In guyland, beer is the official drink, beer ads are the constitution and the Super Bowl is the annual holiday.

Yes, today is beer day. It's the second biggest eating day of the year after Thanksgiving, and I'd put a Vegas wager on it being the biggest beer-drinking day. It's also the biggest celebration of beer ads, which unlike beer's buzz, live forever due to YouTube. It's a day that brought us Wassup, the Budweiser Frogs and, of course, the Cat Fight.

After watching dozens of beer ads over the last few days, I can report that the land of beer is a fun and raucous place. It's a land where drunkenness, laughing, burping, irresponsibility, pranks and rule-breaking reign. There are no awkward silences, no need to speak in words, no need to remember to say or do anything in particular or face the consequences. Heck, there are no consequences. It's a world where women have fun entertaining men. It's an escape from the tyranny of work and manners, from the ill-fitting harnesses of the digital age on our inner human cave animal. The whole nation sighs in relief.

Beer ads have always been about sex. In the ads of my youth, long-haired women in skimpy outfits danced to rock music while guys stood around holding beers. Women smiled at men; the men grinned at each other.

Those ads look pretty tame today. In last year's Miller Lite Cat Fight, which got over 6 million views afterward, women leave a lunch table to rip off their clothes and fight in their undies, mud-wrestle, then make out. "The first beer commercial that starred actual soft-core porn actresses," is how the TV Munchies blog hailed it.

Today's ads are so over the top it's clear they're somewhat ironic. At the end of the cat fight ads, for example, the women, who are also drinking beer, roll their eyes. The ads create a knowing wink fantasy bubble that's enhanced by the fact that everyone knows they're getting away with something naughty.

It's also surely about advertisers giving a nod to the "other" audience. They know women are in the game now, and are figuring out ways of keeping them drinking, too. Women account for 25 percent of beer consumption and almost half the Super Bowl audience. Given that 96 million people watched last year's Super Bowl, that's a lot of women. According to Forbes, even back in 2005, 10 million more women watched the Super Bowl than the Academy Awards.

There's a lot of money at stake. The average 30-second spot sold for $2.5 to $2.8 million this year and Anheuser-Busch (which makes Miller Lite) has spent $311.8 million advertising at the event from 1990 through 2009.

Marketing expert Gerry Myers says more Super Bowl ads should be aimed at women, who spend more money: "Though many women love football, and a lot of men enjoy seeing the new commercials, women focus more on the commercials ... and men more on the game."

Some ads do appeal to women. The Clydesdales spots played well with women, for example (though rumor has it there won't be any this year since they didn't test well). And one of today's Miller Lite commercials features a man who skips his softball game to attend his wife's book club because she's serving Bud Light.

But I doubt the book club ad will play as well as the cat fight. It's almost certain that beer advertising will spin ever more elaborate gender fantasies.

Take the new Andes beer ad (not for the Super Bowl) that features guys at a bar using a sound-proof "teletransporter" with sound effects of hospitals, traffic jams and crying babies. As one AdFreak blogger wrote, it "lets men convince annoying girlfriends when they call that they're not, in fact, at the bar." The contraption was actually installed at bars around the city of Mendoza in Argentina.

Then there's the Ariana beer ad in which a woman opens a beer with her boobs. Or the Bavaria beer ad in which a girl in a bikini mimics the way a guy moves the beer bottle around in his hand. As a TV Munchies blogger wrote, "This explains why so many young Brazilian dudes get their peens caught in beer bottles."

At the risk of being called a humorless feminist, let me say that while the music, movement, smiling and fun of these ads work on me because I am human, and while I might laugh at them, I still know they do a lot of gender damage. What's more influential than fantasy?

The fantasy is that men, in particular, can have it all. Because the ads wink at viewers, and because they're so over the top, men can get away with enjoying the pleasures of a sexist fantasy world while an equal number of women sit in the audience. They can have their beer and drink it, too.

Cartoonist Rob Rogers does "Rob's Rough," an early look at his work and his creative process, exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.