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Notes -
The Sidney Sweeney commercial.
AKA, why nutpicking is not a valid defense. And probably hasn't been in a while.
The Sidney Sweeny "Good Jeans" commercial has gone viral as many here probably know. Of course, with a commercial featuring a conventionally attractive white woman making a double entendre about how she is hot and wears cool pants was sure to be. But, perhaps more than the merits of the original commercial, the backlash to the commercial has vaulted it into an even higher tier of virility than even the most optimistic American Eagle marketers could have projected.
Of course, it is being called fascist, eugenicist, white supremacist, dog-whistling, etc. So, just about everything normally happening on the internet. Right? Well, sure there is your token tic tok users making such accusations. The usual suspects like Salon.com immediately seized upon this narrative, along with someone who is apparently famous called Doja Cat. And MSNBC to complete the set of entities that pick up anything they can regarding online outrage.
But it doesn't stop there, what one would call mainstream, respectable, left of center publications went with it. The Times, Post, and ABC all threw their hats in the outrage ring. ABC especially went deep with Good Morning America bringing on an "expert" to rail against the ad as "Nazi Propaganda" (the host's words), "The American Eugenics Movement" and "White Supremacism" (the expert's words).
Where does this leave us? For me its another data point that the accusation of "nutpicking" whenever one of these woke controversies emerges is kinda a bad faith argument to make. People who see these things aren't nutpicking, they are being presented with a lot of nuts, often in prominent positions or positions of power. This particular controversy had me feeling sympathetic cringe on behalf of the reasonable center-leftists. But then I fisk that feeling and have to ask when they are actually going to police their crazies the way the right's mainstream does. Candace Owens employment status at the Daily Wire is terminated. Tucker Carlson's status at Fox is terminated. The guys who got fired at NPR and the NYT? For NPR its the guy who was saying they were too biased towards the left. For the Times, its the guys who let a Senator write a fairly bland Op-Ed about how to police riots.
As for the politicians, most have seemingly stayed away. I doubt many will answer any questions on this directly (Democrats I mean, obviously many Republicans have already made hay with yet another unforced error by the left's activist class). The reason is clear, they know the right answer, particularly for most general elections, is to laugh at the activists and "nuts" on things like this. But they cannot actually seem to bring themselves to actually express that in public. The nuts are their staffers and their boots on the ground and so it seems keeping them happy is more important than being able to say, "sometimes its just a cute girl making a pun". I don't know what the math on this actually is, but there it is. You are what you do, and this is no longer nutpicking, its mainstream. I dont know if nutpicking was ever valid, but I don't think it can reasonably be said to still be so for this category of things.
Unrelated, and yet somehow related: board game publisher CGE criticized for publishing a Harry Potter themed board game.
Specifically, some (though by no means all) well known game reviewers have declared they will stop publishing reviews of any CGE game, as a result of CGE publishing a Harry Potter themed version of "Codenames." This, on grounds that Rowling uses her money to
The organization in question, of course, does not phrase it that way, claiming instead to
In other words, Rowling says "I want to protect specifically female rights." Her critics must regard the protection of female rights as logically equivalent to transphobia; certainly they treat the statements as logically equivalent. This seems like a mistake to me; it seems to me pretty easy to imagine a society that both protects uniquely female rights and spaces and grants total legal protection and even subsidies to the gender nonconforming (indeed--for the most part, in practical terms we in the United States appear to live in approximately that society now).
CGE did publish a bit of an open-ended maybe-apology? The Bluesky userbase (should they rebrand as Bluehair?) seems about as mollified by that as the redditors in /r/boardgames, which is to say, not very. In fact the reddit thread is the first time I've actually encountered "no ethical consumption under capitalism" deployed unironically in the wild, to explain why it's cool to definitely not boycott major companies like HBO, or Lego, or Visa/Mastercard, etc. over Rowling connections, while insisting that it is a moral imperative to destroy this particular brand in response to a business connection to a woman who has dedicated her wealth to fighting for women's rights.
