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Unfortunately, I really want to talk about all the Bud Light stuff, and I don't want to make a new throwaway for it. So you will have to deal with this short summary of my jury duty instead of the nice effort post I've been cooking up on dog walks: 1) The pool is almost sarcastically diverse, as though someone had intentionally excluded anyone else resembling my 'peers.' 2) If someone shows up it's because they want to serve on a jury, and they find it strange that someone would intentionally decrease their chances of being selected 3) The entire experience can be a colossal waste of time and energy, 50 otherwise productive people spent all day not working because one illegal immigrant made a sexual innuendo to another illegal's girlfriend/stepdaughter. Why not just deport them?
Onto the Bud Light thing, as discussed earlier here yesterday. The short summary would be that someone (also from San Diego, coincidentally) decided about a year ago that they were a woman, and Bud Light decided to make them a special commemorative can, which apparently they drank in a bathtub as part of a marketing campaign. This has made a lot of people (including me) very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. I'm writing this post now because the company just offered its' first official response and it's perfect gpt fuel-on-the-fire. It's short so I won't give highlights, instead, a summary that suggests it pisses off everyone rather than mollifying anyone. I eagerly invite someone to provide a mirror image of 'their tribes' response but I want to share a few thoughts about mine in a few buckets:
1). For most of my adult life, I drank an incredible amount of Bud Light. Occasionally flirting with the limits of 'functional' alcoholism at ~30 a day, occasionally dipping below my typical 10-12, occasionally taking a month off because I'd been getting fat. This amount of consumption is not unusual in my peer group. Just do some napkin math: (minimally) one beer per half hour of time awake and 'off the clock.' Essentially, Bud Light is not a 6 pack that sits in your fridge for weeks, it's bought in 18 packs by people like me on the way home for the night.
2). We drink Bud Light for exactly the reason you (the proverbial 'you', of course) poke fun at it. It's thin, watery, and doesn't have a lot of alcohol. I can drink 30 a day and never get shithouse drunk the way I will after 3 bourbons on an empty stomach. I can drink more than a tiny sip and enjoy the flavor, unlike a double tangerine ipa. I like to sit around and drink beer, and it's a perfect beer for that.
3). I have my friends that drink Bud Light, and my friends that poke fun at me for drinking Bud Light. I love both, but with the later, we usually don't tool around in the garage while drinking. These days with the later it's usually more like visiting the latest pop-up microbrewery which may or may not have food (or anything drinkable). There's a culture, or if that's a bit grandiose, a vibe around a hot sunny day and a big cold box of weak watery beer.
4). Unlike most potential boycotts, I (and my people) have some purchase with this one ('purchase' for the non-english natives among us here meaning 'agency, power, or leverage'). We get a little say. There is a little verve here. This is not nike, something I already didn't buy, or every insurance company known to man, something I can't really avoid buying, this is weak watery beer!
5). Unlike most Allied marketing, this feels like it was meant to hurt. I'm aware Bud Light has done rainbow pride cans before, and I've probably even bought some without thinking about it. But something feels wrong about buying this beer now that I know they intentionally had a AMAB in a bikini drinking their commemorative can celebrating '365 of womanhood.' Not only can I effectively boycott this, but I can't unfeel the desire to boycott this! This one might have legs.
After the non-apology from the brass, Bud Light may have terminally tarnished their brand. Planting a flag and vitally interested to hear your thoughts
I don't particularly love most trans activism, and I'm deeply troubled by a lot of the medical interventionism on the youth.
However, there is a sense that certain factions or cultures of conservative men (of varying races and ethnicities) have created defensive silos of culture against the encroachment of gender non-conforming men. These places could be certain gyms, certain sales teams, certain blue collar unions, or certain bars. The shared sentiment is that there's enough spaces for gay or trans people (these men can't tell the difference) and so they need to batten down the hatches and keep their exclusionary spaces free from the taint of homo (no pun intended).
