That’s Not How That Works: “The New Right’s Theory of Power”
From Nicholas Grossman, writing for Arc DigitalSubstack, takes a stroll from Elon Musk to Dylan Mulvaney and Bud Light to explain the premise and proliferation of social conservatives’ belief they are institutionally persecuted.
An excerpt:
Who, exactly, was hurt by a beer brand hiring a trans woman for a promotion? I don’t mean whether it was a smart/dumb business decision—those happen all the time—but whether anyone suffered any real harm.
No one has to be into Mulvaney’s schtick (I’ve never watched her videos), and like any other public figure, she’s not above criticism. But this went far beyond that. Why spread corporate marketing to people it doesn’t target and say its existence, which they otherwise wouldn’t know about, is a personal attack on them?
The complaint appears to be that Dylan Mulvaney is out in public, acting happy and proud to be trans, while an All-American brand like Bud Light treated Mulvaney and her fans as normal – just another internet celebrity and potential customers. The only way to satisfy that complaint would be for Bud Light—for every brand—to shun trans people, or at least not openly welcome them the way they do numerous other demographic groups.
That doesn’t look like conservative persecution by institution-dominating progressives. It looks like frustration with lost dominance.
Social conservatives aren’t wrong to think their beliefs have less influence in America today than in past eras, but that doesn’t make them victims. Rather, they’ve gone from the overwhelmingly dominant force in the culture to a large faction within it, with less ability to impose their values upon others, or take for granted that their views were default.
It wasn’t long ago that no gay teacher was out of the closet, at least not in school. Now some display rainbow flags and a picture of their same-sex spouse in class, and Republican-led state governments pass ambiguous, potentially onerous laws to chill it.
It wasn’t long ago that virtually no trans people were out and seeking mainstream recognition. Now they’re asking others to use their pronouns, calling people who reject their gender identity bigoted, and getting sponsorship deals online.
LGBT people haven’t taken over all major American institutions and started repressing their enemies, but they have carved out enough acceptance in society that trying to bully them out doesn’t work like it used to. Now people who want to shun them have to compete, and competing at the national level requires appealing to a wide variety of people, not just those on your “side.” Especially when we’re talking about all of society here, not just partisan politics, since tons of Americans don’t vote (about 80 million, even in record-turnout 2020).
Yes, the new right’s theory of power, with culture-transforming dictates imposed from above, is wrong. But the illustrative case they use to build their theory, and the way they measure power distribution in society, are both so far off—more a fantasy that casts themselves as victims, with anything they want justified in response, than an empirical study—that any theory based on it is fundamentally flawed.
The reason no one has a good explanation for how left-wing radicals took over all major institutions, and how the right can counter these leftists’ remorseful application of power, is because that didn’t happen, and isn’t close.
I went to high school with Nick Grossman. He was a year below me. Interesting to see that he is becoming something of an internet political celebrity for his commentary. He is probably the most internet famous person I know from real life. Meaning he is still really obscure.Report
Which is why David Frum’s prediction is coming true, that frustrated by their inability to persuade their fellow Americans, conservatives are resorting to force- legal and physical where need be in order to suppress what they oppose.
And it bears repeating- their efforts have nothing whatsoever to do with liberating themselves from some form of oppression, or even liberating anyone else really. Their efforts are entirely about stripping liberty from others.Report
Lots of people have very definite ideas of what the ideal society should look like. One of the dividing lines between different ideological groups is what amount of coercive force they are willing to impose in order to get messy humans to conform to the idea. Various different types of reactionaries and the more strident Further Left types like Communists were more than willing to use incredibly deadly coercive force on tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people to get them to conform. Different stripes of liberals are more into gently cooing suasion and trying to invoke everybody’s Secret Disney Liberal.Report
You know what this kinda reminds me of? The old “Gamers are Dead” media blitz that happened ~GamerGate.
If you don’t remember, back in 2015, there were a whole bunch of video game websites (Gamasutra, Kotaku, Destructoid, RockPaperShotgun, Polygon, Ars Technica, Daily Beast, Vice….) that all came out with similarly themed essays within, like, a day of each other. “‘Gamers’ don’t have to be your audience. ‘Gamers’ are over.” was the title of Leigh Alexander’s piece.
And, wouldn’t you know it, it ginned up a whole mess of commentary and then had a whole bunch of “entitled” people do stuff like “stop going to these websites” and “writing the advertisers saying ‘I’m going to stop going to this website!'” and a handful of these websites lost advertisers and lost ranking (that, I understand, is what advertisers go for).
Maybe some of them picked up some clout, I guess.
But they alienated their “entitled” audience and their “entitled” audience went elsewhere.
How dare they?!?Report
WhooshReport
Dude, the Bud Light marketing exec said that she wanted a different customer base.
Well, this is what that looks like.
I don’t see what the problem is.Report
There are 1.6 million people in the US who identify as trans. I’m doubtful that’s a big enough number to interest Bud.
For perspective, There are roughly as many people active in the boy scouts, there are more than 100 million former scouts and there are 188 million gamers.
Jenner is “out and proud”, I think Bud could have done their thing with her and it would have been a lot less of an issue.
Mulvaney is only famous because of this issue.Report
You can’t (or shouldn’t, anyway) discount allies.
That said, I don’t know what marketing wanted was possible.
They should have given Bud Seltzer to Mulvaney.Report
I think McMegan of all people actually had a much more insightful take on this than Grossman.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/10/conservative-boycotts-twitter-social-media-progressives/
It’s paywalled but here is IMO the critical passage:
Which brings us back to the boycotts. I don’t think Twitter made the boycotts work because that’s where conservatives organized. Rather, I think the Twitter pseudo-consensus caused some irrational corporate behavior — and its collapse caused even more.
One reason boycotts fail is that major institutions generally avoid taking stances that are guaranteed to make a lot of people very mad. Yet, Twitter Brain convinced a lot of corporate bosses that controversial progressive views were actually quite mainstream. This might explain why Bud Light tried to partner with a trans influencer even though its customer demographic is roughly the opposite of Mulvaney’s “wacky Audrey Hepburn” persona — and triggered a strong enough emotional response to sustain at least three months of boycott.
The Bud Light backlash, and the rightward shift in Twitter’s moderation policies, punctured this illusion. But this meant that suddenly companies were in a position of radical uncertainty: Was this “vibe shifting”? And toward what? I suspect this is why Target panicked about some minor pushback to its Pride displays.
The take away is that the right hasn’t discovered some brilliant new tactic, it’s that corporate perceptions have been deluded for the last decade or decade and a half about where mainstream America is and have behaved really strangely because of it. This is just natural corrective, reversion to the mean, whatever.Report
Since you posted McMegan, maybe you can interpret for those of us who are outside the conservative bubble.
What is it about Mulvaney that “makes people very mad”?
From over here, it looks like intolerance and bigotry.
Does it look different where you are?Report
No one’s stopping you from hating those backward evil conservatives — but maybe you could just take it as accepted here and not insist on making it the topic of every conversation? Your monomania makes for dull threads.Report
I imagine that a handful of people have only seen a couple of her (EARLY!) posts to Tik Tok and they don’t see “Modern Femininity” but “Theater Kid Performing Womanface”.
Here’s what I said back on May Day:
Here’s the Tiktok in question:
Now, maybe you see Dylan’s Tiktok there as yet another girl going out into nature and enjoying it and cannot comprehend the mindset of someone watching that and saying “that’s a flamboyant theater kid”.
I imagine that if you could imagine how someone else would see it, you’d see how differently “if you don’t agree that this is femininity, you’re intolerant” as an insult and they’re responding to the insult.
But I understand that, in the last few months or so, Dylan has gotten some facial softening surgery and turned it down to a ‘3’ and comes across less as a theater kid.Report
That still doesn’t answer the question of what makes conservatives very angry about this.Report
I think it’s the whole “The Emperor’s Clothing Is Beautiful!” vs. “The Emperor is wearing a stained mawashi” argument turning into a “YOU’RE STUPID IF YOU DON’T SEE A BEAUTIFUL OUTFIT! YOU’RE A BIGOT IF YOU DON’T SEE A BEAUTIFUL OUTFIT!” discussion that makes them angry.
But given that the Emperor’s Clothing is made from a fabric that appears more beautiful the more intelligent you are, perhaps we should instead take pity on the people who are demonstrating that they aren’t as intelligent as we have proven to be rather than attempting to shame them into saying that they really like the blues and the greens and the yellows at the collar.Report
Yeah I’m still seeing this as bigotry.
I mean, a flamboyant theater kid posting silly videos makes you very angry?
It just looks like her existence as a trans person is what is causing the anger here and you guys are refusing to accept trans people as your equals.
And look, if that’s what you want to do, hey, you can do it.
But lets just call it what it is and don’t make absurd contrived excuses.Report
I mean, a flamboyant theater kid posting silly videos makes you very angry?
No. I’m one of the people who say stuff like “posting silly videos is one of the things that flamboyant theater kids do”.
The discussion of whether or not there is a difference between “flamboyant theater kid” and “woman” is where the conversation turns into stuff like “WELL, DEFINE WOMAN! YOU CAN’T! DEFINE FLAMBOYANT! YOU CAN’T! WHAT IS THEATER ANYWAY? PEOPLE WHO DON’T AGREE WITH ME ARE BIGOTS!”Report
Well, yeah, people who refuse to accept Dylan Mulvaney as their equal are, by definition, bigots.
