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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36413 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Is Dylan Mulvaney the Trans Andy Kaufmann?

Watching the Dylan Mulvaney spectacle play out has left me with an odd feeling that I’ve struggled to quite put a finger on, with Mulvaney causing me to have something like an uncanny valley reaction to his transition and demeanor. I don’t mean this to say that Mulvaney looks almost female, but not quite, I mean that Mulvaney gives me the impression of someone that isn’t sincere about transitioning, but has put enough effort into it that I’m not exactly sure what’s going on and what to make of this person. In light of the recent Bud Light debacle I’ve finally settled on an explanation that makes more sense to me - Mulvaney is a modern Andy Kaufman, playing the part of a trans person well enough to convince some people, while others are in on the joke, and all of them contribute to Mulvaney’s accrual of fame and cash.

Who was Andy Kaufman? I think the Wiki summary is better than anything I’ll write up:

During this time, he continued to tour comedy clubs and theaters in a series of unique performance art/comedy shows, sometimes appearing as himself and sometimes as obnoxiously rude lounge singer Tony Clifton. He was also a frequent guest on sketch comedy and late-night talk shows, particularly Late Night with David Letterman.[6] In 1982, Kaufman brought his professional wrestling villain act to Letterman's show by way of a staged encounter with Jerry "The King" Lawler of the Continental Wrestling Association. The fact that the altercation was planned was not publicly disclosed for over a decade.

Kaufman died of lung cancer on May 16, 1984, at the age of 35.[7] As pranks and elaborate ruses were major elements of his career, persistent rumors have circulated that Kaufman faked his own death as a grand hoax.[6][8] He continues to be respected for the variety of his characters, his uniquely counterintuitive approach to comedy, and his willingness to provoke negative and confused reactions from audiences.[6][9]

Comedian Richard Lewis in A Comedy Salute to Andy Kaufman said of him: "No one has ever done what Andy did, and did it as well, and no one will ever. Because he did it first. So did Buster Keaton, so did Andy."[96] Carl Reiner recalled his distinction in the comedy world:

Did Andy influence comedy? No. Because nobody's doing what he did. Jim Carrey was influenced—not to do what Andy did, but to follow his own drummer. I think Andy did that for a lot of people. Follow your own drumbeat. You didn't have to go up there and say 'take my wife, please.'[97] You could do anything that struck you as entertaining. It gave people freedom to be themselves.[98]

Reiner also said of Kaufman: "Nobody can see past the edges, where the character begins and he ends."[99]

Kaufman made people laugh, get angry with him, and even physically attack him by playacting at different roles so successfully than people couldn’t tell where the sincere Kaufman stopped and the characters began. When I watch Dylan Mulvaney advertise native-scented deodorant, I don’t see someone that’s genuinely trying to be a woman. I see someone that’s clowning the concept, mocking women, mocking trans people, and exploiting the clicks for fun and profit.

I wasn’t around for Kaufman, so this comparison is likely imperfect. Nonetheless, watching people react to what sure looks to me like a running joke as though it’s perfectly sincere has been entirely surreal. I see people on the pro-trans side treating Mulvaney as sincere. If I’m right and this is a running joke, Joe Biden sure didn’t get the word. My inclination has been to chalk this up to people becoming sufficiently accustomed to never question claims from trans people that playing along with Dylan Mulvaney is no different than the rest of it, and even if they have doubts, they’re surely not going to look at Dylan and saying, “oh, come the fuck on”. So even though this was weird, it wasn’t until the Bud Light thing that it began to really seem hyperreal to me.

Here, watch this 35 second reaction video from Kid Rock. What’s going on here? Is Kid Rock sincerely pissed off at Bud Light, so pissed off that the only way to express it is with a burst of automatic weapons fire supplemented by some covering fire from a shotgun-wielding buddy? Is he basically sincere in his reaction, but strongly exaggerating the reaction because it’s funny? Is he ambivalent, but doing it for the clicks and lols? Is he part of the Bud Light advertising campaign, just driving the product into people’s mindspace? Does he agree with me that the whole thing is a big joke and he’s just rolling with his own improv? I don’t know and I don’t even know how I would know.

Vox reports that people have reacted in real life:

Don, a liquor store owner in Arkansas who requested to remain anonymous so he “doesn’t get caught up in the wokeness,” told me he’s seen a 20-25 percent dip in Bud Light sales since the controversy hit, with his admittedly small sample size of shoppers seemingly opting for Miller Lite and Coors Light instead. However, he doesn’t expect the backlash to stick. “A lot of people are talking about it, fired up about it, they’re never drinking Bud Light again, yada yada yada, but they’ll be drinking them in a month, as soon as the news cycle quits,” he said.

Well, what are those people thinking? Are they genuinely pissed, but not so pissed as to permanently give up a product that seems completely fungible with other light beers? How about Ben Shapiro:

The post started to pick up steam in conservative circles relatively quickly. Right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro decried the collaboration on his show, saying, “Well, folks, our culture has now decided men are women and women are men and you must be forced to consume products that say so.” Shapiro appears not to be much of a Bud Light fan himself, so he probably doesn’t have much to boycott. “I understand Bud Light is piss water masquerading as beer,” he said, “so I guess that, you know, it’s sort of trans beer.”

