and filled student newspapers with tosspot boy-chases-girl messages.

As the interest groups have stepped up their protests, the American breweries have struck some of the beer tents and lavished donations on addiction research foundations and other good causes just this side of abstinence.

But there is no question of their ever bending to a ban on advertising, sexist or otherwise.

“Any bill designed to protect some kind of orthodoxy would just be stricken down,” Kamp says. “There isn’t an appeals court in the United States that would allow (a ban on sexist commercials) to stand.”

Thus, Ontario’s beer ad clean-up drive shows not only the unusual muscle of Canadian feminists, it also highlights a fundamental difference between American and Canadian attitudes toward government authority: Unlike life-liberty-and-happiness-pursuing Americans, Canadians are generally tolerant of a little government overreaching when the public good is said to be at stake.

They applaud campaigns against drunk driving that permit highway patrol officers to set up roadblocks and flag down each passing car for inspection--hang probable cause requirements. And when the government of Quebec banned toy makers from advertising their wares during children’s TV shows, out of a conviction that the pitches preyed on unsophisticated minds, the courts upheld the prohibition.

“You have to understand the history of our country,” says Robert Reaume, vice president for marketing at the Assn. of Canadian Advertisers.

“There is a feeling that governments in Canada can intrude more into civil liberties than they can in the United States,” he explains. “Governments feel they have some ground to stand on, legally, morally and otherwise, to restrict. As an association, we’re always having to be out there, fighting for freedom of commercial speech.”

Canadian feminist groups have found beer and liquor ads troubling for years. In a notorious Johnny Walker campaign in 1989 on both sides of the border, a woman showed up on billboards and bus shelter hoardings clad in a bathing suit emblazoned with a telephone number and instructions to call for interesting serving suggestions. Consumers who took her up on it had their calls answered by a tape of a woman suggesting proportions for Scotch-based drinks in a throaty purr.

“It’s so reminiscent of phone sex,” says Wise Harris, whose group went after the Johnny Walker ad when it first appeared in Toronto.

No sooner had MediaWatch gotten the city to order the removal of the offending ad from public property than a new one appeared, this one for Miller beer, featuring a barmaid with some drafts on a tray. “It’s Milly time,” the slogan cheered. Milly, let it be said, was easy on the eyes.

“Of the two ads, I find that one more insidious,” says Wise Harris. “The copy sent out a very clear message that it wasn’t time for the beer--it was time for the woman. It taps into the whole mythology of women (working) in bars--that just because they’re serving beer, they’re serving themselves up as well.”

MediaWatch organized more phone-ins and a wave of letter writing. Last call for Milly, not long in coming, was a victory for the feminist group: The city of Toronto issued guidelines for what would be appropriate on public property, and the company that had been selling display space on bus shelters asked to meet with the feminists to hear their arguments.

But for Wise Harris, the worst was yet to come. The spring of 1990 brought a fresh onslaught of beer ads and the debut on television and subway posters of “The Rare Long-Haired Fox.”

The “fox” was, in fact, an imperious long-haired young woman with an arched back and an upturned bosom swathed in a halter top. She was part of Molson Breweries’ “Canadian Wildlife” advertising series, a spoof of the nature documentaries that every child growing up in Canada takes in with mother’s milk.

There was “The Slick-Backed Howling Wolf” (a predatory looking muscleman with a ducktail, a toothpick in his mouth and T-shirt sleeves rolled up to highlight bursting deltoids), “The Great Bellowing Moose” (an overweight loudmouth in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt) and “The Uncommon Black-Capped Loon” (a nerd in a black baseball cap). And, of course, “The Rare Long-Haired Fox.”

Keeping pace with the Molson effort was a Labatt Brewing Co. campaign worked around “La Goddess,” who held forth in “La Bar.” She was draped self-approvingly over the counter in a U-necked dress, tousling her hair and parting her lips. The narrator decided it would be all right to come on to La Goddess with the ancient barroom gallantry of buying her a beer, because “la beer is Labatt’s.”

Feminists went ballistic, but there was little they could do because the ads were on nationwide television, far beyond the brief of Toronto’s ban.

But then something happened that had nothing to do with women’s rights or feminist lobbying. In May, 1990, an adolescent Toronto boy went on a drinking spree with two friendly and thoughtless adults and died of acute alcohol poisoning.