No one is forcing you to accept that transwomen are women, the same way that no one is forcing you to accept that a wafer becomes the true body of Christ.
But boycotting a company because they hired a Catholic spokesperson is, well, bigotry.Report
“As my equal”? Equal in *WHAT*?
Equal in the eyes of God? Well, of course Dylan is.
We are all God’s children, Chip.
“You should agree on definitions of things, then!”Report
A defensive squid cloud of obfuscation isn’t the defense you think it is.
And now the Bud Light episode is history, just a series of irrefutable facts from which people can draw their own conclusions.Report
That’s not obfuscation.
You asserted: “Well, yeah, people who refuse to accept Dylan Mulvaney as their equal are, by definition, bigots.”
I accept Dylan Mulvaney as my equal.
“Then that means that you have to X!”
If Dylan can force me to do something that goes against my observations and inclinations, then you’re agreeing that we’re not equals.Report
What are you being asked to do, that goes against your “observations and inclinations”?Report
Compliment the emperor’s outfit.Report
Um, no, that’s not what the facts show.
Conservatives were angry that Budweiser hired a trans person, and boycotted the firm in retaliation, implicitly demanding that businesses which want their business refuse to hire trans people.
This is the simple irrefutable fact.
We are only asking you to stop doing that.
You aren’t being asked to say anything, believe anything, or even do anything.
Just let other people live as they wish. That’s it.
If you don’t want to stop doing that, well, don’t complain when we call you bigots.Report
implicitly demanding that businesses which want their business refuse to hire trans people.
That’s one heck of an implicit demand.
We are only asking you to stop doing that.
What does “stop doing that” look like in practice?
Buying Bud Light?
Hey, Chip.
Have you purchased any Bud Light in the last three months?Report
It is possible to both accept that Dylan Mulvaney is a woman AND ALSO think that trans should be a discouraged absolutely-last-step to a serious problem not the first stick out of the bag.
Further, “accept as a woman” doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be banning all college and pro female trans athletes. They seem to retain enough of the male package that it’s a problem.Report
I feel the same way about hip replacement.
Mostly because bigots have been screaming in my ears about how doctors demand people get chemotherapy as the very first step when people have a cold, and I have literally no context or knowledgeable about anything that actually happens WRT it.Report
Hey, look, it’s almost as if assumptions that cis people make about how this works are all completely wrong and they should actually stop making them. It’s almost as if people who discover or finally admit new aspects of themselves actually can be a little weird about it, and that doesn’t make them liars.
And maybe it isn’t the job of anyone to police those people. Literally anyone at all.
Are cis people in general, or even just the ones on this site, going to actually learn this lesson? Hell no.Report
Good lord. “Policing.”
“I think X.”
“Yeah, well… I think ~X.”
“STOP POLICING X!”
Would you compare it to literal violence? Stochastic terrorism?
I mean seriously. It’s barely concern trolling.Report
…do you honestly not know what deciding how people in a group should act based on your own opinion is called ‘policing’ that group?
And using ‘policing’ that ways especially obvious in the context of _gender_ policing, (which is what you were doing, trans policing is just a subset of gender policing) as that has been a explicitly named concept since 1990: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_policing
Please note that isn’t even a _queer_ thing, that’s just basic feminism.
Honestly, I’m completely baffled you haven’t run across it any other context. It’s often talked talked about in the same context as gatekeeping, which is a slightly different related concept of disallowing someone from a group (as opposed to stating they fail at correctly being in the group and that they should be punished for it).Report
No, David. They can do whatever they want.
It’s just that… so can I.Report
…we are not in any manner talking about what you are ‘allowed’ to do. Where did you even get the world ‘allowed’ from?
We are talking about how it isn’t your job to do that thing, to figure out who is actually trans and tell other people, and that you are frankly are incredibly bad at it.(1)
You made your opinion on Dylan pretty well known, that she was just faking for attention, and now that she has had _actual surgery_ and it seems clear she wasn’t faking, do you care to _reflect_ that on that certainty you felt and you expressed openly? That ‘how it works in your brain’ is actually not very good at guessing?
Isn’t that one of the general philosophies that popups up every once in a while on here: That people should actually pay attention to their predictions and when they are wrong so they can correct themselves in the future?
1) Which isn’t odd, a huge amount of cis people are very bad at that.Report
You’re saying that I’m “policing”. Essentially saying “you can’t X!” to these folks.
And I’m saying “No”.
The dynamic is that they’re saying “X!” and I am saying “I disagree.”
They can say “X!” all they want.
It’s a free country.
I disagree.
Now, you’re saying “you can’t disagree!”
And I’m saying “I can”.Report
So you literally didn’t read the summary at that link, eh? I admit it’s really long, but literally just the summary.
Gender policing isn’t telling people what they can and cannot do. Because normal people cannot tell other people not to do things. (I mean, it sometimes is that too, but not, like, normally.)
It’s merely indicating people whether or not their behavior is _acceptable_ for their (Perceived) gender. Or, to put it another way, if their gender is matching their behavior.
In fact, the interesting thing about social policing is that it doesn’t even have to impact the person being policed…a good chunk of this sort of policing is making sure that everyone knows what is acceptable, so it’s actually fine if the person being policed doesn’t know, everyone who hears the policing will get the message.
If you want an example of a _good_ sort of policing, not gender based, it’s when people complain about someone who litters. That such people are bad people. It’s social policing, it’s setting the standards for society.
Gender policing is a specific term talking about how Western society has done that WRT gendered behavior for a huge chunk of history, to enforce gender roles. (Trans policing is slightly more complicated, trans people can get policed in both directions, but I’m not going to go into that until you actually understand this.)Report
It’s merely indicating people whether or not their behavior is _acceptable_ for their (Perceived) gender. Or, to put it another way, if their gender is matching their behavior.
Acceptable?
See, I’m not arguing about “acceptable” (and I’m not sure what we mean… socially acceptable? I’m pretty sure that my saying “they can say whatever they want” is me socially accepting their statements!)
I’m arguing about whether I agree with their statements.
And you’re seeing me saying “Nah, I don’t agree with that” as me saying “THAT’S NOT ACCEPTABLE!”
And I don’t agree with you on that.Report
Perhaps you’ve gotten really lost in all this,but there are no ‘statements’ of Dylan that you’re disagreeing with. What you were complaining about and using it to justify your reaction was this:
I don’t even need to rephrase anything here, that last paragraph is the _exact_ definition of policing someone gender. You are complaining about how well they are performing gender. It’s not a disagreement over what she’s saying, it’s you asserting she isn’t _feminine enough_.
You then use her failure to live up to gender norms to accuse her of lying and being a con artist, but that’s the end result, not the gender policing that _lead_ to you doing there.
I quote the Wikipedia page you didn’t read: It is common for normative gender performances of gender to be encouraged and rewarded, while non-normative performances are discouraged through punishment or generally negative reactions. Policing of non-normative performances ranges in intensity from relatively minor discouraging comments to brutal acts of violence.
You notice how the low end of that literally describes exactly what you did?
In fact, you _still_ seem to think the problem is a disagreement over _how well_ she is performing femininity. That you saw one thing and other people saw something else:
YOU ARE INTOLERANT BECAUSE YOU HAVE DECIDED YOU ARE IN CHARGE OF JUDGING OTHER PEOPLE’S FEMININITY. It is not because we are disagreeing over your judgement, it is literally the fact you think not only can judge people over that, but can then decide if they pass some cutoff and if they do not, you are allowed to criticize them for that.
And just in case it’s unclear about the word ‘allowed’, you are obviously _literally_ allowed to criticize anyone you want for any reason. But you pick sexist reasons to do it, like by policing how well you think women are performing their gender, and people will call you out.Report
it’s you asserting she isn’t _feminine enough_.
Hey, don’t take my word for it! You can watch the TikTok yourself! I linked to it above!
YOU ARE INTOLERANT BECAUSE YOU HAVE DECIDED YOU ARE IN CHARGE OF JUDGING OTHER PEOPLE’S FEMININITY.
I’m not “in charge” of it. Goodness, what would that be like?
But you aren’t in charge of it either.
It’s decentralized.
It kind of reminds me of D&D.
Like, if someone said “We should be allowed to have house rules for D&D!”, I’d agree with them. Hear hear! Have whatever house rules you want!
And then if they told me that I should adopt their house rules for D&D, I can then say “Nah, I play D&D differently.”
“I play D&D *AUTHENTICALLY*!”
“Sure. Knock yourself out.”
“You’re *NOT* playing D&D authentically!”
“Whatever.”
“YOU SHOULD ADOPT MY HOUSE RULES!”
“Have your house rules for your house and I’ll have my house rules for my house.”
“THAT’S INTOLERANT!”
What’s wacky is that I see “Have your own house rules in your house and I’ll have my own house rules in my house” as tolerance.Report
Yes, Jaybird, enforcement of the patriarchy is, indeed, decentralized. Making sure that, I dunno, women are nice and demure and don’t talk too loud, and that men don’t hug.
All of society just sorta goes along with it, there’s often no person demanding it be enforced. (Until there is.) Glad you figured that out, I guess.
