Bud Light Super Bowl Ad Offends Book Clubs, Literary Bloggers, and Readers

By Jason Boog 

Nobody ever expects high-culture Super Bowl ads, but a Bud Light advertisement irked some literary football fans.

Bud Light released the beer ad embedded below, mocking book clubs, male readers, female readers, and book reading in general. The ad shows a couple fun-loving beer drinkers crashing a book club, playing with all sorts of stereotypes about American readers. As this Twitter search shows, America’s reaction was mixed.

Literary blogger Edward Champion has led the online backlash against the ad. He described the message: “Let women have their ‘little’ book clubs, which can be easily interrupted on a masculine whim and which women will never dare object to. They will set everything aside to give you head or to serve you beer. And, by the way, if you’re a man, you don’t even need to read to get ahead in the world. (Indeed, one of the commercial’s curious philosophical positions is that one cannot both enjoy beer–at least the stuff better than the undrinkable swill that is being sold in this commercial–and books.”

What do you think? Leave your thoughts in the comments, and we’ll round up the responses later today. UPDATE: Jezebel rounds up other trouble-making ads.