Now, @FtttG suggests below,
Fair enough, and the mainstream fandom of Harry Potter is clearly large enough that the game will sell well. But the board game community is often rather short on normies, and for some reason also quite high on drama, with "boycott this publisher" being a somewhat common refrain.
A Harry Potter boardgame is small potatoes compared to the Sweeney thing, but I offer it for comparison. It never fails to astonish me, the vitriol and frankly falsehood leveled against Rowling on this matter. Rowling is very much not anti-trans. She's totally down with people dressing, speaking, and acting however they want, to a degree that no sex or gender conservative would ever approve. All she wants is for sex-segregated women's spaces (restrooms, prisons, changing rooms, shelters) to remain sex-segregated for all the safety and comfort reasons that have always underwritten that segregation. This seems like a pretty minor heresy, given the larger Leftism to which she unquestionably subscribes.
But of course, it's often Freud's narcissism of small differences that really underwrites "outgroup" identification. And since Rowling is financially and culturally insulated from direct attack, it is only her smallest, most vulnerable business partners who get targeted by her critics. "No ethical consumption under capitalism" becomes the excuse for picking-and-choosing popular outrage for maximum strategic benefit. There's less friction to identifying with a viral movement if doing so bears only the strictly social cost of alienating anyone who disagrees. For the movement, alienating your friends and family who don't fall in line is a feature rather than a bug.
This is where I want to push back (only a little) on @FtttG's response. The Sweeney thing is just one especially notable case among many. Calls to boycott or "show the door" this or that person or product are a dime a dozen, a standard play in the political playbook. But every single one is both a trial balloon and a substantive nudge. The tide is not completely unrelenting, and has receded somewhat since Trump's re-election, but here we have a couple of stray waves lapping the shore, outrage peddlers beginning to nibble at the edges...
I'm a boardgamer and have to sit on my hands every time this comes up in /r/boardgames or boardgamegeek, because there is basically no tolerance allowed for any dissent. JK Rowling is a transphobic genocidal Jew-hating racist fascist and buying HP content is the equivalent of donating money to fund concentration camps.
I wish that was hyperbole. I wish I was exaggerating. That is literally what they think, and any pushback will get you banned fairly quickly.
Wait where did the Jew hating come from?
People claim that goblins in Harry Potter are an anti-Semitic caricature. Personally, I believe that if one looks at a fantasy race of bankers and their first thought is "they're Jews", that says more about them than it does about the author.
Heck, I've seen people claim that the (decidedly non-mercantile) goblins in Goblin Slayer are an intentional anti-Semitic caricature; on the grounds that (paraphrasing from memory) 'goblins are always, and have always been, nothing but an anti-Semitic caricature — that's why they're depicted with long noses.' (Still not quite as ridiculous a take as the 20-something who complained about "anti-Semitic microaggressions" in a Mel Brooks movie.)
Is that more or less ridiculous a take than the people who complained that Blazing Saddles was racist?
I'd say only slightly more. The people who complain about Blazing Saddles are generally the sort who can't grasp the use/mention distinction, and also often the sort to argue that certain very bad things should not be depicted in fiction even to condemn them, like the nerd forum (I can't remember which one) that was considering banning any and all mention or discussion of Chainsaw Man, because it depictsMakima's grooming of Denji , even if it also shows it as quite clearly a bad thing.
Meanwhile, the person complaining about the "Druish Princess" joke in Spaceballs also thought Brooks's Yiddish accent as Yogurt was Italian, because it's one of those "white ethnic" accents you hear in NYC, right? And "Brooks" isn't the most Jewish-sounding surname, is it? So expecting her to know he's Jewish — and thus the joke is "classic Jewish self-deprecating humor" instead of an "antisemitic microaggression" — is totally unreasonable, and you know what the only kind of non-Jew who bothers to learn and remember who is or isn't Jewish is….
(Now ask me about the "naked Orientalist racism" in Batman comics…)
You can't just tease me like that. Go on...
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