Now, here’s the question: Are at any point are you going to be stepping back from this and asking: Is this something people should be doing at all? Is it something I should be doing? What exactly am I accomplishing by judging people by how well they fit into gendered rules that I have been taught exist? Why am I punishing, or at least accusing of lying, people who do not fit these rules?
And can this actually just be limited to _trans_ people, as I think you are imagining you are doing, or does attempting to enforce gender norms on them specifically actually just reinforce it for all of society.Report
Oh, and you still haven’t actually answered the original point in that it seems like your judgement, your prediction that this was a PR stunt, was _wrong_, actors don’t get facial feminization surgery for a PR stunt(1), and you just keep doubling down by pointing at the video and saying ‘SEE! SEE!’, like we should all agree with you.
But as I pointed out back then very explicitly, those of us with _actual experience_ do see Dylan being exactly who she claimed to be, she was acting _exactly_ how newly-out trans women behave, and you have literally no experience at this and thus are _incredibly_ bad at judging these things.
And one of us in that discussion was correct.
But you are pretending that we should somehow agree with you! Instead of admitting you were just completely wrong and probably should stop trying to guess based on your concept of how gender should be performed.
Although I’d prefer you stop gender policing _at all_, but at minimum you should admit that you’re bad at this one specific type of judging and maybe be more hesitant to do it in the future.
1) And should I point out that by you including the ‘she now has facial feminization surgery’ in the post here so she’s more feminine, you were rather clearly implying that part of your judgement was _how she looked_, because apparently trans women should instantly have more feminine facial features when they come out, as opposed to that being accomplished via hormones and possible eventual surgery? Do you even hear yourself?Report
But as I pointed out back then very explicitly, those of us with _actual experience_ do see Dylan being exactly who she claimed to be, she was acting _exactly_ how newly-out trans women behave
Oh. This is probably one of the reasons that there’s as much pushback against the whole trans thing as there is, then.
But you are pretending that we should somehow agree with you!
You don’t have to! I fully support the whole “I don’t agree!” thing. I don’t see it as an attack, either. Nor an attempt to police.
I’ll note that your last paragraph does not capture my entire point of what I said. I certainly would not argue that trans women should instantly have more feminine facial features when they come out. Good lord. That would mean that only the pre-adolescents that start on the blockers early could qualify as being authentically trans.
But there is/was an undercurrent of “I’m subverting the dominant paradigm!” to Dylan’s early TikTok’s and that is an *EXCEPTIONALLY* theater kid thing to do.
Well, keep subverting that paradigm. Maybe it will topple.Report
Congratulations, Jaybird, you’ve figured out one of the ways that transphobia exists in a cis-normative society: Because cis people have been taught all their life to police gender, and feel anyone operating outside what they see as gender norms is being inauthentic and pretending.
That’s probably because you’ve literally never had anyone police your gender so you feel it is very unimportant, as opposed to trans people who have probably had people policing their gender their entire life.
…wait, you literally talk about how there is pushback, a thing you yourself were part of, and then immediately assert you weren’t policing. You do understand that gender policing is literally the concept of pushing back against gender non-conformity, right?
No, it’s an exceptionally queer thing to do. You do know that queering, as a very, literally means ‘subverting gender norms’, or, to phrase it as you did, ‘subverting the dominant paradigm’…although the dominant paradigm that Dylan is subverting would be cis-normativity. (Which I thought was hilarious because I already used that word in this post and here you are, trying to figure the term out.)
You just apparently have never come across it in any context except ‘theater kids’.
You do understand that a huge chunk of flamboyant theater kids are queer in one way or another, right? Tell me at least that you know that? Or tell me that at least you know Dylan was asserting, before she came out, that she was a _gay_ man?
Although, I suspect you (And this one isn’t your fault, it’s due to Lies-To-Children that cis people have to be told because they don’t understand any of this.) are not really aware that queer identities are not…quite as clearly defined as names might be, and it’s not the least bit surprising for feminine gay men to realize…they’ve been stopping themselves from crossing a line that maybe they’d be happier on the other side of. That the more feminine they are, the more comfortable they are, and maybe the place they want to be is on the other side of the imaginary line we call gender.Report
You do know that queering, as a very, literally means ‘subverting gender norms’, or, to phrase it as you did, ‘subverting the dominant paradigm’…although the dominant paradigm that Dylan is subverting would be cis-normativity.
Would that even be *POSSIBLE* without people like me?
I provide a valuable service.
I imagine that if what Dylan was doing wasn’t notable at all, Dylan would have found something else entirely to do.
Surely there’s something else that would need queering in a world without people like me.
TO THE BATTLEFRONT!
You just apparently have never come across it in any context except ‘theater kids’.
Past, future, or present… yeah. That is where they tend to show up, ain’t it?
they’ve been stopping themselves from crossing a line that maybe they’d be happier on the other side of. That the more feminine they are, the more comfortable they are, and maybe the place they want to be is on the other side of the imaginary line we call gender.
Without getting into whether this observation is accurate, there seem to be a non-zero number of people for whom this is not true and they have made themselves internet-famous by saying they’d been lied to.
Heck, I can find you a handful of interviews where Dylan explains something to the effect of “I can’t find a date and I don’t know why!”
Here’s straight from the horse’s mouth:
There are some traditionally gendered ways of thinking about beautiful people and this is certainly one of them, isn’t it?
I’m not sure that I’d call the line “imaginary” as much as I’d call it “socially constructed”.
But we’ll get to see this evolve in real time, won’t we?Report
…no, she almost certainly would have told her followers that she was a woman. It would have been really weird not to.
Yeah, there’s about four of them.
But of course, I wasn’t talking about anyone telling anyone anything. People don’t actually tell other people they’re trans. (No, not even kids.) Dylan figure it out while trapped in her house due to the pandemic, IIRC.
…you have _seriously_ misunderstood what I meant by the word ‘happier’.
No one transitions to get dates. People transition with the full knowledge that _their social experience_ is going to be much harder from that point onward. Their employment, finding a partner, sometimes their family, it often blows up basically every relationship they have.
They transition because their current life experience is _worse_. That living as they are living is taking such a told on their mental health and well-being that they cannot function anymore living as they are, and finally they pull the pin.
It is “I am going to break out of this prison and live my entire life as a fugitive because I cannot stand another minute of this’.
In other words, a fluff piece asks her if she’d kissed anyone yet as a woman, and she says no, and that she is getting a little impatient in what is clearly a somewhat joking way.
Then she gets a little honest about how she always had bad experiences dating when she was pretending to be a man (1), and is hoping that it will go better this time.
Yeah, in some alternate universe that’s her transitioning because she wanted to find a date and was lied to, I guess.
1) And this is the point in the post for the Things Trans People Know That Cis People Don’t: Trans people pre-transition are often horrible with relationships because they’re are pretending to be who they’re fundamentally are not, even before they even realize they’re doing that.Report
For what it’s worth, I’m not accusing “transpeople” of this.
I am accusing Dylan Mulvaney of this.
“Is this something people should be doing at all? Is it something I should be doing?”
Should? I’m not sure about “should”.
Like, I see it more of a “if P then Q, if R then S” situation. Do you want Q? Then you should P. If, instead, you want S? You should R.
“What exactly am I accomplishing by judging people by how well they fit into gendered rules that I have been taught exist?”
From here, I see it as “what exactly am I accomplishing by saying that the emperor’s outfit ain’t all that?”
I suppose that I am accomplishing nothing. Nothing at all. The emperor will still parade about and the emperor’s advisors and lackeys and other assorted assistants will continue to praise the sheen of the ermine collar.
Why am I punishing, or at least accusing of lying, people who do not fit these rules?
I don’t see “I don’t agree” as necessarily an accusation of lying.
Hey, maybe the fabric really is only visible to truly smart people. Maybe it’s all a matter of perspective, at the end of the day.
“I think X.”
“I don’t agree.”
Now, you seem to think that the second person is punishing the first. Maybe accusing them of lying.
I don’t agree.Report
You are saying that a trans person is not a trans person. Attempt to assert you aren’t doing that because they _aren’t_ a trans person is absurd circular logic.
I thought you had realized she actually is trans because _no one gets surgery for a bit_, but apparently not.
You: Now, maybe you see Dylan’s Tiktok there as yet another girl going out into nature and enjoying it and cannot comprehend the mindset of someone watching that and saying “that’s a flamboyant theater kid”.
Now, you said ‘kid’, but if you meant girl there, that sentence literally would make no sense. Everyone watching that video would agree with those comments. So clearly what you’re saying is that you see her as a boy (Or, rather, man.)
Which, whatever. You can think of people in your head however you want.
But what you can’t do _without enforcing the patriarchy_ is saying ‘This person who says they are a woman seems to look and act a lot like a man, and thus the pushback they got is justified’.
That’s how the patriarchy functions. There are occasional laws, but it’s not actually enforced by laws, it’s enforced by a few people being very proactive and critical about gender norms and people like you just sorta nodding along and saying ‘Yeah, I don’t know what they expected, that woman was wearing pants’.Report
You are saying that a trans person is not a trans person.
No.
I am saying that a person claiming to be a transperson at a given point in time is not representative of all transpeople.
Goodness… what mischief might I get away with if I said “okay, anyone who claims to be trans is now representative of all transpeople!”
‘Yeah, I don’t know what they expected, that woman was wearing pants’.
