The Super Bowl is the biggest day in advertising for a huge number of companies, and this year, I sincerely hope two are left out: Dr Pepper and Miller have been making low-calorie beverage commercials that tell men how to act for too long now. The last thing I need when watching impossibly gigantic men throwing each other around is to be emasculated by a Miller Lite ad because my jeans (in theory) wouldn’t look all that bad on a woman.

Miller Lite’s ad campaign/crusade of manliness has focused on ridiculing men who do not meet its standards of masculinity. As the advertisers see it, the main criteria for being a man are drinking Miller Lite beer and never doing anything even slightly feminine. As if it wasn’t obvious enough, each commercial ends with a macho, disembodied voice telling viewers to “man up” and choose Miller Lite.

For reasons unknown, Dr Pepper has decided to hop on the patriarchy bus with Miller Lite. Now that Dr Pepper, too, has a low-calorie product to sell, it needs a way to bring their beverage to men who might fear drinking a 10-calorie cherry cola isn’t totally cool.

To reach this demographic, it has decided to eliminate an entire sex from its target market. For those unfamiliar with anatomy, that doesn’t leave many sexes left in the target market. With the coinage of the slogan, “It’s Not For Women,” Dr Pepper has topped every frustrating advertisement Miller has ever put out. In addition to the blatant misogyny, this seems to be an objectively terrible strategy for selling products.

Now, I’m not saying this slogan has no place anywhere in advertising; certain products aren’t made for women. Viagra comes to mind almost immediately, but surely other such commodities exist. Diet soda, however, would not have been in my list of products that women do not use.

I think I know what’s going on here. It seems like Miller and Dr Pepper are worried there is a feminine stigma associated with the consumption of low-calorie foodstuffs. With commercials featuring only the manliest of men, these two giants of carbonation are hoping to eliminate any elements of femininity and make their products the new go-to drink for every guys’ night out. Unfortunately, I think the only people who dig these commercials are men whose only option is a guys’ night out.

I don’t think these ads are working, but imagine if they did: men buying Miller Lite for the purpose of pouring it on the tight-fitting jeans of other bar-goers, Dr Pepper 10 drinkers getting punched at random — because in Dr Pepper’s world, all men love fighting. It seems that in Dr Pepper’s world, life is an action movie. Please, come back to reality.

Dr Pepper, Miller, please stop reinforcing archaic notions of gender, and give human beings some credit. These ad campaigns reduce men to one-dimensional caricatures and ignore women outright. It’s a poor reflection on these two companies that their only idea on how to get people to drink soda is to infuse it with imagined machismo. I’d rather look “unmanly,” to use Miller’s phrase, than support a company that can’t figure out how I might be OK with such an image.

So, Dr Pepper, you’ve lost this customer. Miller? You make awful beer, so it really doesn’t matter how you advertise it. I don’t want any. But please, when I’m watching the Super Bowl next weekend, quit making fun of me because I’m not the man you want me to be.

Jake DeVirgiliis is a junior government and politics major. He can be reached at devirgiliis@umdbk.com.