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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.

Perhaps they did not want you to notice that Megan Markle, Pamela Anderson, and Sofia Vergara were in the ads. These women still have quite a bit of cachet, so it is embarrassing to be pulping their images. For example, here is a post from one day ago of bikini pictures of Ms. Vergara. The people in the ads are still mainstream stars. Selling products is how stars make their money.