My criticism of Dylan for making that video had downright nothing to do with pants.Report
That is not what you or anything else was talking about. No one is saying she is a representative of all trans people! The word ‘representative’ or ‘represent’ does not appear on this page in the context of her until now, or in the May discussion.
You were talking about whether a person claiming to be trans was actually trans. You asserted she was a theater kid performing ‘womanface’.
And you are also obfuscating the issue by phrasing it as ‘person claiming to be a transperson’, which could also apply to someone who creates an internet identity that is trans (Something uncommon, but which does happen.), as opposed to what we are talking about, which is an actual real person with a real identity who has claimed they are trans. (Which really hasn’t ever happened that I can recall, but is certainly much rare than the ‘people trolling on the internet’ you have conflated with it via your phrasing.)Report
Well, let me look at this:
There are a handful of people who claim to be on the other side of detransitioning.
Would you like to give their claims enough credence to include in this argument?
Because the whole “I am trans at time T but I am not trans at time T+1” dynamic might make this discussion more interesting.Report
That sentence is not how any of those words work. There are people who have detransitioned.
What are you talking about, ‘their claims’?
You’re acting like gender transition (and detransition, which also is a transition) is a claim that people make instead of a process they are clearly doing in front of everyone. Transition is the _process of changing gender presentation_, not identity.
The problem here, Jaybird, is that your weird ‘I shall come in from an odd angle with implications and questions’ doesn’t really work very well when you don’t know the topic at all and don’t know what people in that area normally think.
Because I rather suspect that you don’t know that trans people are _incredibly aware_ that people are often wrong about their gender, considering a huge amount of trans people started out wrong, assuming they were the gender they were assigned. And even after they realized they weren’t that, trans people often sorta move around until they find a gender identity that seems to explain them. Sometimes, very rarely, they end up back on their original gender.(1)(2)
This is why the general rule is you just accept whatever people are saying about their gender at any particular time, barring _extreme_ exceptional circumstances (By which I mean, ‘a mass shooter’s lawyer suddenly claiming they are non-binary to try to escape hate crime charges’, not ‘has a tiktok’.), and you don’t think you know better than they do.
It is perfectly possible for someone to be trans, and then not be trans…although if you want to phrase it as ‘they were mistaken about being trans, then realized they were not’, that’s common also.
But it’s not your job to try to correct them, and not only is it not your job, you have absolutely no information that would allow you to do that job. I.e, I’m not saying it’s not your job in the sense it is not your business, I’m saying it’s not your job any more than it is your job to try to second guess astronauts who are operating the thrusters on the space shuttle.
1) Although most people who transition to their original gender are doing it not because they are not trans, but because being publicly trans is too stressful for them, because of losing jobs or relationships or random internet idiots wage hate campaigns against them. Again, transition is the process of changing gender presentation, not identity.
2) And there is an even smaller amount of those people who been recruited by transphobes to run around screaming and suing about that. Which because of the PR and how they get promoted all the time and how transphobes like to just invent them out of thin air, is a much much smaller group than you think…I wasn’t kidding when I said there was about four of them who are known to actually exist.Report
This is why the general rule is you just accept whatever people are saying about their gender at any particular time
For the most part, I’m down with this.
But given the fluidity of the subject, I do think that it’s possible for an outsider to see something like Dylan and say “that’s a theater kid schtick”.
And that’s not “policing” or me saying that Dylan needs to change or has to go to Gender Jail or anything like that.
It’s just saying that it’s obvious that Dylan is “queering femininity”.Report
Does this observation support or refute the idea that the boycott was motivated by bigotry?Report
For some involved in the boycott, it was. For others, it was closer to a “I guess I ain’t the target audience no more”.
If having a single bigot involved in the boycott is enough to get it to say “this boycott was motivated by bigotry!”, then it certainly meets that standard.Report
I think its amazing that you think “I am not trans so therefore I must not be the target audience” makes them sound less like bigots.Report
That’s not what I said but I appreciate that you needed to translate what I said into something that made sense to you.Report
Your exact words:
For others, it was closer to a “I guess I ain’t the target audience no more”.
They decided they weren’t the target audience, because the brand used a trans person as a spokesperson.Report
Ah, now *THAT* I agree with.
There’s a school of thought that says something like “what people purchase and consume ties into their self-image” or something like that and so advertising doesn’t sell a product as much as it sells an idea.
The VP made a big deal about how she wanted to shed the old “fratty” image and pick up a new more “inclusive” image.
The people who used to see Bud Light as “their” beer suddenly found themselves being sold a new image.
And they said “I guess I ain’t the target audience no more”.
And you know what? THEY WERE RIGHT! SHE CAME OUT AND SAID THAT THEY WEREN’T!!!
So they stopped buying the product.
You see this as “bigotry”. I’d be happy to agree that this or that example of a particularly loud and ugly performance of not purchasing the beer is evidence of bigotry. Sure.
But as a whole? Eh. Sometimes target audiences change. Sometimes you’re not in it anymore. It’s okay to move on at that point.
I mean, especially if the product is oh-so-very fungible.Report
Yes, they saw someone endorsing the beer, and made the choice to see it as no longer “their” brand.
They could have done what everyone else does, and accepted that many different types of people enjoy the brand. If we see black people endorsing a product, we all understand that yes, the beer is for non-black people as well. We all share the public space of brands.
But they insist that the brand is exclusive- it is “theirs”. If it is endorsed by a trans person they refuse to share it.Report
and made the choice to see it as no longer “their” brand.
The VP of Marketing said that they were going to pivot and, indeed, they pivoted.
The message got across.
This was a successful marketing campaign! If your definition of “marketing campaign” is to communicate something like “we’re pivoting”.
But they insist that the brand is exclusive- it is “theirs”. If it is endorsed by a trans person they refuse to share it.
It doesn’t seem like the majority of the folks who walked away are insisting on anything.
They’ve moved from “doing something” to “no longer doing something”.
You’re having to stretch to turn their passive inaction back into active action in order to criticize it (which is fine) but the majority of the folks who just stopped buying Bud Light merely just stopped buying Bud Light.Report
They were pivoting to be inclusive of trans people and this is what made conservatives alienated (again, their exact word).
And yes, the people who stopped buying the brand were making an active choice. No power was compelling them, they were doing it freely and telling us bluntly that they were making a free choice.
The conservative hero, Ron DeSantis is now threatening legal action against the company for daring to include trans people in their ad. This is a very definite active choice.Report
I’m pretty sure that A-B isn’t entitled to keep their customer base. Especially after the VP of marketing said that they wanted to change it.
No power was compelling them, they were doing it freely and telling us bluntly that they were making a free choice.
And they stopped choosing to purchase Bud Light after the marketing campaign came out and said “we’re going for a new audience now”.
The conservative hero, Ron DeSantis is now threatening legal action against the company for daring to include trans people in their ad.
The pretext is that the company deliberately shot itself in the foot and turned a blue chip stock into one that lost a lot of money and something about how the marketing was a failure to shareholders or something like that. (Pretty sure that this will fail. If you look at the 3 year chart, the line goes up and the line goes down but it bounces around $55.)
That would be a good way to strike out at the pensioners, though. Enron a company that everybody has in their portfolio.Report
I notice you keep avoiding telling us who the “new audience” is.
Because the new audience is the old one, plus one new member.
No one ever suggested that cis people weren’t welcome. They never stopped ads showing athletes, suburban dads or soccer moms. They were just adding transpeople.
But conservatives refused to be part of any audience which includes trans people.Report
Oh, is that what you wanted to know? The LGBTQQIP2SA community.
“Oh, you’re saying that that doesn’t overlap with the other community?”
“The VP of Marketing didn’t seem to think so. Neither did the old audience.”
No one ever suggested that cis people weren’t welcome.
Well, I’d go back to what Alyssa said herself in her interviews.
But conservatives refused to be part of any audience which includes trans people.
Some of them did, looks like. That’s absolutely true. Bud Light went out of their way to come up with a new advertising campaign to try to woo them back, even.
Bud offended a chunk of their customer base.
“They shouldn’t be offended!”
Dude. You have no idea how often I have thought that thought over the last two decades.Report
Wait a second… I might have been premature on that.
This is from 2019:
So it looks like Bud Light has been supporting the LGBTQQIP2SA community for years.
This was triggered by Dylan Mulvaney specifically.
Maybe there’s something specifically offputting about Dylan.Report
LOL.
Seriously, I audibly snickered.Report
“But conservatives refused to be part of any audience which includes trans people.”
Actually, the most logical conclusion is “bud lite drinkers refused to be a part of a audience that included trans people” hence their not purchasing as much of that beer. There are several reasons why both “regular” bud lite drinkers and trans folk might object to being stuck together marketing wise…..Report
Such as?Report
If Bud Lite was smart, they did that research and know. I didn’t and don’t.Report
Well if you don’t know just ask any conservative including the ones here.
They are most eager to explain their reasons.Report
You’re speculating that the self identified conservatives on this site drink bud lite and participated in the boycott. I’m not. The only way to really know is to poll bud light drinkers.Report
For my part, I’m a wino.
Maybe we could ask Chip if the recent kerfuffle inspired him to purchase Bud Light in solidarity!Report
You’ve already tried. It didn’t get anywhere. For good reason.Report
Yeah.