Well, I’m glad he at least kept the on-brand smugness. In fact, no one seems to be missing out on their normal branding, which lends itself to the hyperreal experience. In keeping with that, I will smugly note that I don’t drink that shit anyway and I’ll be cracking an IPA from a real industry underdog - Lagunitas(tm), a tiny subsidiary of a little-known international parent company. Thank God that I’m not getting taken in by all this hyperreal marketing.

The Bud Light debacle made it into the watercooler talk at my work, which is rare but not unheard of for culture war items. The general consensus seemed to be: it’s not just that he’s a man trying to be a woman, it’s that he’s trying to be an “adolescent girl”.

Oddly enough, I had the opposite reaction as you. If you want to be a woman, why would you want to be a business professional or something? why wouldn’t you want to be a teenage girl making melodramatic Instagram videos, dancing, screaming, waving your hands everywhere, and doing whatever gets you the most attention? His is perhaps the most sincere desire to “be a woman” as I’ve ever seen. Maybe the programmers with anime profile pics are the inauthentic fakers?

Maybe the programmers with anime profile pics are the inauthentic fakers?

Seriously. My top 3-5 lady programmers were all AMAB. Patriarchy?

I'd guess there's a bunch of reasons other than just plain old coincidence. One is that there just aren't that many female programmers, so there's a relatively higher proportion of MTF women in the industry. Also the well known male/female difference in interest-in-things versus interest-in-people could be resistant to whatever the cause of an MTF transwoman to be a transwoman rather than a cis man, and also resistant (perhaps not fully immune, but resistant nonetheless) to whatever treatment they might undergo as part of the transition. And there's also some (weak) indication that autism is correlated with transness. The latter 2 don't automatically translate to someone being better at programming, but it's not hard to see why someone who's further on the autism spectrum and with a greater interest in things could develop programming skills further than otherwise.

The 1st 2 could be attributed to patriarchy under standard modern feminist ideology. Not having roughly same amount of female programmers in the industry as male ones is, tautologically, an indication that society hasn't been engineered in such a way as to equalize the proportion of the sexes within this industry, and this is attributable to patriarchy no matter what the mechanism. If society has largely provided women the freedom to pursue whatever careers they want and they're just choosing not to pursue programming - which is likely the case in most western societies - that means that society has sent girls some sort of messaging that has discouraged them away from pursuing programming, which is a form of patriarchy. For the 2nd, the same reasoning applies, just to the interest-in-things/interest-in-people difference. The fact that there's some measurable difference between the sexes in this dichotomy means that there must be some sort of messaging, possibly starting even from the womb, that girls receive that pushes them towards greater interest in people rather than things. The messaging can take forms that are literally invisible and undetectable, but it must be there, and it must be an indication of patriarchy, as long as the results are the kind of imbalance we're talking about.

For the 3rd one, I'm not sure what feminist ideology has to say about the apparent correlation between autism and transness - it might not exist in any case, since I don't think this has been studied much. But there's got to be a way to attribute it to patriarchy somehow if it turns out to be the case; it's just that both autism and transness are considered to be "innate" or "born with it," and I'm not creative enough to come up with a way by which patriarchy can be attributed to a correlation between the 2, but that doesn't mean nobody is that creative.

If you want to be a woman, why would you want to be a business professional or something? why wouldn’t you want to be a teenage girl making melodramatic Instagram videos, dancing, screaming, waving your hands everywhere, and doing whatever gets you the most attention?

You could equally ask "why wouldn't someone who's already a woman not want to be a teenage girl making melodramatic Instagram videos?" Because that's behavior which depends on having a lack of adult responsibilities and on excessive self-centeredness.

To the extent that "wants to be a woman" is acceptable at all, it can at most mean "wants to be a woman in a situation similar to the one he's in now, except with the effects of gender changed". "Wants to be a woman + X" is no good if wanting X is already bad independent of gender.

Oddly enough, I had the opposite reaction as you. If you want to be a woman, why would you want to be a business professional or something? why wouldn’t you want to be a teenage girl making melodramatic Instagram videos, dancing, screaming, waving your hands everywhere, and doing whatever gets you the most attention? His is perhaps the most sincere desire to “be a woman” as I’ve ever seen. Maybe the programmers with anime profile pics are the inauthentic fakers?

Even if that were true, not sure why it would be more sympathetic.

Basically you're saying that everyone is being asked to indulge someone trying to secede from being an adult (a right they don't have)

Strip the trans element out of it and it would still be received badly. All the more for how much the desire has been indulged.

Basically you're saying that everyone is being asked to indulge someone trying to secede from being an adult (a right they don't have)

Well unfortunately many of the younger generation are succeeding in exercising that right. It's a sad world we live in.

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