Women’s rights and gender education have made great strides in the past 50 years — but liquor marketers haven’t noticed.Thumbing through magazines in a grocery store, it’s easy to see the disconnect. Men’s magazines such as Maxim still feature ads with guys in cool suits drinking expensive scotch, while female-marketed magazines such as US Weekly feature women in brightly colored dresses drinking brightly colored drinks.The basic assumptions of these marketers may be based in one of the fundamental building blocks of modern science — the lab rat.In today’s almost-egalitarian society, marketers use sexist images from the past to coerce people into buying their products. It’s an old psychological technique — advertisers associate popular images of supposed masculinity or femininity with their product. People want to identify with these images and buy the product.We can all think of hundreds of examples of sexist ads — any ad for Axe Bodyspray immediately springs to mind, but some of the most sexist ads we see are those shilling liquor.In a September 26 post, Feministing.com contributor Ann Friedman detailed some of her favorite presumptive and sexist whiskey ads.Friedman admits to laughing out loud at one of them — a 1990 Johnnie Walker ad depicting two women running on the beach with the text “He loves me for my mind AND he drinks Johnnie Walker.”She also links to a series of Australian Jim Beam ads — which have caused a great deal of controversy there — that refer to attractive women in bars as stalkers and lesbianism as a tragedy.Friedman remarks that these ads are amusing, but her point is clear. Alcohol ads are still horrifically sexist.What’s most troubling about them is their use of old images of gender to invoke feelings of belonging in viewers.Liquor ads today often invoke classic sexist images: The suave man that drinks expensive whiskey, the party girl that loves vodka tonics and — perhaps my favorite — the average looking guy who is surrounded by beautiful women because he is drinking fancy whiskey.We know these things are not true. Not all women drink fruity drinks, not all men enjoy whiskey and furthermore the act of merely purchasing or drinking a product will not drastically improve your social life or make you cool. Yet they push these images, and we fall for them. Thinkprogress.org blogger Matthew Yglesias was also perplexed by the sexism seen in marketing. He was also specifically interested in the examples he found in liquor advertisements. Yglesias thinks the issue extends beyond just liquor though and to another old and sexist marketing idea. Women instinctively like sweets, so women would prefer sweeter liquors.His chain of logic seems to make sense — the idea that women prefer sweets is also ubiquitous in the U.S. — though people talking casually rarely cite scientific studies when passing this information along.  In a September 27 response to Friedman’s column, Yglesias writes “The Internet is full of references to this alleged greater female proclivity for sweet-tasting things, but the sources that cite specific references all seem to come back to a handful of studies done on rats.”I found that remarkably hard to believe.But with a little research of my own, I confirmed that some of the studies linking sex and food preference used lab rats as their subjects.In their 2002 book Behavioral Endocrinology, Jill B. Becker, S. Marc Breedlove, David Crews, Margaret M. McCarthy found male rats prefer mildly sweetened water, while female rats prefer super sweetened water. Other similar studies also used lab rats as test subjects.So it looks like Yglesias’ theory may check out — almost.Yglesias’ search for information was most likely kept to the biological sciences and not the social sciences. He makes no specification in his post.Some survey research has found women prefer sweet foods over savory foods. It’s quite likely by the time these people were old enough to participate in surveys they had already been socialized into believing women should like sweets and men more savory foods, though.Maybe lab rats are right that women prefer sweets, but that still doesn’t justify the marketing of alcoholic beverages in a way that is blatantly sexist.Issues of gender are very social things, and each new generation has the opportunity to cut new gender views from whole cloth; yet we continue to allow images and ideas of the past to shape our future.—-Contact Skylar Gremillion at [email protected]