Restore your fragile masculinity with deep fried factory farmed chicken!

This spectacularly subtle ad is currently airing on Australian TV, reminding men that their masculine identities are so fragile that they can be destroyed by one single sweater, and so insubstantial that they can be restored with a bucket of chicken.

Yeah! Dudes! Manly dudes in t-shirts! Dudes eating fried chicken! Dudes denigrating vaguely feminine things, and each other! Dudes being portrayed as so deeply insecure that they can’t handle wearing a pink sweater without freaking the fuck out! Dudes, how are you not insulted by this shit?
Transcript below the jump.

Emasculated bro in pink: Hey, guys. You remember Sarah.
Masculinity-policing bro 1: Nice jumper, mate. Do they make it for men?
V/O: With loads of original recipe chicken, wicked wings and heaps of sides, The Pack from KFC gets you back on side with your man clan.

New York, NY

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia. She joined the Feministing team in 2009. Her writing about politics and popular culture has been published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, New York magazine, Reuters, The LA Times and many other outlets in the US, Australia, UK, and France. She makes regular appearances on radio and television in the US and Australia. She has an AB in Sociology from Princeton University and a PhD in Arts and Media from the University of New South Wales. Her academic work focuses on Hollywood romantic comedies; her doctoral thesis was about how the genre depicts gender, sex, and power, and grew out of a series she wrote for Feministing, the Feministing Rom Com Review. Chloe is a Senior Facilitator at The OpEd Project and a Senior Advisor to The Harry Potter Alliance. You can read more of her writing at chloesangyal.com

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia.

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