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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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Not to be outdone by Bud Lite, Miller Lite has apparently been running their own "woke" beer advertisements: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_NtBQWZqaHo

IMO the campaign here is actually clever, take this "bad" thing, use money to buy it, and turn it into a "good" thing. Whoever came up with this idea: cool idea.

But here's my question: is any of this old "bad" stuff actually bad? Let's look at contemporary things like onlyfans, instagram, tiktok, the hundreds of reddit 'gonewild' type porn forums, etc. It seems to me that many women, given the chance, enjoy wearing bikinis, being sexualized, being lusted after etc. Not all women, obviously, since some women don't like this, but...isn't this trying to strip the pro-sexualization women of their agency?

Aside from that, isn't Miller saying that women belong...in the kitchen? Don't go out to the beach and get drunk and have fun. Wear modest clothing (like the person in the ad), stay inside in the dark, and make things for people to eat.

Also: the claim that women were the primary brewers historically, is not only dumb, it's also wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weihenstephan_Abbey?useskin=vector

So many kneejerk reactions to this ad.

I mean for starters, they censored all the faces of the pinup girls? Like they are in witness protection or some shit? It puts off strong Orwellian vibes that even as they are attempting to censor the past by buying up as much material as they can and destroying it, they have to censor even their request to further censor too?

And then there is the blatant destruction of history. I get it, it's beer pinup memorabilia. It's not The Iliad or Animal Farm. But it's still a part of culture, and seeing this active campaign to gather and destroy it is still remarkably offputting. It's not a practice I want out there being done in any context, lest it catch on the same way all the other obscene year zero impulses we've seen have caught on.

Edit: Is this even a real thing? It's an unlisted video, only has 2m views, was published March 7th, so before Bud's fiasco. Everything about this feels so artificial now that I look closer.

I get the feeling that there’s an idea out there that’s something like, “sexually arousing content can only be ethically consumed on direct license from the content creator.” OnlyFans, Instagram, TikTok, GoneWild, etc. are all okay because the model is giving her direct consent for everyone to look at her by posting on her own personal account. This gives her a sense of agency that pin-up girls posing for beer ads lack.

I was going to critique your argument on the grounds that it is still not okay if we take some feminists views on objectification - which allegedly inculcates men with problematic and potentially violent ideas and, as 2rafa is arguing, may also send demoralizing messages to women.

But, I mean, the more obvious criticism is that it just doesn't seem like there's that sharp a distinction. The pin-up girl is also licensing her likeness - and it'd take a fool to not know why. She is simply using someone else's platform to spread that likeness. But then again, so is the person on Onlyfans, in a sense.

That isn't even getting into the fact that there's nothing saying the Onlyfans model inherently has more agency. She could be one of the unfortunate masses making Uber-level money for objectifying herself far worse than the model does. But she doesn't even get to blame some shady porn exec for upselling/coercing her into it. We also know that that also happens in OF because even some of the wealthiest girls in the game claim to be involved in abusive relationships that forced them to work

This is just about the worst link you could have attached to support your argument because Amouranth is extremely obviously fabricating her husband's "abuse" to facilitate more simp donations.

Indeed, you're on to a losing battle whenever you claim that we can "know" (justified true belief) that something is happening based on the evidence of an lewd streamer's Twitter self-reporting.