“With five solid chunks of chocolate, it’s a man sized eat!”

“Yorkies” man sized chunks are for sale in my local World Market.

From Nestle’s Yorkie website:

YORKIE – “IT’S NOT FOR GIRLS”

In 2001 the Yorkie “It’s Not for Girls” campaign was launched because, in today’s society, there aren’t many things that a man can look at and say that’s for him.

The ‘Not For Girls’ campaign theme for Yorkie uses humour, which resonates with today’s British male and simply states that Yorkie is positioning itself as a chocolate bar for men who need a satisfying hunger buster. With five solid chunks of chocolate, it’s a man sized eat!

(Above two photos via Feminist Reprise)

According to Catherine Redfern at the f-word:

The Yorkie ad sparked off tons of publicity as Nestle embarked on a campaign to ‘reclaim the sweets’ (groan-sorry) for men. The tv ads show women attempting to purchase the chunky chocolate bar – but the only way they can do this is by glueing on fake beards, dressing up as builders with hard hats, and swaggering into corner shops asking (in deep, gruff, fake-male voice) for a “Yorkie please.” In one ad, the large, bearded, super-gruff male shopkeeper ‘tests’ the woman to prove she is a man, by quizzing her on stereotypically male questions, thrusting a fake spider in her face to see if she screams, and so on. He finally hands the bar over, but when he tells her the it really highlights the blue in her eyes, she gasps “really?” and he snatches the Yorkie out of her hands and bites off a huge, masculine chunk in one go.

Women and men even eat chocolate differently in the world of advertising – men snap off chunks on the side of their mouth and chew and swallow purposefully, and of course, they scowl as they’re doing it. Women suck and nibble slowly, eyes closed, perhaps raising a well-manicured fingertip to the corner of their mouth to daintily catch a few stray crumbles – think Cadbury’s Flake for the classic freudian way to eat chocolate. (The only exception that I can think of to this is Dawn French stuffing wedges of Terry’s Chocolate Orange into her mouth in a most unladylike fashion.)

However, chocolate isn’t a pseudo-orgasmic experience for the men who eat Yorkie, of course. It’s a re-affirmation of their manhood. The Yorkie ads, on tv and posters, used the slogans “It’s not for girls”, “don’t feed the birds”, “not available in pink” and “King size, not Queen size.” Interestingly, the campaign even affected the design of the bar itself, seemingly intended to literally stop women buying the bar in the real world. The “O” in Yorkie has been altered into a “no go” road sign, with a line cutting through a woman symbol. The bar also has the phrase “not for girls” on it.

Nestle claims to be taking a stand for the “British bloke” and says that by making a chocolate “just for men”, they are offering men something just for them in a changing, confusing world. They have actually used the word “reclaiming”, as if women have “taken” chocolate away from men – despite the obvious fact that chocolate is mainly marketed to women by the people who create it. But from the ads, they seem to be targeting not “British men” but British, large, bearded, macho, builders. That’s gotta be a limited market, guys. Using the most hackneyed stereotypes, the Yorkie ads seem to be trying to say that eating chocolate is an okay thing for a man to be seen to be doing; it isn’t a cissy thing to do, it’s not emasculating. But they are also saying that men can only feel happy eating chocolate if it is associated with everything very, very MACHO. Men can enjoy things associated with women – as long as they are constantly demonstrating in the most tired cliches that they are still REAL MEN. They can only eat chocolate if the chocolate in question is branded as NOT-FEMALE. Really, they do protest too much, don’t you think?

According to this site:

WHAT ARE TWO ALTERNATIVE NAMES THIS CANDY BAR COULD BE CALLED?

The Nothing Special
I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Better

–Ann Bartow