This cartoon shows the opposite of what you seem to think it does.Report
…except when they show up in public, I guess? Because we’re actually pretty much the only time I’ve ever seen you talk about a trans woman, and…here we are.
The ‘outsider’ thing gets a little more dubious when _you_ keep holding that position and trying to defend it even when it’s been pointed out it’s wrong.
We aren’t talking about some random abstract person, hell, you’re _literally the person who introduced the idea she was faking_ into the discussion. This wasn’t a discussion anyone else was having, it wasn’t a discussion the site was having, it was you, not some unknowable ‘outsider’.
And to defend it, you keep focusing on the ‘theater kid’ part of what you said. But you didn’t just say she was a theater kid, which I guess would be fine. You said she was a theater kid _instead of_ ‘a girl enjoying nature’. Said she was doing womanface.
You keep hiding behind the gender-neutrality of the word kid and pretending you weren’t calling her a flamboyant man pretending to be a woman. But you were…and in fact still kinda are.
Indeed, you haven’t even explicitly stated you were wrong in this particular example. You mentioned she had FFS (Which seems to disprove the ‘doing it for views’ thing by itself.) and has ‘toned it down’, which is literally what you complained about, but…you haven’t even admitted you were wrong.
No, it’s you saying that Dylan needs to change because _you will criticize her if she does not do ‘woman’ better_.
Or, because this is how gender policing works, it’s less about Dylan (Who will never see anything you say specifically) and more as a _signal_ to the public in general that trans women who fail in some described way will get, and deserved, criticism from society. (And of course the secret is that people can _always_ find a way that trans women fail at being women, which is one of the ways that trans gender policing and transmisogyny differs from regular gender policing and misogyny.)
Just to drive a little more social pressure on people not to transition. Just to make the incredibly hard thing they’re doing a little harder.Report
…except when they show up in public, I guess?
No. There are plenty of celebrities (even actors!) who are trans and they don’t inspire the whole “oh, that’s a theater kid right there” response.
The ‘outsider’ thing gets a little more dubious when _you_ keep holding that position and trying to defend it even when it’s been pointed out it’s wrong.
You say it’s wrong. That’s different from demonstrating that it’s wrong.
You said she was a theater kid _instead of_ ‘a girl enjoying nature’. Said she was doing womanface.
The original conversation where you asked me which video I was talking about. Now, I admit: I haven’t watched a whole lot of Dylan’s videos. I can’t get more than five seconds into them before my eyes roll into the back of my head. The only one that I’ve watched the whole one of is the whole “nature” one that struck (and strikes!) me as being a “this is you” joke.
No, it’s you saying that Dylan needs to change because _you will criticize her if she does not do ‘woman’ better_.
I’m 99% sure that Dylan will never, ever read what I have written.
From my perspective, I’m not policing Dylan at all. I am, instead, saying “The emperor’s outfit is nowhere near as good-looking as you guys are saying it is.”
You can sing the praises of the subtle fabric textures but I ain’t seeing it.
If people want to transition? Hey. Great. Best of luck.
If people want to start telling me how amazing the emperor’s outfit is?
Well, in Dylan’s case, perhaps you should run with the whole “the smarter you are, the better the clothing looks” thing. Because I don’t see an amazing outfit.Report
I was assuming you were smart enough to figure out that someone getting surgery is actually serious. I thought that was why you mentioned it.
You are, indeed, making it very very clear that if anyone wants to transition and they don’t do it to your standards, you will criticize them and suggest they are fakers doing it for attention.
The problem is you can’t figure out a problem with that.
Best of luck except for the whole ‘…and I reserve the right to call you liars and mock you if you fall short in any way’, along with the implicit ‘and you will _always_ fall short’ that women have had to put up with forever.Report
Nope, there are plenty of people out there that I don’t particularly see as deserving criticism for how they’re doing it.
But the idea that nobody, anywhere, should be criticized for bring provocative when they’re deliberately pushing boundaries and trying to redefine stuff is strange.
Queering gender is one of those things that you’d think would get people to say “nope”.
I mean, even in the face of the whole “everything is performative and there’s no wrong way to do it!” crowd.Report
By deliberately pushing boundaries, you mean ‘Being who they actually are in ways you do not like’, not ‘pushing boundaries’.
I hate to inform you of this, but women doing random videos on tiktok about being outside is not even vaguely ‘pushing boundaries’.
Yeah, what is with those woman wearing pants and voting? Of course people are going to say nope!Report
Note: I’m not saying Dylan should stop being Dylan. Hey! Go for it! It’s a free country!
Make those tiktoks!
“Oh, so you agree with the claims made in the tiktoks?”
“No. That’s a theater kid doing a schtick.”
“THAT’S THE SAME THING AS BEING OPPOSED TO WOMEN VOTING!”
“I disagree.”Report
Jaybird now thinks societal pressure doesn’t exist. Let’s all remember that.Report
“I state a statement.”
“I disagree with your statement.”
“OH MY GOSH THIS IS THE SAME THING AS A REALLY BAD ANALOGY!”
“No, it’s not.”
Out of curiosity, does your disagreeing with me count as “societal pressure”?
Or is this one of those things like the whole “punching up” distinction that makes it okay for you to disagree with me but I should really only agree with you because of my relative privilege?Report
I have the right to be an asshole, but the corollary to that right is everyone else’s right to treat me like one and call me out as one.
If my response is “Well, I have the right to be an asshole” or doubling down on the assholery, take the win.Report
What I think McArdle is saying is that social media makes it seems like the most advanced social views are widespread when they are not or at least not as common in the real world. Most people might not be anti-trans per se but they aren’t gun ho about trans rights either and still see them as very weird and non-mainstream people. When social media shapes business opinions and that turns out not to be as popular as thought, corporations retreat.Report
I’m also reminded of comment on the other blog that the culture wars are basically being fought between two groups of middle class people, the educated professionals and the petit-bourgeois with actual working class people taking the back seat.Report
That would be the stupidest thing imaginable. Trans people hate Jenner. She pals around with anti-trans bigots and will say anything in a desperate attempt to fit in with them.Report
I don’t think it’d be going out on a limb to say that Bud lite’s primary marketing target wasn’t and isn’t trans people and their allies.Report
Well, that raises an interesting question. Was Bud Light trying to woo the trans community? I’d guess they were trying to use Mulvaney as a signal to the kind of people who would be allies to the trans community. If viewed that way, this wasn’t outreach to the very small trans market, it was outreach to a social / political faction. In that light, you can say that they were willing to lose their base to pick up a different one.Report
Sure, if that was their plan. But I think that the better take away from this saga is simply that social media is c-suite and decision maker brain rot. It gives them a distorted understanding of what “everyone” wants and it skews decision makers incentive away from messages and decisions that will be broadly successful and towards messages and decisions that will earn said decision maker plaudits from their social media environ. In a lot of cases it’s an open question as to if the decision maker is even thinking about broad success at all.Report
But part of their rote declaration is a commitment to revolution. Everywhere else on this site we say “when people tell you who they are, believe them”. Can’t we do that here? I’d guess that in their hearts they thought they could completely change the world without getting a scratch, so it’s okay to pity them, but we also have to recognize their agency.Report
I’m unaware of any declarations of “commitment to revolution” that predate* the foofaraw that followed when right wing media glommed onto the campaign and it went viral. If you have any references I’d be interested because I haven’t seen any but I confess not to having dug into it deeply.
*Declarations after it blew up are meaningless since, at that point, they’d be skittering for any ideological shelter or retort they could find.Report
I do not think they were and would refer back to what I thought was the basic point of the McArdle piece. Marketing is in a lot of ways preaching to the choir. Even expanding into new areas is a lot of letting people know they are part of the choir, they just hadn’t realized it yet.
Bud Lite’s error was the twitter brained misconception that there really is ra-ra mainstream support for what Mulvaney is doing. They weren’t trying to get trans people, or people for whom the trans cause is important, they just assumed that any performance that is at least superficially popular in certain, very left dominated social media spaces would also necessaily be popular with the normie young men who are their core consumers. This was obviously an idiotic assumption to anyone not Extremely Online but from their tunnel visioned corporate perspective the decision made total sense.Report
Everybody who bought our product yesterday will buy it tomorrow.
Therefore: All we need to do is get more people to buy our product tomorrow and we don’t even need to think about the people who bought our product yesterday.Report
I really don’t think that’s it either. North put it better than me, but to simplify it, I think the people at Bud really believed that what is popular on twitter/TikTok is what’s popular everywhere, and it never would have occurred to them that it might be controversial or downright unpopular. I understand now terminated personnel at Bud Lite may have couched what they were doing in other ways but I don’t see any reason to take that at face value. They said that stuff because they also think it’s popular to say that stuff and in the world they inhabit it probably is.Report
I think that there might have been some “if it generates controversy, JUST SPELL OUR NAME RIGHT!” there as well. Perhaps a dash of “We’ll just call the people who pretend to be offended ‘bigots’.”Report
No, Jay, I think that to the degree the execs thought about it at all it they thought about it like a variation of the apocryphal Pauline Kael quote that Nixon couldn’t have won because everyone she knew voted against him.
