Inflection Point?

Yesterday, Mark Dice asked a question I haven't heard anyplace else: what is Bud Light going to do for Pride Month, which is coming up in June? Apparently they've had major campaigns in the past, as the artwork above reflects. Are they going to try to pull this off again?

They've already gone out of their way to put themselves between a rock and a hard place. For instance,

Though it didn’t come in June, Bud Light recently made a play for queer consumers when it produced a single can of the brand’s beer featuring trans TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney’s likeness. On April 1, Mulvaney made an Instagram post promoting Bud Light to her nearly 2 million followers. But the company’s response to the conservative backlash that followed suggests that its campaign didn’t come with any real commitment to inclusion.

. . . After what's been reported as a significant dip in sales, the company tucked tail and sought to distance itself from Mulvaney. Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth released a mealy-mouthed non-apology that said, “We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people,” as conservative media dragged [marketing VP Alissa] Heinerscheid through the mud. Then came the news that Heinerscheid will be replaced.

The piece then takes the intriguing line that the right is a bunch of sickos for complaining about corporate glorification of sickos.

The Bud Light/Mulvaney controversy was the latest illustration of the right’s long and increasingly obsessive and weird fixation with transgender people. Consumers of conservative commentary have been conditioned into needing ever more trans-related outrage to feed their obsession, and Mulvaney’s beer campaign hit the sweet spot.

So wait a moment. The argument here seems to be that Bud Light was playing to conservatives to work them into yet another froth about trans people. Bud Light just fed their demand for more trans to outrage about. So, if Bud Light hadn't run its one-single-can-not-a-campaign featuring Mulvaney, the right wouldn't have flown into outrage. Thus the solution to the problem is seen in the disappearance of the problem, the Bud Light Mulvaney non-campaign was a big mistake. Or do I have this wrong?

Let's take another instance of what the writer here would apparently call pandering to the right-wing hunger for outrage against trans:

Women’s fashion brand Anthropologie faced major backlash from their fans following a campaign featuring a male model wearing women’s clothing.

Anthropologie posted a reel Wednesday on Instagram featuring a man with a shaved haircut dancing around while trying on a variety of women’s clothing. In one shot, the man twirled around in a skirt, exposing his underwear.

Backlash and negative comments were so extreme that the social media team turned off comments on the reel. However, furious fans simply started commenting on a different reel.

So Anthropologie is pandering to the right by giving them another opportunity for outrage. That does bring me to my perennial question: what problem is Anthropologie trying to solve? If the problem is not as many people want to buy their products as they'd like, so they want to run an ad that will make the products desirable, that pretty clearly can't be what they had in mind, since the right got outraged and promised never to buy their products.

More likely they were trying to signal to what they imagined was their existing customer base that Anthropologie was with the program over trans, and what better way than to have a trans guy dance around trying on their clothes? This would outrage the right yet again and make their existing customer base feel smug and virtuous, or something like that.

It ap;pears that the trans-affirming community is doubling down on the idea that Bud Light should be promoting trans even harder. Via the New York Post,

The attempt by Bud Light’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch, to distance itself from transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney puts the iconic American beer brand at risk of going “extinct,” according to an LGBTQ activist.

. . . “As far as marketing, I hope and think they realized that as a brand they will be extinct in a few years if they are not fully on the side of equality, as that is what the Gen Z consumer expects and demands,” [activist Stacey] Lentz told Newsweek.

. . . Last month, John Casey, senior editor of the LGBTQ magazine Advocate, published an op-ed calling for a boycott of Bud Light for “validating trans hate.”

So both the anti-trans right and the trans-affirming left are in agreement that Bud Light should be boycotted and go extinct, as presumably should any other corporation that validates trans hate, for example by running ads featuring guys dancing around in women's clothing or in bubble baths. Or do I have this wrong?

This still leaves open the question of what Bud Light, or any other corporate marketing department, will do for this June's Pride Month. Maybe they could announce that out of consideration for the whole LGBTQ+ community, this year they will pledge not to fuel trans hate by running ads featuring guys in drag or stuff like that. But I probably have this all wrong.