Horrified provincial officials put together a special coroner’s inquest, with a jury empowered to issue non-binding recommendations. The jurors issued a call to ban beer and liquor advertising outright, in the name of protecting Ontario’s young from the popular pathologies of drink. Provinces don’t generally have the right to regulate advertising in Canada, but they do when it comes to beer, wine and liquor.

Then, just as the jury was coming out with its recommendations, Ontario voters went to the polls, threw out the existing centrist Liberal government (for non-alcohol-related offenses) and brought in the socialist New Democratic Party.

The New Democrats had never governed in Ontario before. In the many years they had sat on the opposition benches, they had promised that, should they ever take power, they would enact vast and all-encompassing social reforms.

The New Democrats now pledged, among other things, to take the alcohol ad recommendation most seriously. Cowed alcoholic beverage industry lobbyists began meeting with the new government--and so did the people from MediaWatch.

And somewhere along the way, the agenda changed. Social reform, it developed, could mean social control. Carnality in advertising moved to the foreground.

“We’re going to eliminate advertising that is sexist and inappropriate in the 1990s,” promised Ontario Consumer and Commercial Relations Minister Peter Kormos. He said he would “rely very heavily” on the advice of MediaWatch in writing the new regulations. (MediaWatch has said it would like to see a greater diversity of the sizes, ages and colors of the female models in advertising. Most beer ad models are lithe, young, white women.)

The next day, the Toronto Sun presented Kormos as its daily “Sunshine Boy,” a beefcake photograph meant to balance the tabloid’s pictures of pretty and nominally clad “Sunshine Girls.”

Kormos conceded a lapse in judgment in posing for the shot, in which he was fully clothed. Before local feathers had stopped ruffling, however, another newspaper broke the news that the aide he had deputed to the sexism-in-advertising struggle had been convicted of beating his common-law wife three years earlier.

Kormos refused to resign, so Ontario Premier Bob Rae fired him, replacing the Sunshiner with Marilyn Churley, a legislator who as city councilor had fought to get those Johnny Walker ads removed from city property.

There is little question that Churley will continue her predecessor’s fight against sexist advertising. Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno, who takes a civil libertarian stand on the beer ad controversy, calls the new minister “the mother of all Big Sisters.”

Which leaves advertising lobbyist Reaume worried. “Where does it all end?” he wonders. “There was a health minister in Quebec who floated the idea of banning the advertising of junk food.

“If you can ban tobacco, then alcohol, then why not junk food?” he asks. “Why not the cholesterol in eggs and butter? Why not cakes and sweets? If you take it to the extreme, why not mother’s milk, because it contains both fat and cholesterol?”

The way Reaume sees it, the Ontario government is coming down on the beer ads because the other reforms it swore to before taking power have turned out to be too expensive.

The New Democrats promised everything from welfare reforms to a nuclear plant moratorium. Analysts said fulfillment of the pledges would have cost Ontario $3.6 billion over the New Democrats’ first two years in office--and this at a time of deep recession and budget deficits all across Canada.

“I’m sure they were looking around for ideas for pro-social regulations that would at least look like they were keeping some of the promises they made, without costing them anything,” says Reaume. “This is an inexpensive way for them to strike a blow--to keep the social contract they made with Ontarians before the election.”

Molson, meanwhile, is unwilling to discuss any aspect of the “Long-Haired Fox” flap. It has even censored its own ad, after a fashion. It has kept the Canadian Wildlife theme alive but replaced “The Rare Long-Haired Fox” with “The Heavily Bundled Arctic Fox.” Gone from today’s ads are the halter top, the flowing brunette mop--and the happy liquid cosmology that binds sex to drink. The “Heavily Bundled Arctic Fox” is dressed in an immense parka with a hood that covers part of her hair. She even wears gloves.

It looks like a concession to the feminist pleasure police at first glance, but the copywriters couldn’t help tweaking their earnest Big Sisters.

Under the photograph, the legend reads: “Though it completely obscures a lithe and graceful form, this heavy winter covering is essential, as it gives the Arctic fox a better chance of surviving in an environment that is becoming increasingly hostile to all foxes.”