But I think the social media brain rot in this case was that the people behind this Bud Lite decision probably weren’t even thinking about how the masses would respond to it at all, but rather were thinking about the plaudits and praise they’d get from their social media environs for putting Mulvaney in their branding message first and foremost. Then only absently going Kael like as a second order thought about how it’d be received.
So I don’t think it was cynical manipulation or even, screw those hicks defiance- I think it was pure social media thoughtlessness.Report
If that’s the case (and it makes sense!), we’re going to see a correction of sorts in the coming months.
I hope that it’s a funny one.Report
“Trans people hate Jenner. She pals around with anti-trans bigots and will say anything in a desperate attempt to fit in with them.”
mask-off moment for the transphobe hereReport
I believe she was saying she wanted another customer base. No mass market company wants to reduce its number of buyers.Report
If that’s the case, she failed and failed hard.
Here’s what she said:
I appreciate that she had a nigh-impossible task put before her. I’m not sure that I would have succeeded where she failed.
But it is possible to fail quickly and catastrophically and to fail slowly and steadily and her failure was not slow and steady.
I mean, assuming that it’s possible to fail. What does failure even mean?Report
The failure is obvious, since she’s out of a job.
I still fail to see how trying to expand a corporation’s customer base somehow offends its existing customer base, especially since the actual product has not changed one bit. This is not a New Coke situation.Report
If we can’t see “how” but are then stuck with how it appears to have actually happened, we’re in a place where it seems to me that we have two options for a conclusion:
1. Our inability to see how is primarily our problem
2. Our inability to see how is primarily somebody else’s problem
“The failure is obvious, since she’s out of a job.”
I still get a vibe that she shouldn’t have done anything differently and that the outcome is indicative of a problem with the customer base rather than with the VP of Marketing.
Maybe I’m misreading the vibe but I, seriously, feel that vibe.Report
I mean, who on earth could expect a however long it was TikTok video of someone holding a can of beer to somehow offend a significant chunk of said beer company’s customer base?
Ultimately, the marketplace is the great decider, and it sure isn’t rational sometimes, however much we wish it were so.Report
You do understand how trying to expand a corporation’s customer base could offend its existing customer base, though. I’d bet you could think of a dozen examples off the top of your head. Do you mean that you don’t see why this particular attempt alienated the existing customer base?Report
No, I meant exactly what I wrote.Report
OK, so for example I’m thinking of Denny’s Death to America Platter. The meal itself was nearly identical to their other fare, except for the two broken toothpicks on top of the burger that represented the Twin Towers, but it was just bad timing on the rollout. When that Starbucks did that latte art swastika thing, that’s another one. Woolworth’s “Old Style” lunch counter was also a dud. And I know what you’re going to say, but Woolworth’s opened those lunch counters especially for the occasion, so it wasn’t to get rid of old customers.Report
Hilarious examples, and I would totally eat at that lunch counter. (I know where you went there, never fear.)
Maybe it’s just me and my lazy ways, but I’ve just never been that invested in any consumer goods to try to lead a nationwide boycott. I’ve got better things to worry about.Report
I’ve been pointing it out this whole time, this wasn’t a led nationwide boycott. There was no organization, no petitions, no terms. This was people looking at the Mulvaney video and saying “nope”. If some group could even tenuously claim to have been the instigator, they’d be bragging about it non-stop, but this was purely grass roots. Also, this was the opposite of people being invested in consumer goods.Report
So, your definition of ‘groups’ does not include Fox News?
And I like how you think the fact there were not petition was a _good_ thing. Boycotts are based around demands, that companies stop doing something. The fact that no one had any petitions pretty much indicated that no one actually had any demands they were willing to write down.
Why would people not want to write their demands down, I wonder?Report
Fox News doesn’t organize boycotts. I don’t know when they started covering the story, or how much coverage it got, but I’d guess they were equally enraged about five other stories each day, and none of those collapsed a long-established major brand. The only other brand Fox News has done that to is Fox News. So there was something different here. I didn’t see an anti-Bud Light march anywhere, or hear about protests against bars. This wasn’t a boycott in any conventional sense.Report
Imagine I wrote this sentence:
“To American conservatives, transgenderism is a moral abomination, something which is so abhorrent as to be comparable with genocide or terrorism.”
This is why I keep saying this is bigotry. In this formulation, people transitioning from one gender to another isn’t something which can be tolerated like a different religion or something, but instead, is an affront which must be opposed and suppressed wherever possible.Report
The error wasn’t in trying to expand the brand’s base, it was they way in which they did it–alienating the existing customer base.
I took 1 marketing class in college decades ago. I’m, by appearance, similar in age to the woman in this video, and even I am not that stupid.
You do not piss off your existing customer base. You ensure you try and preserve it. Now, you can, at the margins, try to expand, but you expand into near/adjacent markets, not pull a marketing 180.
She screwed up and now she’s gone. It’s almost as if she didn’t know what the market for your product was.Report
I think you’ve, at least to me, identified the problem. It probably never occurred to her that what she got produced could offend anyone. There’s the disconnect, and it’s how she got disconnected from her job.
See my above comment about the rationality of the marketplace.Report
“. It probably never occurred to her that what she got produced could offend anyone. ”
That’s a pretty bad mistake for someone in charge of marketing a mass-appeal product. As an internet commenter you’re free to just judge these conservatives and stop there, but someone whose job it is to protect a brand should damn well think about the potential effect of her choices.
I do think (as I said when this first came up) that it’s a little unfair just because you never know what might go viral, but still, it’s what she was getting paid for.Report
“but someone whose job it is to protect a brand should damn well think about the potential effect of her choices.”
Exactly.
“Group Vice President of Marketing Daniel Blake and Bud Light Marketing Vice President Alissa Heinerscheid,”
Group VP and Marketing VP. These are not mid level positions–they are, in fact, quite senior. I’d expect that they have AT LEAST 20 years of experience and a resume full of significant achievements. That they were so tone deaf or didn’t apparently understand their consumer is 1) stunning and 2) reeks of hubris.Report
But how do you predict irrationality?Report
I would suggest through testing.
Like, hammer out: What are the three biggest Bud Light markets in the country?
Find out what those markets are. What are the three biggest bars/nightclubs where they sell Bud Light?
GO TO THESE BARS/NIGHTCLUBS. See what’s going on.
Oh, do people buy pitchers for the Friday Night Shuffleboard Tournament in this city, the darts tournament in that city, and line dancing at the nightclub?
Well, then you go to the cities where you most want penetration and find out where they have shuffleboard tournaments, darts, and/or line dancing.
And then you see if you can have a Bud Light Pitcher Night Shuffleboard Tournament.
Or if the cities with the most Bud Light sales are doing something else, DO THAT.
You predict irrationality by doing research!Report
https://ordinary-times.com/2023/07/17/thats-not-how-that-works-the-new-rights-theory-of-power/#comment-3860900Report
A company like this, probably does that type of research periodically, and if their market share was changing, was ALREADY aware of the demographics of their market, and had provided that to “what’s her face”.Report
You’re the one claiming that the market responded irrationally. To me, this whole thing was like watching Grizzly Man.Report
I wonder who the first offended person was who just by accident happened to be on Dylan Mulvaney’s TikTok account.
I’m throwing in the towel on trying to understand this.Report
I’d only heard of him in passing, mostly from women’s bloggers complaining about him getting beauty care contracts. But he had done an interview with Biden, so he wasn’t so tiny.Report
That. That exactly. Everyone else believes the same things I do. Everyone else is gung ho on inclusivity.
The job of marketing is to NOT believe that everyone else thinks exactly the same way that the marketer thinks and is in favor of what she favors.
McDonalds or B-King, experimented with a child actor in ads. They rolled it out in a small test market.
The kid was “popular” but always played obnoxious children. Sales went down in the test markets because people loved to hate him.
The campaign was dropped and never rolled out on the mass market.
What this VP did was risky and unprofessional.Report
The thing is, you had to be a follower of Mulvaney on TikTok to have seen it, at least at first. The weird virality is what did her in.Report
All it takes is one retweet to the right person at the right time to kick off virality.
And “this makes me really happy” doesn’t get a quarter of the retweets that “OMG LOOK AT THIS AND BE OUTRAGED!” does.Report
Truer words, my friend. Social media in a nutshell.Report
When I was on Twitter and TikTok, I made sure to follow people that I disagreed with. I doubt all of Mulvaney’s followers were fans. If he is well known enough, I am sure there were hate-followers.Report
That did not occur to me!Report
If your goal is to appeal to younger drinkers, then your obvious route is college sports, and colleges in general.
Better would be to do some research on what young drinkers do and like.
In the video she explains her reasoning was they needed to go with inclusion-for-inclusion’s-sake. That’s the kind of virtue signaling I’d expect from HR.Report
I posted this in David’s thread about what he’s looking for in a 2024 candidate but it works equally well here. Trump and his cabal fully intend to destroy democracy when they come back to power. Thus “conserving nothing.”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-17-2023Report
That may be the least thoughtful writing I’ve seen all year. There wasn’t a single original thought in it, and no effort to understand the opponents’ argument. You don’t have to always understand your opponents’ arguments, but when you’re writing an essay about them you should at least make an attempt.
