This morning on NPR, during a discussion about race in the election campaign, there was some talk about just what the "Joe Sixpack" shorthand represents. The concensus seemed to be that he is a white male. I think there are some other facets worth identifying.
Joe is clearly a man, clearly white/non-Hispanic, and clearly a drinker. But what else? Let's unpack the term.
Joe is someone for whom the unit of beer is the sixpack. I don't just mean that Joe buys a sixpack at a time. To the contrary, I think he buys a case at a time. The sixpack is his favored unit for consuming beer.
I'm a psychologist. There's a rule of thumb in the psychology game that when you ask patients about their alcohol use, you should double what they tell you to have a better estimate of the truth. More than once, I've asked a patient if he used alcohol, and he's said, "No. Well, beer." And invariably, for those patients, the metric for beer has been the sixpack. A sixpack a night. Or a sixpack on Friday and Saturday. Or two sixpacks.
Several points follow from this.
One is that the sixpack drinker is unapologetically pursuing a buzz. One doesn't consume 72 ounces of carbonated beverage -- or some multiple thereof -- for any other reason. Especially since sixpackers do not, as a rule, drink "the good stuff."
That leads to the second point: There's a culture-war divide here between the elitist who sips microbrews or imports on one hand, and the regular guy who drains cans of Busch or Miller Lite. Forget about the wine drinkers.
Third, the sixpacker will tend to perceive himself as occupying the middle ground between the tea-totaler and the alcoholic. They're not stuffy and righteous like the former, they swear now and then and enjoy a dirty joke, but they are not flagrantly irresponsible like the latter. In their own view, that is.
Fourth, an implicit feature of the person who identifies with sixpackiness is that his alcohol-permeated consciousness is disinhibited. Alcohol lowers inhibitions, everyone knows. At first, it's social inhibitions that drop. We feel more at ease with others, talk more freely, even get close to strangers. After a few more drinks, other inhibitions drop away, too, and the angry or sentimental impulses that we usually keep under wraps may start to emerge. So Joe does not put a lot of stock in being civilized. Sexual aggression, competitiveness, judgmentalism, machismo, and exclusionary group identification are just fine, even if they aren't Politically Correct.
Finally (and paradoxically), Joe, since he's a regular guy who doesn't put on airs and will have a drink with you and maybe conspiratorially share a racist joke with you, is also friendly and accepting, in a way. He's got his flaws -- and who doesn't? -- but he's good people. He's a little rough, maybe, but....
Okay, that's all I've got. This was an exercise in stereotype interpretation, I realize, and other interpretations are possible. What are yours?