Daily Buzzkills: Wheaties Fuel is part of a man's reassuringly masculine breakfast

Being pitiful little bitches who find it difficult bench-pressing anything heavier than our iPhones, and whose testicles are, in reality, just small velvet purses filled with crushed potpourri, we here at Daily Buzzkills are always on the lookout for products specifically engineered to enhance our latent manliness—or at least, to create a suitable smokescreen of pheremones to momentarily stun and bewilder prospective partners. But until now, the options for masking our inherent wussiness have been limited primarily to spray-on musks and Jason Statham movies.

So what about our insides? Torturing them with energy drinks and spicy foods is supposed to make you bolder, but merely strafing your tongue with fiery chemical extracts doesn’t do anything for your lower GI, which is where all your gumption takes root, and then slowly compacts in the form of kick-ass polyps. Being a real man requires eating something with fortitude—something that doesn’t just give you all of your necessary daily vitamins and minerals, but rams them down your fucking throat, straps on some steel cleats, and stomps them into the heads of your crybaby cells. Then it blitzes the waste right of your rectum, all while blasting Slayer’s Reign In Blood. In other words, a full-on breakfast assault, as opposed to the polite, Stephen Sondheim-soundtracked mincing of your average bowl of Special K. Enter the new Wheaties Fuel, which will have to suffice until Axe makes a vaguely leather-scented breakfast cereal.

Touted as “the next evolution” of America’s favorite sports-themed bran mixture, Wheaties Fuel comes from the explosive creative team of “Peyton Manning, Kevin Garnett, Albert Pujols, Bryan Clay, Hunter Kemper, and Dr. John Ivy,” athletes and experts who came together to create the exact combination of complex carbohydrates, antioxidants, and cinnamon clusters required to transform losers into champions. But it’s the marketing that deserves all the credit here, recognizing that the original Wheaties—while still inextricably tied to athletes—had lost some of its edge the second it started letting in girls. (Thanks for the flaccid memories, aviator Elinor Smith!)

Independent studies have shown that eating a cereal out of a box with, for example, Kristi Yamaguchi’s face on it actually causes the penis to retract inside the body—and then there’s insidious folic acid, proven to grow breasts and an abnormally strong interest in True Blood in lab animals. The new Wheaties Fuel finally leaves both of these power-boner-killers out of the equation, setting its sights squarely on those with Y chromosomes and a deep need to be reassured by everything they own that they are, in fact, men. As General Mills marketing manager told the New York Times back in July while Fuel was still being developed, “Men don’t use their wives’ razors or deodorants; why would they be eating their cereal?” (Sounds like someone just called Michael Jordan a big, fat girl!)

Indeed, for nothing is so innocuous or commonplace that it cannot be overburdened with gender politics—not even dried bits of bran gruel. And while some would point to Wheaties Fuel as a needless and vaguely insulting rebranding of an American institution, yet another desperate attempt by marketers to create divisions by catering directly to man’s seemingly limitless secret insecurities—not to mention using the same old youth-bludgeoning, EXTREME techniques of setting up completely pointless Facebook pages and a so-pointless-it’s-almost-enough-to-make-you-pity-the-underpaid-English-grad-who-has-to-man-it Twitter feed—well, these are clearly the short-sighted, limp-dick whinings of a walking, talking daffodil who wouldn’t recognize a man’s breakfast if he was served bull testicles in motor oil.