I guess you could argue the assumption that millions of people switched beers on orders from Kid Rock is somewhat original, but it’s also obviously stupid.Report
WWKRD?Report
Classic framing of the opposition argument as a scarecrow and then knocking it down with established narrative. The tell is: “The complaint appears to be…”
No actual attempt to understand the others perspective. It’s intellectually dishonest.Report
Yes. If the author was interested in finding out what the complaint really is, he could have lifted a finger.Report
Do tell.Report
The other perspective is the Bud Light can’t be drunk by or marketed to anyone who isn’t a cis-het conservative white man. And it was that marketing that sent Kid Rock and a bunch of other people over the edge.
For all the freedom and liberty loving being allegedly done by conservatives this sure smacks of bigotry.Report
Not everything is about sex and not every marketing strat should be about sex.
Market to people who like College Sports. One assumes there are gay and trans people who like sports. More importantly, a lot of drinkers also like sports.
Market to people who like race car driving. One assumes there are gay and trans people who like racing cars. More importantly, a lot of drinkers also like sports.
If the trans community is more prone to drinking beer than most then I have not heard. If the drinking community is more likely to go trans I haven’t heard.
The VP explained that she was marketing this way “because inclusion”. IMHO she was NOT trying to market to the trans community because it’s so tiny. She was trying to make this beer “the inclusive beer”.
That’s great for someone in HR, it’s mal-practice for marketing. IMHO she did no research. She just assumed that because it was where her head was at, it would be popular because everyone’s first priority is inclusion.Report
Why are trans people deemed not worthy of inclusion in Bud light’s world – especially after a decade of pride themed marketing that drew no backlash?Report
“Worthy” has nothing to do with it.
Gay marriage has been a thing for almost a decade. LGB is so not-controversial that the old fogies on the Supreme Court ruled there was no problem with them getting married.
Trans doesn’t have anything close to that history.
Society, as a whole, view LGB as “different but not in a mentally ill way”. That’s not the case for Trans.Report
Literally no one believed any of that five years. This is you projecting current conservative spittle-laced screaming as some true thing.
The actual population of this country sees LGBTQ as just that, LGBTQ, and is statistically fine with it, and the people who are not fine with it have a problem with the entire thing. There is not some mystery group that is fine with part of that any not another part.Report
“gender identity disorder” was officially classified as a mental illness until 2013.
Homosexuality stopped being a mental illness in 1973.
That’s the American Psychiatric Association, i.e. the official experts. “The actual population of this country” opinion lags that.Report
See, you guys keep indignantly saying you aren’t bigots, but then repeatedly saying that transgenderism is either a mental illness or faking for attention, and in any case, something that need not be tolerated.
If you want to defend yourself against charges of bigotry, you shouldn’t just repeat the thing we think is bigotry.Report
It seems like a lot of the gender discourse is some weird positional signaling.
Like, here’s a fun question:
“Can White People Be Two-Spirit?”
I have, seriously, heard that the answer to this question is *NO*.
Like, there are genders out there that only certain races have access to.
This is a game! I want to know what the rules are!Report
Imagine for a moment if we treated religion the way we treat transgender:
It is obvious that there is no god. This is a simple and obvious fact.
Anyone who talks to an invisible being is obviously either mentally ill or faking.
I refuse to engage in this charade of mental illness, and refuse to patronize any business which hires religious people.
I also vote against laws which protect religions from discrimination in employment.
I demand that schools forbid the wearing of religious emblems or attire, and forbid any attempts by students or faculty from speaking to an invisible being.
If consenting adults want to talk to an invisible being in the privacy of their homes I will allow it, but I want to make it illegal to bring children into this sickness and therefore parochial schools should be shut down and parents arrested, with their children being taken from them and given to decent atheist parents.
P.S. I am not a bigot.Report
“Hey, you can believe whatever you want.”
“So you agree with me?”
“No.”
“That’s bigotry.”Report
I think its useful to summarize the progression of the conversations here:
We’ve moved from “concerns about women’s athletes” or “concerns about overly lax safeguards for minor treatment” to “We consider transgender to be a mental illness or fakery and unworthy of tolerance”.
So long as it is naked and open, I think that’s about as much as we can say.Report
“We weren’t able to reach agreement on X, we weren’t able to reach agreement on Y, and now we’re not able to even define each other’s position on Z! It’s *OBVIOUS* what is going on!”Report
Actually we are all here in complete agreement on what the positions are.Report
Yes.
Society mostly behaves that way outside of very limited religious ceremonies.
So if the airplane is crashing and the pilot tries to pray it away rather than doing something, he can be charged with this if he lives through the crash (this has happened).
Parents have the responsibility to give medical care to their children even if they think prayer is better. We arrest a handful of people every year for this.
You want to rip up the First AM and believe your point of view will get more popular and widespread if that happens?
My expectation is the God Delusion will eventually fade into the dustbin of history. I also think it will take centuries.Report
Do you see an absurdity to accepting circumcision, while banning puberty blockers?
To allowing private schools to teach about an invisible being, but forbidding any depiction of two men holding hands?
To repeat my question in reverse, what if we treated transgender the way we treat religion, as something covered by “freedom of conscience”?Report
Then someone needs to explain convincingly to the American Public why the appropriate comparison isn’t female “circumcision” (i.e. “female genital multination”).
And when the same people explaining that also insist that trans female athletes are exactly like other females or that there are no biological differences between men and women, they’re badly damaging their credibility.
There are people who insist that their god wants them to abuse their children. Society mostly opposes that.
For example the courts have consistently held that Jehovah Witness’ parents can’t refuse blood products for their minor children.Report
Athletic organization already have very specific rules about things like age, weight classes, steroid use.
So we can put trans athletes in a separate category where they may indeed be legitimately banned from competition against cis athletes.
So now that we are past that, can we agree that drag shows, cross dressing, and changing pronouns are covered under freedom of conscience norms?Report
I’m not sure what “freedom of conscience norms” are.
IMHO everything I just quoted is irrelevant to the Trans issue.
The Trans issue is whether we’re going to let people change genders, and given we let people do all sorts of other body modification for less claimed reason, I don’t see why not.
My expectation is within a century or so most of society will be cyborgs, and it will be a good thing.
As for cross dressing, as a mater of policy, I have no opinion on (women’s) fashion(*). Various entertainers, movies (etc) have done so over the years without it causing problems, it’s not a big deal.
There are fashion successes and fashion failures, but it’s not a threat to society nor something politicians should be involved in.
(*) This policy has served me very well. I’ve spent years living with 5 women with differing fashion opinions. If they’re fighting over dying the dog blue, I don’t want to get involved.Report
Put differently, I see no reason why Cross Dressing should be illegal.
We let women wear men’s clothes. It often looks better on them than it looks on us.
A cross dress show is where a man dresses up as a woman and pretends to try to fool people. That’s acting. It might be bad acting and not entertaining but those are different problems.
If we’re not going to outlaw the Monty Python Crew for doing it then I don’t see why we’d bother drawing lines, much less where the lines would be drawn.Report
Re-read one of Leonard Cohen’s last poems again today. Been thinking about it a lot, recently.
What is coming
All that to say: You aren’t going to like what comes after theism.Report
This is what people have been saying since the Enlightenment (you remember the Enlightenment, the thing you claim to support, right?)
That is if The Holy Magisterium of the Church is abandoned, the floodgates of chaos and disorder will open and dogs and cats will live together.
I mean, stop reciting your Decline narrative for just one moment and look at what is actually happening.
Young people, the most irreligious generation ever, are leading perfectly normal, perfectly happy lives.
They don’t need religion to be happy. They just don’t.
If you feel you need it, great. But issuing dark ominous threats of What Is To Come is just a stale retread of the Westboro crowd.Report
No, Chip. I’m a materialist. I do not believe in two substances.
I’m also not the greatest fan of “The Holy Magisterium of the Church” but neither do I think that it should be abolished. Heck, I’m fairly sure that it *WON’T* be.
But the Enlightenment concept of it? The Sky God?
That might go away. And it will be replaced with Earth Gods again.Report
See, it’s great that you have this fervent faith in your intuitive hunches and gut feels.
I’m just not sure why anyone should believe them since as we’ve repeatedly demonstrated, there’s no evidence for any of it.
From what I’ve seen, as societies grow less religious they grow more peaceful, more tolerant, and more orderly.Report
You don’t have to believe them, Chip.
Feel free to not.
I do not believe that you should be shamed into thinking the way that I think. (I mean, not only do I not think that it would work… I don’t think that it’d be moral.)
From what I’ve seen, as societies grow less religious they grow more peaceful, more tolerant, and more orderly.
Fewer wars, do you think? Fewer people dying in riots?Report
There are plenty of people who will want to subscribe to your newsletter on this issue.Report
So anything you disagree with is bigotry? Even objective facts? Let’s just repeat:
“gender identity disorder” was officially classified as a mental illness until 2013.
Homosexuality stopped being a mental illness in 1973.
Society tends to lag in terms of acceptance. Society’s view of Gays in 1983 wasn’t full acceptance.
And “not viewing it as mental illness” isn’t the same as “thinking trans female athletes keep enough of the male package that it’s a massively unfair advantage”.
That last point about athletics is mine, if you want to disagree with it then I’ll argue my point.
