“The Perfect Beer For Removing 'No' From Your Vocabulary For The Night.".

I really commend this slogan for getting past the checks and balances of Bud Light's brightest. I mean, really, of all the slogans in the race to be printed, to become the newest face of this largely popular company, somehow, this one won. Bud Light's employees were clearly intoxicated and saying, “We're #UpForWhatever happens after this (including tarnishing the reputation of our own company)!" as they gave this slogan the green light.

There's an obvious double entendre presented in the slogan "#UpForWhatever". This slogan can innocently mean that you can have an awesome night, and be a “yes-man" if you drink Bud Light. However, it can also not-so-innocently mean that drinking Bud Light can remove “no" from a potential sexual partner's vocabulary when it comes to closing time and beyond. That's the issue here, isn't it? It seems like Bud Light is promoting the rape culture that hundreds of people are working to remove from college campuses, and as a result, Bud Light is undermining a woman's choice to say no to sexual advancements.

Now, I don't believe that Bud Light intended this slogan to mean the latter connotation, because promoting rape culture in the midst of the current gender equality movement would be quite foolish. However, I also didn't expect that a slogan like this would be approved by not one, but multiple supposedly intelligent people, given the connection between alcohol consumption and sexual assault, specifically on college campuses.

Now let's take a step back and look at the #UpForWhatever campaign as a whole. Being up for whatever when one is sober, and when one is intoxicated, means two completely different things.

Being up for whatever when sober, at least for me, means being up for ordering Jimmy John's or shopping online excessively (go crazy). Being up for whatever when intoxicated can have any number of meanings, including committing dangerous, reckless acts such as drunk driving, leaving your friends behind at a party without an explanation, drinking yourself to the point of blacking out, or even contracting alcohol poisoning. Is this really the kind of activity Bud Light wants to be associated with?

The kind that gets college students sent to the hospital? See, despite the obvious trauma that comes with such an experience, there's this little thing called taste aversion. After eating or drinking food or drink that then makes us sick, most of us can't stand the taste of that food or drink anymore, and remove it from our diets completely. Taste aversions can last years, even lifetimes. So, when Bud Light promotes reckless behavior from drinking its product, hopefully the company knows that it's hurting its own sales and reputation, as a result.

Bud Light has already apologized for its incomprehensible mistake, but so does every company when they upset their customers. Bud Light says the company would never condone disrespectful or irresponsible behavior, but this is coming from the creators of now TWO disrespectful and irresponsibly approved slogans. On St. Patrick's Day, the beer company tweeted, "On #StPatrickDay you can pinch people who don't wear green. You can also pinch people who aren't #UpForWhatever", which led to an onslaught of accusations that Bud Light was undermining the act of sexual assault. Maybe after making two irreversible mistakes, Bud Light will learn how to write a slogan.