I think that there's a good proportion of younger straight men who are very into this, a la the andrew tate fans, and there's another group of younger straight men who are completely over it, and don't want to engage in long or endless discussions of masculinity and how important it is to pick a side.
If i were to entertain the idea of corporate advertisement as culture war, I'd say the point of this ad might be to demonstrate how hateful conservatives actually are against gay and trans people, no matter how much they pretend its about protecting children and women's sports. The liberals could be seen as responding to this "it's just about protecting children and women" rhetoric by saying "okay, here's a drag queen in her proper place, advertising beer in a funny commercial, joking about not knowing what March madness is"
Then the conservative men start literally shooting cases of beer, and it becomes apparent that it's not really about protecting women and children, it's about establishing cultural silos of hatred towards gay and trans people.
It's a good tactic for uniting the gay and trans factions that have started to schism lately. At the risk of being snide, I think the QT BIPOCS realize the white gay tops aren't coming to the club if they keep calling them "the nazis of the LGBT community" for going to the gym. Also that white wealthy gay men are the ones with the social capital and mental fortitude to penetrate these conservative cultural silos.
There is a reason that younger straight and politically incorrect men want to establish gay free spaces- gay cultural norms are a bit different about sexual harassment of other men, and most of these men suspect that allowing homosexual entry will force them to tolerate gay cultural norms. There is, IMO, no evidence against this suspicion.
Honestly I don’t quite know why it’s so important for gay men to be welcomed in these spaces, because it’s not as if the plumbers and auto salesmen and gym bros you’re complaining about are trying to show up at gay bars. Can’t different sorts resolve their incompatible preferences by not forcing each other to interact?
A gay bar is not equivalent exchange for being unwelcome at your nearest health centers, entire professions, or the most well paying department at your corporation.
Are you saying that straight men have more to fear in regards to harassment from gay men than gay men have to fear from straight men? Because I think that's demonstrably false based on the history of gay men being beaten, sometimes to death, by groups of straight men, and the opposite never occurring at all.
Your examples are ‘gyms, blue collar unions, sales teams, and bars’. None of those are existential, although it does make certain career opportunities more uncomfortable. You have every ability to either pick a different career- of which there are many-, deal with discomfort, or simply not tell your coworkers.
Society fundamentally does not exist to make deviant lifestyle decisions seem normal and accommodated. If you or one of your gay friends actually want to be a plumber, then deal with the low level hostility until you learn to follow social norms among plumbers.
And yes, straight men have more to fear in terms of sexual harassment from gay men than gay men do from straight men. The evidence for that is ‘duh’. Whether anti-gay hate crimes are as common as they’re made out to be by the LGBT persecution narrative is neither here nor there; you are free to be wary of blue collar men if you’d like, it’s no skin off of our backs because we don’t insist on being welcomed into your spaces and affirmed in them for things that have nothing to do with the places we came to.
It's actually not as easy to be selectively closeted as you seem to think. People ask you questions about your life, and you are then given the options to either refuse to answer, in which case you are unfriendly, lie, in which case you are untrustworthy, or tell the truth, in which case you are provocative.
You have no claim to blue collar professions nor the right to establish them as safe spaces for gay hatred.
I have a fourth option, which is to advocate against your arbitrary definition of deviancy, which conveniently includes being gay, but not premarital sex, drinking, swearing, and hostility towards gay and trans people.
The idea that gay hatred in blue collar professions is justified because of a fear of sexual harassment is silly. I am sure straight men sexually harass each other, and gay men, far more than gay men might sexually harass straight men. Your ability to dismiss the fear of harassment that gay men experience while at the same time demanding gay men deal with constant "low level" hostility is evidence I am correct and you are not.
I would guess you simply just sympathize more with a straight man who experiences the presence of a gay man as intrinsically sexual harassment, whereas you see low level hostility towards gay men as justified because you think gay men are deviants.
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