If you disagree with any of the other points then you need to explain why they’re not facts.Report
One of the issues that seems to elude this debate (or at least the debate we have at OT) is that the trans rights movement already won the big legal battle in Bostock v. Clayton County, which extends to trans people the same rights that have been granted to gay people. For that reason I’m not sure the advances for LGBs is a parallel, at least not anymore. Retrospectively we can probably conclude the LGB equality movement was successful due just as much to what it didn’t ask for as what it did. None of it required anything like the demands to upend long established understanding of how sex-based equality works, institutionalizing and demanding public validation of various forms of mysticism and pseudoscience (including in public schools), or acceptance of highly experimental, poorly understood medical interventions in minors. At least I’m pretty sure I don’t remember like, Andrew Sullivan or Ellen DeGeneres making the case for anything remotely like that stuff.Report
Well the policy asks from the T part of LGBT are pretty vague in general beyond a perfectly reasonable request to be treated humanely. It’s a curious intellectual exercise to ponder if that’s because of something inherent to the T movement or if it’s simply because of the state of both social media as it is now and right wing weakness. The battles with the LGB portion of the alliance happened in an environment with less and different social media and a much stronger social right wing.Report
I agree, inability to easily determine whether something is a serious policy demand or just academics and/or other maladjusted people sounding off online is a major confounding factor.Report
I so love how we always have to talk about “rights being granted” while all the while denying the existence of structural racism or patriarchy. If we really mean what we say we mean in the Constitution, then trans people already have the same rights the rest of us do simply by dint of being American citizens. Of course we had to amend the constitution to grant women and black oriole the same rights as white men – which we still fail to universally enforce. So I guess we have to amend the Constitution to protect the LGBTQ community.Report
Dude, what are you talking about? The people you (and I for that matter) think should have won the case won the case. Why can’t that be acknowledged as a good thing, and also a thing that just might be relevant to how we think about these other much more vexing questions as well as the environment in which they now exist? The worst thing about letting oneself become totally addicted to outrage is the inability to just take a victory.Report
“Hi, I’m Lia Thomas, and after a long hard day of competitive swimming, there’s nothing I like better than a Bud Light!”Report
“I can’t believe those snowflakes aren’t responding to this much-more-inclusive ad campaign for the product!”
“Have you bought any?”
“I never really had any interest in the product.”Report
And?Report
It certainly puts the limitations of detached personal belief into perspective.Report
How?Report
There are many who are apparently invulnerable to much-more-inclusive ad campaigns.Report
So?Report
It’s funny to see it used as a sibboleth anyway.Report
It?Report
The much-more-inclusive ad campaign.Report
Shibboleth.Report
Different cultures say the word differently.Report
Indeed.Report
Last Thursday was a bad day at the office, it seems.Report
Thursday was actually a pretty good day. Got a lot accomplished, finally received some things I was waiting for for far too long, and straightened out a mess on one of my cases.
Thanks for your concern, though.Report
I was a poorly ranked men’s swimmer but when I started swimming against the girls I became world class!
So if you’re a natural female or know a natural female who thinks that’s not fair, shut up you bigot!Report
The opponents argument seems to be that trans people should not exist and they don’t want to acknowledge the existence of trans people at all. Like I understand finding some of the rituals involving DEI silly and hectoring but Republicans are deliberately passing laws that make it really difficult to be trans at best. They most definitely do not want trans actors in their commercials and on TV shows and movies.
There are some issues where there really can’t be an understanding of the other side because a compromise isn’t possible. Like you either have the death penalty or you do not. There isn’t an in-between position that satisfies both sides. Same with reproductive freedom or LGBT rights, etc.
I also find that you have to understand the other side arguments tend to be a one way street. Liberals after understand the Republican argument but not vice versa, Jews have to understand the anti-Zionists but not vice versa, etc.Report
I go back to General Hospital’s Olivia and Ned (who currently, because of a head trauma, thinks he is Eddie, not Ned, but that’s another story):
Olivia: You’re not hearing me.
Ned: I hear you. I just don’t agree with you.
Olivia: I want a divorce.
Much of what is unctuously diagnosed as failure to understand is just plain disagreement. I’ve seen very few arguments here that aren’t just variations on recurrent themes from dorm bull sessions a half-century ago.Report
That last bit was like you were goading me – not the Jewish part, but about liberals and conservatives. I feel like I bring this up too much, but Jonathan Haidt has demonstrated that liberals understand conservative arguments far less frequently than vice versa. And your first sentence demonstrates it as well. I guess it’s sort of good that you did the “the complaint appears to be…” thing that John Puccio called out, so I can’t say that you were deliberately misrepresenting the argument, but it’s possible for two sides to understand each other even if they don’t reach an understanding in the sense of a compromise. I also don’t think a compromise is impossible. Keep the gender stuff away from the children, and there probably isn’t a thing left on the table. That was the old compromise, and it worked.Report
If you think you think that, the problem isn’t that we don’t understand you, it’s that you don’t understand you.Report
LOL. There’s clearly a selection effect among blog commenters – wild overconfidence is heavily over-represented.Report
So Europe has no reproductive rights because they’re way more restrictive than Roe was? You’re narrowing everything down to the polar extremes. That describes noisy groups that exist but they’re small.
For Reproductive rights the GOP will find out their extreme views no longer win elections so they’ll drop them. Over the long haul we’ll end up with compromises akin to Europes.
We’ll probably see LGB dropped as an issue entirely.
For Trans, I’m not sure what the Conservatives at large think about it. Something between mental illness and total lack of comprehension. It doesn’t help that with a lot more acceptance of LGB, various groups are looking for enemies to stay relevant.
IMHO we’re still figuring this one out. Not just “conservatives” but “society”. That’s why we don’t know what to do with trans athletes yet.Report
“So Europe has no reproductive rights because they’re way more restrictive than Roe was? ”
This is not true, no matter how many conservatives try to claim it is, once you account for the actual rules on the ground.Report
No matter how much we show what actually happens in Europe, conservatives will never accept it.Report
I’ve discovered that once people believe things emotionally, it is nearly hard to convince them of things otherwise. Other variants include “The Democrats would be a conservative party in Europe” or “Manchin and Sinema are just providing cover for the rest of the neoliberals in the Democratic Party despite any evidence.”Report
OK, so let’s look at the actual rules on the ground in the EU governing abortion access.
I suggest looking at the chart on the last 2 pages, but here are some highlights.
6 EU countries do not permit abortion on request or on “broad social grounds”. : Andorra, Liechtenstein,
Malta, Monaco, Poland and San Marino
15 EU countries have a mandatory wait time between when abortion was first requested and when it’d done: : Albania, Armenia, Belgium, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Russian Federation, Slovak
Republic and Spain.
12 have Mandatory counseling: : Albania, Armenia,
Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Russian
Federation and Slovak Republic.
In Germany and Hungary (and maybe others), laws require biased and directive counselling deliberately intended to influence women’s decision-making and dissuade them from having an abortion.
https://reproductiverights.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/European-abortion-law-a-comparative-review.pdfReport
I’m not getting “subscribe” messages even though I have clicked the “Notify me…” boxes.
Is that a “me” thing?Report
I read Grossman’s essay and the few comments on it. One of the comments brought up the usual so-called lefties who criticize the current liberal movement like McWhorter and Quillette and Weiss. People who make money on the circuit for soothing the bruised and fragile egos of middle-aged or older white guys.
And a lot of the hives that break out of DEI and woke or whatever strike me as a lot of middle-aged white guys being afraid that someone younger is going to mock and yell at them for being clueless and out of it. Or even worse, just an uncool, middle-aged white guy.Report
“People who publicly dissent from the current intellectual fads are just afraid of being thought of as uncool, unlike those of us who slavishly adhere to them” is an interesting take.Report
“The complaint appears to be…” except without the courtesy of creating a made-up point.Report
I see the vicious smearing of dissenters as an implicit acknowledgement of intellectual fragility—a sort of memetic defense mechanism. If critics are not merely wrong, but bad, then their arguments don’t even need to be considered.
Tabooing of criticism is crucial to the survival of wokeness, because it is, to put it bluntly, a pretty dumb ideology that can’t stand up to serious scrutiny. More precisely, it’s a midwit ideology. There’s a litany of carefully curated concepts and facts (and factoids) you need to learn to fully appreciate it, and because of that, its adherents can easily convince themselves that they know more than those who disagree with them, and that that knowledge is the reason for the disagreement.
On average, that’s probably true. There are more people who reject wokeness because they don’t know enough than who reject it because they know too much. But the latter do exist, and that’s what matters. As you go beyond the Gospel of Woke and start filling in the strategically placed gaps, the intellectual foundations of wokeness melt away.
In particular, wokeness’s Achilles heel is quantitative analysis. It appeals most to people who think in terms of narratives rather than data. For example, the idea of redlining being a major contributor to the racial wealth gap makes intuitive sense, as long as you never do so much as a back-of-the-envelope sanity test to see if the numbers check out.Report
I find myself thinking “does he *KNOW* any 50 year old introverts?” and then I realized “yeah, probably not”.
You know what’s cool?
Well, I sure don’t. One of the highlights of my week is watching old episodes of Ducktales with my wife. My social calendar has “pro wrestling” and “board games” on it.
Clueless? Out of it? I will have you know that I never had a clue and I never was in it.
If he wanted to draw blood, he would have said “this strikes me as a lot of middle-aged white guys acting out because they’re upset that Starfield isn’t coming out on PS5.”Report
“They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”Report
Good news for opponents of the Idea of Gender:
Report