Ad for "The New Harley-Davidson F-150 SuperCrew" in Sports Illustrated magazine. July 2-9, 2001(42-43)
Dan Denvir

Harley-Davidson and Ford introduced the first F150 corporate collaboration at the 1999 Sturgis Rally, a gigantic annual motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. The Harley-Davidson F150 SuperCrew is a Harley-themed truck. The SuperCrew was introduced at the 2000 rally. (Russ) Harley-Davidson's website provided telling customer demographics from 1997-2002. (www.harley-davidson.com) While the percentage of male owners has dropped slightly from 93% to 91%, the median age has risen from about 44 to 47 years and the median income from about $74,000 to $79,000. For both the age and income graphs, there is a yearly increase. The gender demographic has held steady since 1999. Racial demographics are not provided.

The Harley-Davidson/Ford advertisement positions a tough looking but calm man, seated between his Harley motorcycle and Ford truck. The man is comfortably slouching and has a look of well-earned contentment on his face. He is white, early middle-aged and has a heavy but muscular build. Below his feet the ad reads "Love Triangle." Emblazoned on the bottom right is the Ford motto, "Built Tough." The ad is two pages wide. This paper will argue that this ad, along with many car ads, displays masculinity as something achieved homosocially, an identity secure only when women are safely out of sight. I will also argue that this ad represents a specifically bourgeois masculinity.

The American home is a highly gendered landscape. The site of the advertisement is outside the home, in front of the garage. The garage is represented as a sort of male retreat within a domesticity thoroughly pervaded by a dangerous and potentially emasculating femininity. The home as a whole, as part of a larger domestic/public dichotomy operative in the modern West, is gendered female while the public is gendered male. A few spaces within the domestic, however, are annexed by the male and gendered masculine: studies, recreation rooms and garages. "Wives are seldom seen in advertisements for men's status goods" (Barthel: 148) and ads do not generally picture men in the kitchen.

The sexuality of this advertisement is obvious, yet its directness instantly veils the magnitude of what gender/sex/sexuality norms are being indexed. Slouching, hands on stomach and satisfied with his Love Triangle, his legs are apart and a quite discernable bulge protrudes from his crotch. The juxtaposition of domesticity and transportation is telling. Domesticity evokes boring ritual, stasis, and stability under what is often represented as the supervision of a "nagging" wife/ "old lady". Conversely, trucks and motorcycles express a masculine, anti-domestic freedom (the most so of any personal transportation). In "car advertisements...the keywords are masculine: power, precision, performance." (Barthel: 145) The domestic is represented as a female place where a man is made to behave himself in a way acceptable to his wife's standards. A love triangle is typically a relationship involving three persons, generally at least one of whom is of the "opposite" gender. This ad is an all-masculine, homosocial utopia, wherein women are substituted for masculinized objects.

Although only the garage is within the ad's frame, the house is obviously upper-middle class or upper class. The bourgeois house seemingly stands in contrast to the muscular man in jeans, work boots and a shaved head. Not only is this man escaping from a female to male domain of the house (en route to the open road), he is escaping from the potentially emasculating office world into a place where men play with big toys and get dirty. Just as the domestic is gendered as feminine and the public as masculine, the working class is gendered as masculine whereas the bourgeois male is gendered as feminine, soft and unphysical- a paradox of capitalist culture. The bourgeois male, physically inactive and thus feminized during the workweek dons a working class lifestyle on weekends, becoming the "weekend warrior." Whether the open road, the snowmobile or the hunting trip, "When the gentleman-consumer goes back to nature, he confronts his own nature. From underneath the modern-day corporate conformist there emerges the Great American Individualist." (Barthel: 143) It is telling to compare the refined ruggedness of the man in the advertisement to the enclosed photographs from the Sturgis Rally.

If "Ford F-Series pickups and Harley-Davidson motorcycles are both true American icons," (Russ) then so is the working class white male. Harleys, pickups and the Sturgis Rally are all white generally a paradoxically outlaw patriotism. The only photos from Sturgis that I could find were of white people. The few white women that I could find photos of were stripping/ naked and being stared at by white men.

This ads placement in Sports Illustrated is important. "Sports serves as a metaphor for the male: a special arena free of life's contradictions and contaminations, where a man can test himself and be tested." (Barthel: 250) Sports provide a homosocial space for males to define themselves against each other and against women as a negative whole. The ad is thematically in tune with the magazine.

The man with two vehicles "dreams of escape" from the emasculating influence of the domestic and office spheres. "Back home, in everyday adulthood, the man finds himself weighed down by the pressures of competition, achievement, and conformity." (Barthel: 151) Away from wives, bosses and desks, the "weekend warrior" produces his masculine identity through the liberation of the open road.

Work Cited

Barthel, Diane. When Men Put On Appearances. In "Men, Masculinity, and the Media" Steve Craig, ed. Newbury Park: Sage, 1992.

Russ, Carey. Ford F150 Harley Davidson SuperCrew (2001). At http://www.theautochannel.com/F/vehicles/new/reviews/2001/russ0103.html

http://investor.harley-davidson.com/demographics.cfm?bmLocale=en_US

Photograph of Four White Males at the Sturgis Rally. Vietnam Vets M/C Wyoming <http://www.nevnvmc.com/Wyoming.htm>

Photograph of White Woman in Thong Underwear <http://www.motorcycle.com/mo/mclaw/96sturgispre.html>

Photograph of Three White Firefighters, Two of Whom Wearing Patriotic Shirts<http://www.ladder54.com/Photospersonnel2.htm>